in for a long time to
come. Accordingly, just as the provincial _grand seigneur_ of France
became the courtier of the King at Paris or Versailles, so the
previously quasi-independent German knight or baron became the
courtier or hanger-on of the prince within or near whose territory his
hereditary manor was situate.

The eventful year 1525 was truly a landmark in German history in many
ways--the year of one of the most accredited exploits of Doctor
Faustus, the last mythical hero the progressive races have created;
the year in which Martin Luther, the ex-monk, capped his repudiation
of Catholicism and all its ways by marrying an ex-nun; the year of the
definite victory of Charles V. the German Emperor, over Francis I. the
French King, which meant the final assertion of the "Holy Roman
Empire" as being a national German institution; and last, but not
least, the year of the greatest and the most widespread popular
movement Central Europe had yet seen, and the last of the mediaeval
peasant risings on a large scale. The movement of the eventful year
did not, however, as many hoped and many feared, within any short time
rise up again from its ashes, after discomfiture had overtaken it. In
1526, it is true, the genius of Gaismayr succeeded in resuscitating
it, not without prospect of ultimate success, in the Tyrol and other
of the Austrian territories. In this year, moreover, in other outlying
districts, even outside German-speaking populations, the movement
flickered. Thus the traveller between the town of Bellinzona, in the
Swiss Canton of Ticino, and the Bernardino Pass, in Canton Graubuenden,
may see to-day an imposing ruin, situated on an eminence in the narrow
valley just above the small Italian-speaking town of Misox. This was
one of the ancestral strongholds of the family, well known in Italian
history, of the Trefuzios or Trevulzir, and was sacked by the
inhabitants of Misox and the neighbouring peasants in the summer of
1526, contemporaneously with Gaismayr's rising in the Tyrol. A
connection between the two events would be difficult to trace, but the
destruction of the castle of Misox, if not a purely spontaneous local
effervescence, looks like an afterglow of the great movement, such as
may well have happened in other secluded mountain valleys.

The Peasants' War in Germany we have been considering is the last
great mediaeval uprising of the agrarian classes in Europe. Its result
was, with some few exceptions, a