empt was
made with much skill, and that none of the appointed guardians of the
old Empire raised a voice in protest while he imposed a constitution
on the fifteen Princes of the new Confederation.

They included the rulers of South Germany, as well as Dalberg the
Arch-Chancellor, who now took the title of Prince Primate, the
Grand-Duke of Berg, the Landgrave, now Grand-Duke, of Hesse-Darmstadt,
two Princes of the House of Nassau, and seven lesser potentates. In
some cases German laws were abolished in favour of the _Code
Napoleon_. A close offensive and defensive alliance was framed between
France and these States, that were to furnish in all 63,000 troops at
the bidding of the Protector. Napoleon also gained some control over
their fiscal and commercial codes--an important advantage, in view of
the Continental System, that was soon to take definite form.[85]

As a set-off to this surrender of all questions of foreign policy and
many internal rights, what did these rulers receive? As happened
almost uniformly in Napoleon's aggrandizements, he struck a bargain
extremely serviceable to himself, less so to those whose support he
sought, and in which the losses fell crushingly on the weak. His
statecraft in this respect was more cynical than that of the crowned
robbers who had degraded eighteenth-century politics into a game of
grab. Their robberies were at least direct and straightforward. It was
reserved for Napoleon at the Treaty of Campo Formio to win huge gains
mostly at the expense of a weak third party, namely, Venice. He
pursued the same profitable tactics in the Secularizations, when
France and the greater German Powers gained enormously at the final
cost of the Church lands and the little States; and now he ground up
the German domains that were to cement his new Rhenish system.

There were still numbers of Imperial Counts and Knights, as well as
free cities, that had not been absorbed in 1803. The survivors were
now wiped out by Napoleon for the benefit of his Rhenish underlings,
the spoliation being veiled under the term _Mediatization_. The
euphemism claims a brief explanation. In old German law the nobles and
cities that gained local independence by shaking off the control of
the local potentate were termed _immediate_, because they owed
allegiance directly to the Emperor, without any feudal intermediary:
if by mischance they fell under that hated control they were said to
be _mediatized_. This term was now