7,000.
Sixtus V took energetic means to repress them. One of his stratagems
is too characteristic to omit mentioning. He had a train of mules
loaded with poisoned food and then {505} drove them along a road he
knew to be infested by highwaymen, who, as he had calculated, actually
took them and ate of the food, of which many died.

Other countries were perhaps less scourged by robbers, but none was
free. Erasmus's praise of Henry VIII, in 1519, for having cleared his
realm of free-booters, was premature. In the wilder parts, especially
on the Scotch border, they were still rife. In 1529 the Armstrongs of
Lidderdale, just over the border, could boast that they had burned 52
churches, besides making heavy depredations on private property. When
James V took stern measures to suppress them, [Sidenote: 1532] and
instituted a College of Justice for that purpose, the good law was
unpopular.

Bands of old soldiers and new recruits wandered through France, Spain
and the Netherlands. The worst robbers in Germany were the free
knights. From their picturesque castles they emerged to pillage
peaceful villages and trains of merchandise going from one walled city
to another. In doing so they inflicted wanton mutilations on the
unfortunate merchants whom they regarded as their natural prey. Even
the greatest of them, like Francis von Sickingen, were not ashamed to
"let their horses bite off travellers' purses" now and then. But it
was not only the nobles who became gentlemen of the road. A well-to-do
merchant of Berlin, named John Kohlhase, was robbed of a couple of
horses by a Saxon squire, and, failing to get redress in the corrupt
courts, threw down the gauntlet to the whole of Electoral Saxony in a
proclamation that he would rob, burn and take reprisals until he was
given compensation for his loss. For six years [Sidenote: 1534-40] he
maintained himself as a highwayman, but was finally taken and executed
in Brandenburg.

[Sidenote: Fraud]

Fraud of all descriptions was not less rampant than force. When
Machiavelli reduced to a reasoned {506} theory the practice of all
hypocrisy and guile, the courts of Europe were only too ready to listen
to his advice. In fact, they carried their mutual attempts at
deception to a point that was not only harmful to themselves, but
ridiculous, making it a principle to violate oaths and to debase the
currency of good faith in every possible way. There was also much
untruth in pri