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_.