At the opening of the sixteenth century every established institution--political, social, and religious--was shaken and showed the rents and fissures caused by time and by the growth of a new life underneath it.

The empire--the Holy Roman--was in a parlous way as regarded its cohesion.

The power of the princes, the representatives of local centralized authority, was proving itself too strong for the power of the Emperor, the recognized representative of centralized authority for the whole German-speaking world.

This meant the undermining and eventual disruption of the smaller social and political unities,[4] the knightly manors with the privileges attached to the knightly class generally.

The knighthood, or lower nobility, had acted as a sort of buffer between the princes of the empire and the Imperial power, to which they often looked for protection against their immediate overlord or their powerful neighbour--the prince.