Again, all these exaggerated characteristics were mixed with new elements, which distorted them further, and which foreshadowed a coming change, the ultimate issue of which would be their extinction and that of the life of which they were the signs.
The growing tendency towards centralization and the consequent suppression or curtailment of the local autonomies of the Middle Ages in the interests of some kind of national government, of which the political careers of Louis XI in France, of Edward IV in England, and of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain were such conspicuous instances, did not fail to affect in a lesser degree that loosely connected political system of German States known as the Holy Roman Empire.
Maximilian's first Reichstag in 1495 caused to be issued an Imperial edict suppressing the right of private warfare claimed and exercised by the whole noble class from the princes of the empire down to the meanest knight.

In the same year the Imperial Chamber (_Reichskammer_) was established, and in 1501 the Imperial Aulic Council.

Maximilian also organized a standing army of mercenary troops, called _Landesknechte_.

Shortly afterwards Germany was divided into Imperial districts called circles (_Kreise_), ultimately ten in number, all of which were under an imperial government (_Reichsregiment_), which had at its disposal a military force for the punishment of disturbers of the peace.

But the public opinion of the age, conjoined with the particular circumstances, political and economic, of Central Europe, robbed the enactment in a great measure of its immediate effect.
Highway plundering and even private war were still going on, to a considerable extent, far into the sixteenth century.