[German Culture Past and Present by Ernest Belfort Bax]@TWC D-Link book
German Culture Past and Present

CHAPTER VI
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From all this it will be seen that not much co-operation was to be expected between such heterogeneous bodies as the knighthood and the free towns, in spite of their common interest in checking the threateningly advancing power of the princes and the central Imperial authority in so far as it was manned and manipulated by the princes.
Amid the decaying knighthood there was, as we have already intimated, one figure which stood out head and shoulders above every other noble of the time, whether prince or knight, and that was Franz von Sickingen.

He has been termed, not without truth, "the last flower of German chivalry," since in him the old knightly qualities flashed up in conjunction with the old knightly power and splendour with a brightness hardly known even in the palmiest days of mediaeval life.

It was, however, the last flicker of the light of German chivalry.

With the death of Sickingen and the collapse of his revolt the knighthood of Central Europe ceased any longer to play an independent part in history.
Sickingen, although technically only one of the lower nobility, was deemed about the time of Luther's appearance to hold the immediate destinies of the empire in his hand.

Wealthy, inspiring confidence and enthusiasm as a leader, possessed of more than one powerful and strategically situated stronghold, he held court at his favourite residence, the Castle of the Landstuhl, in the Rhenish Palatinate, in a style which many a prince of the empire might have envied.


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