THE EPOCHS OF GERMAN AGRARIAN HISTORY 241 



modern form of the estate farming of the Northeast? Why has 

 the manorial system in the Southwest decayed, without develop- 

 ing into the modern form ? And why in the Northwest has it not 

 further developed into estate farming ? 



This latter development was, as we have seen, prevented chiefly 

 by the early intervention of the supreme power of the state in 

 behalf of the peasants. The government was here able to accom- 

 plish this because, during one of the periods of complete impotency, 

 particularly of financial impotency, it did not, as in the territory of 

 colonization, waive all its rights in the peasants of the private mano- 

 rial estates, a process that did not take place in the East until the 

 sixteenth century, after having led in old Germany to the forma- 

 tion of the old large manorial estates, fully a thousand years 

 earlier. Similarly in the Southeast, in Old Bavaria, the vast pos- 

 sessions of the Church, maintained for so long a period, checked 

 the importance of the nobility. In the Southwest, on the contrary, 

 the noble had no thought of increasing his holdings ; his ambition 

 was not to become farmer, but ruler. " Every imperial knight," 

 says Gothein, "wished to emulate the prince, every landed noble- 

 man wished to emulate the imperial knight, to be legislator and 

 ruler. The wretched condition of the state was itself a weapon 

 of defence for the peasantry." 



We have, therefore, first of all a political factor, the development 

 of the state in question, particularly of its finances. This develop- 

 ment made the state more or less dependent on the privileged 

 class, the nobles, and forced it more or less to sacrifice to them its 

 public rights in the peasants. Then there is the different character 

 and the importance of the nobility itself. 



Added to this is the national factor, which doubtless contrib- 

 uted to the suppression of the peasantry in the Northeast, a sup- 

 pression that is the more marked the less the domain in question 

 was colonized by Germans, the more the Slavic population was 

 spared and merely Germanized and merged with the German 

 immigrants. 



Finally, the different extent to which the Thirty Years' War 

 affected the different parts of Germany and the power of their 

 resistance against it, which differed in proportion to the age of 



