They included the rulers of South Germany, as well as Dalberg the Arch-Chancellor, who now took the title of Prince Primate, the Grand-Duke of Berg, the Landgrave, now Grand-Duke, of Hesse-Darmstadt, two Princes of the House of Nassau, and seven lesser potentates.  In some cases German laws were abolished in favour of the Code Napoleon.  A close offensive and defensive alliance was framed between France and these States, that were to furnish in all 63,000 troops at the bidding of the Protector.  Napoleon also gained some control over their fiscal and commercial codes—­an important advantage, in view of the Continental System, that was soon to take definite form.[85]

As a set-off to this surrender of all questions of foreign policy and many internal rights, what did these rulers receive?  As happened almost uniformly in Napoleon’s aggrandizements, he struck a bargain extremely serviceable to himself, less so to those whose support he sought, and in which the losses fell crushingly on the weak.  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.  The euphemism claims a brief explanation.  In old German law the nobles and cities that gained local independence by shaking off the control of the local potentate were termed immediate, because they owed allegiance directly to the Emperor, without any feudal intermediary:  if by mischance they fell under that hated control they were said to be mediatized.  This term was now applied to acts that subjected the knight, or city, not to feudal control, but to complete absorption by the king or prince of Napoleon’s creation.  Six Imperial or Free Cities survived the Secularizations, namely, the three Hanse towns, and Augsburg, Frankfurt, and Nuremberg.  The northern towns still held their ancient rights; but Augsburg and Nuremberg now fell to the King of Bavaria, and Frankfurt was bestowed by Napoleon on Dalberg, the Prince Primate of the Confederation.