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In the last four chapters we have examined the search for order in the sixteenth century. Now we turn to the crisis of the seventeenth century, when order gave way to confusion. To understand the crisis in South Germany a number of characteristics of the agrarian order should be kept in mind. Never should one forget the tenuousness and the uncertainty of the social order, the fact that at every turn, when a measure of stability appeared at long last secure, deep and unresolved tensions still lay not far beneath the surface of events. In Hohenlohe the tensions flowed from the new terms of domination that weakened the state after 1610. The Assecuration became an embarrassing liability to the House of Hohenlohe, setting limits to state incomes and, from the point of view of Count Philip Ernst, creating a new sort of chaos in the territory: As we have repeatedly seen, there has been a striking amount of chaos since the establishment of the Landsteuer. Many of the rich are not assessed even half of their worth, not of their fixed property or of their movables. And this has led to considerable trouble and to a decline of our laws. And the poor and those with little property, because of this state of affairs, can avoid their responsibilities only with much greater difficulty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To the modern observer looking back on the decades around 1580, the patterns of lordly and princely dominance, of paternalistic rule and deference, appear much more settled than they in fact were. Only with hindsight can one see in this period the decisive turning point that it most assuredly was: a watershed when South Germany's lords and princes established secure patterns of dominance over their villagers that would last well into the eighteenth century. Determined and zealous princes had clearly seized the initiative to broaden their authority over their domains and subjects, to use new power to impose order where disorder appeared to reign. That these feudal lords, their secretaries, pastors, and stewards sometimes justified these measures with the passionate rhetoric of religious reform or with time–honored appeals to their villagers' devotion to custom or justice did not matter. The effect was the same. The autonomy of the village commune had been broken. Willingly or not, the descendants of villagers who had fought in 1525 for the freedom of their rural communes were forced to weaken their corporate ties and redirect their loyalties to the territorial state. But for contemporaries, especially those who knew the circumstances of the small German states well, lord–peasant relationships appeared very much unsettled in these years, even more unsettled than in the two or three decades after 1525. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]