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Updated: June 11, 2025
So he wrote a letter to the lord Robert de la Marck, who was at Sedan, in which he hinted at a rumour he had heard that the Count might be persuaded to become an ally of the King of France. Bayard added that he desired nothing more, but Sickingen must lose no time, for his camp would soon be hemmed in by the approaching Swiss and by a sortie well timed from the town.
It is evident that this campaign, begun so late in the year, was regarded by Sickingen and the other leaders as merely a preliminary canter to a larger and more widespread movement the following spring, since on this occasion the Swabian and Franconian knighthood do not appear to have been even invited to take part in it.
Strange as all these beliefs seem to us now, they were a very real factor in the intellectual conceptions of the Renaissance period, no less than of the Middle Ages, and amidst them there is to be found at times a foreshadowing of more modern knowledge. Many other persons were also more or less associated with the magical school, amongst them Franz von Sickingen.
On one occasion he came to me and said that he and I were to dine with Count Sickingen some day soon; adding, "The Count and I were conversing together, and I said to him, 'A propos, has your Excellency heard our Mozart? 'No; but I should like very much both to see and to hear him, for they write me most astonishing things about him from Mannheim. 'When your Excellency does hear him, you will see that what has been written to you is rather too little than too much. 'Is it possible? 'Beyond all doubt, your Excellency." Now, this was the first time that I had any reason to think Raaff interested in me.
This city was of immense importance at that moment, if it could be held against the might of the Emperor until the French army should be made up to its full strength and reach the frontier, where the Germans had arrived, commanded by two great captains, the Count of Nassau and the famous condottiere, Franz von Sickingen.
"My dear lord," he said to the Count Palatine, his feudal superior, "I had not thought that I should end thus," taking off his cap and giving him his hand. "What has impelled thee, Franz," asked the Archbishop of Trier, "that thou hast so laid waste and harmed me and my poor people?" "Of that it were too long to speak," answered Sickingen, "but I have done nought without cause.
The accumulated hatred of generations for the priesthood had made Sickingen a willing instrument in the hands of the reforming party, and believing that Charles now lay to some extent in his power, he considered the moment opportune for putting his long-cherished scheme into operation for reforming the Constitution of the empire.
Of these, he declares the robber-knights to be the least harmful. This is naturally only to be expected from so gallant a champion of his order, the friend and abettor of Sickingen.
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.
Even Franz von Sickingen, known sometimes as the "last flower of German chivalry," boasted of having among the intimate associates of his enterprise for the rehabilitation of the knighthood many gentlemen who had been accustomed to "let their horses on the high road bite off the purses of wayfarers."
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