The German territories emerged somewhat strengthened from the Thirty Years War, at least in respect of their political position in relation to the Empire. It was quite clear that, although they still did not formally possess full sovereignty, territorial rulers rather than the Holy Roman Emperor were the key political actors. In the period from the mid-seventeenth century to the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire under Napoleonic rule in 1806, a unique pattern of political multiplicity existed in the German lands. The Holy Roman Empire ceased to be an active political vehicle or potential basis for the development of a centralised state; on the other hand, its continued juridical functions and rather passive political protection permitted the survival of many small units, fragments which without this wider context might easily have been submerged by larger neighbours. Viewing the Empire as a whole, this was the German pattern of ‘small principalities’ or Kleinstaaterei which has led some observers to see Germany as a petty, small-scale provincial backwater compared to the increasingly powerful western European states of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (notably of course England and France). Concomitant with this overall pattern of Imperial decentralisation was however a relatively high degree of centralisation of power at the territorial level. Individual rulers within the small states sought to gain more power for themselves at the expense of those below.