As the peasants in the Salian and Staufen Empire were recruited to new programmes of labour which continued to enrich their lords, so the latter were enabled to redesign the inherited authority of their caste. As we have seen, their manorial possessions were extended through the assart of forest and conquests in the east. Their military powers had been enlarged through the enfeoffment of new retinues of ministeriales. Their judicial competence was improved through the creation of Landgerichte and equivalent jurisdictions, crowned by the sombre infliction of death sentences. Their dynastic capital was profitably invested in the foundation of towns and the erection of castles. The tradition of patronage of ecclesiastical institutions achieved fresh returns through their advocacy over the new foundations of the religious orders. So their continued success in dominating economic expansion conferred more of everything upon the German princes. Those who were fortunate in biological and adept in political survival were able to establish principalities which might last right to the end of the Holy Roman Empire in the nineteenth century, and in a few cases into the twentieth. But the integration of lands and rights in the Middle Ages was also a political competition involving events and personalities: who had died or was about to, who might be married with profit, what could successfully be claimed as an inheritance; who might be outfaced in court or, if necessary, set back by forged or rewritten charters; who ought to be checked by well-timed feuds or rapidly constructed castles.