respectively demonstrated the continuing significance of territorial power. But gravitation towards the rulers' court, especially at a period of diminishing returns from agricultural rents and sometimes dramatic decline in the purchasing power of money, was a marked tendency among many nobilities in the west. Pensions, court sinecures, and offices (butler, bread-bearer, cupbearer, horn-bearer, or carving squire) all played an important part in bolstering noble incomes (as in France, with a pension list of about 700 names by 1483) or in the exercise of some degree of control by princes over their nobles (as in Burgundy or the German principalities). The court and the courtier were to be among the most durable legacies of the later Middle Ages to the so-called 'new monarchies' of the Renaissance.
Many ruling houses of this period shared a tendency towards natural extinction in the male line or more violent replacement by other dynasties. In 1254 the last Hohenstaufen, Conrad IV, was killed and an interregnum began in the Holy Roman Empire which was to last until the election of Count Rudolf of Habsburg as king of the Romans in 1273. Even then, his childless death in 1291, the unprecedented deposition of his successor Adolf of Nassau in 1298, and the murder of Albert I of Habsburg in 1308 merely increased the dynastic instability of the German Empire. It was left to the house of Luxemburg to make the best of the unpropitious situation bequeathed to them by the Interregnum, and they looked increasingly to their kingdom of Bohemia for the power and support which their imperial title failed to give them. Only in 1438, with the election of Albert II as emperor, did the Austrian house of Habsburg unite together the Hungarian, Bohemian, and German crowns. In 1421 Albert had married the heiress of the last Luxemburg emperor, Sigismund, king of Hungary ( 1410-37) and the latter's death without male heirs ensured the reality of an Austro-Hungarian union. From this dynastic arrangement was born the empire which was to last until 1806, first welded together (not without acute set-backs and difficulties) by the
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