Commerce and industry almost came to a standstill during this long period; in many instances they were almost completely destroyed and picked up but very gradually. A large portion of the population had become demoralized and brutalized and disaccustomed to all regular work. During the wars, troops of mercenary soldiers had crossed Germany from one end to the other, plundering, destroying, ravishing and murdering, a terror alike to friend and foe. After the wars countless numbers of beggars, robbers and vagabonds maintained the population in constant terror and made commerce and all traffic difficult or impossible. To the female sex especially it was a time of great suffering. In this period of dissoluteness the contempt of woman had increased to the utmost, and the general condition of unemployment weighed most heavily upon her shoulders. Like the male vagabonds, thousands of women populated the highways and forests and filled the alms-houses and prisons. All these sufferings were still increased by the forcible expulsion of numerous peasant families by the greedy nobility. Since the reformation the nobility had become more and more subjected to princely rule, and by holding court and military positions their dependence on the princes had constantly increased. Now they tried to reimburse themselves for the losses sustained through the princes by robbing the peasants. To the princes, on the other hand, the reformation offered the desired excuse to acquire the property of the church, which they proceeded to do on a large scale. Prince August of Saxony, for instance, had, at the end of the sixteenth century, acquired no less than 300 ecclesiastical estates.[42] His brothers and cousins, the other Protestant sovereigns, above all those of the House of Hohenzollern, did likewise. The nobility followed their example by appropriating the remaining communal property, and by driving both free peasants and serfs from hearth and home and taking possession of their estates. The unsuccessful peasant revolts during the sixteenth century gave them the desired pretext for such action, and after the attempt had once succeeded, new pretexts were constantly found to continue this forcible method. Various schemes and distortions of justice were resorted to, made easy by the Roman law which had been established in Germany in the meantime, to increase the property of the nobility by forcing the peasants to sell theirs at lowest prices, or by simply expropriating them. Entire villages and the farms of entire districts were usurped in this manner. To quote just a few examples: Of 12,543 knightly peasant estates which still existed in the province of Mecklenburg during the Thirty Years’ War, only 1,213 remained in the year 1848. In the province of Pomerania 12,000 farms were abandoned since 1628. The transformations in the methods of farming that took place during the seventeenth century gave a further impulse to the nobility to expropriate the peasants and to transform the last remnants of communal property into their private estates. The rotation of crops had been introduced, which provided for changes in the cultivation of the soil in definite periods of time. Tilled land was occasionally transformed into pasture which favored cattle-breeding and made it possible to diminish the number of workers.