War and further territorial fragmentation. The Free imperial cities, many of them founded by the German kings and emperors during the 10th to 13th century, had initially been administered by the Imperial nobility (), direct vassals of the emperor. These towns gradually gained independence as their patrician city magistrates assumed full control of administration and justice. While in other European kingdoms such as France, coherent nation states emerged as a result of early modern ideas of political concentration and centralisation, the Habsburg dynasty, who already controlled the Duchy of Austria, Kingdom of Bohemia and Kingdom of Hungary, ruled the Holy Roman Empire from 1438 and managed to permanently occupy the imperial throne until 1806 (with a brief exception between 1742 and 1765). The Habsburg family, however pursued its Grand Strategy policy, that focused on long-term dynastic reign at the center of a vast, multi-layered and multi-ethnic realm against Bourbon France and the Ottoman Empire. The imperial lands rather served to retain buffer zones that were at odds with any concepts of patriotism and national identity. In 1495 emperor Maximilian I attempted to reform the empire. An Imperial supreme court () was established, imperial taxes were levied, and the power of the Imperial Diet () was increased. The reforms, however, were frustrated by the continued territorial fragmentation of the Empire. The Protestant Reformation represented a major threat to imperial integrity. Emperor Charles V stated in 1546: "if we failed to intervene now, all the Estates of Germany would be in danger of breaking with the faith". With the 1548 Augsburg Interim he attempted to reconcile the religious schism in Germany, but instead only prompted new Protestant defiance. In the 17th century the Kingdom of Prussia emerged as the second dominant power, which also incorporated substantial non-German territories and lands beyond the borders of the empire, while excluding major parts of Germany proper. Apart from these two states, the Holy Roman Empire consisted of hundreds of small, German-speaking principalities, most of which derived from successive dynastic splits (feudal fragmentation), sometimes reflected in compound names such as Saxe-Coburg; some of these were united through royal marriages, although the resulting entity was often not a contiguous territory. During the early modern period, these small states modernised their military, judicial, and economic administrations. These hardly existed at the imperial level, and the emperor was little more than a feudalistic confederal figurehead, without political or military