Recent German scholarship on the old Reich underscores the strength of the corporate loyalties at work within the ranks of the imperial knights. The carefully drawn analyses of Gerhard Pfeiffer and Dieter Hellstern, to name but two examples, point up the success which attended these sovereign aristocratic families as they worked aggressively through a well-organized system of circles (Kreise) to combat the persistent threat of encroachment by their more powerful neighbors. This emphasis on the success of the knights is squarely on target. The imperial barons do survive, their rights more or less intact, right down to the dissolution of the empire. This essay seeks to draw attention to yet another dimension of this success, to document some of the tensions arising within the corps of knights and to demonstrate the knights' determination to contain these pressures and to prevent them from shattering their corporate unity. In the case of the Reichsritterschaft, not only did corporatism provide the occasion for rivalry among various groups within the corps. It also defined the outer limits to which internal rivalries could safely be pursued.