Report and Answer to the Bavarian-Anhalt Secret Chancellery

Furthermore, the enforcement original: execution — the legal and military carrying out of an Imperial ban against the poor town of Donauwörth followed soon after. It was felt clearly enough in practice that this was not a general levy—as the compiler The author of the Bavarian-Anhaltine Secret Chancery claims—but rather hit them specifically original: in specie so hard that the poor citizens, from being free citizens of the Roman Empire original Latin: ex civibus liberis Imperii Romani, have now been plunged into a deep servitude of body and soul. They find themselves almost entirely robbed of all human help and hope of being rescued. One also remembers well enough what was negotiated at that time in the name of Emperor Rudolf by the Count of Zollern, President of the Imperial Court Council, with the Duke of Bavaria regarding a general and universal enforcement against the Protestant Estates. One recalls how the said President made two different reports original: relationes. In the one (which was distributed original: spargiret to blind the eyes of the Protestants), he reported to Emperor Rudolf Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor that despite all diligence, he could obtain nothing from His Princely Highness in Bavaria, and that the Duke did not wish to be burdened in the least with such a commission and enforcement. In the other, however—a quite secret report—it is related that the Duke of Bavaria had declared that if His Imperial Majesty would show him and provide original: subministriren the necessary means for the enforcement, and would sufficiently assure original: assecuriren him of his own assistance as well as that of other Roman Catholics (so that he would not be left in the lurch), then in such a case—and not otherwise—he would be willing to take the burden of the general enforcement against the Protestants original: contra Protestantes upon himself. Therefore, there is no doubt that if the Union had not intervened at that time, and if this plan for a general enforcer against the Protestants had not been somewhat held back by it, then the neighboring Evangelical Protestant estates and cities—especially the smaller ones, just like Donauwörth—would have suffered the same fate. Indeed, even the mightier ones, such as the Duke of Württemberg and the cities of Ulm, Nuremberg, and others, would likely not have remained unmolested. What the compiler on page 22 pointedly alleges original: speciosè allegieret regarding Otto Pack Otto von Pack (c. 1480–1537) was famous for a 1528 scandal involving forged documents that nearly started a religious war does not conclude as well as he pretends. For Sleidanus Johannes Sleidanus (1506–1556), a historian of the Reformation writes expressly that although Duke George of Saxony and others tried to excuse themselves, it was nonetheless the common opinion and rumor original Latin: communis opinio & fama that it was not for nothing original Latin: non fuisse de nihilo. The circumstances of time, place, and persons and other particulars were described by the said Otto Pack in such a way that any sensible person, skilled in the public affairs and actions of that time original Latin: & rerum & actionum publicarum illius temporis peritus, can easily perceive that Pack did not simply suck such things out of his thumb A German idiom meaning "to make something up out of thin air.". What he further introduces regarding Cardinal Truchsess, the city of Nuremberg against Margrave Albrecht, and the Gotha enforcement, these are things that...