Prodromus or Fore-runner

...[done to the] German Princes, that the Emperor—without provoking the wrath of God and the violation of his honor—could not retreat, and other such matters.

In the letters of Cardinal Ludovisi Ludovico Ludovisi (1595–1632), a powerful cardinal and diplomat who managed Papal policy during the early years of the Thirty Years' War. and the Nuncio in Vienna, much more of this subject matter is to be found. It is particularly well-noted from the Count of Oñate’s Iñigo Vélez de Guevara, the Spanish ambassador to the Imperial court, who pushed for a hardline Catholic policy. Memorial that the current war in Germany is once and for all considered a Religious War against the Protestants Evangelicals in the Empire. Furthermore, from the aforementioned Cardinal’s writings, it is clear that the Count Palatine Frederick V, the "Winter King," who had been stripped of his lands and titles. is to be ruined for this reason: so that the Catholics may be strengthened, and thus more easily deal the death blow original: "GARAUS machen" to the Protestants. The kind reader may easily observe these and other such details, which will be demonstrated more fully in other places.

It is especially noteworthy that Duke Wilhelm of Bavaria, in his letter to his son, the Prince-Elector of Cologne, threatens the other two ecclesiastical Prince-Electors The Archbishops of Mainz and Trier, who were the other Catholic members of the Electoral College. because they look toward the Prince-Elector of Saxony The Lutheran Elector of Saxony was a moderate whose cooperation the Emperor needed; the hardline Bavarians saw any concessions to him as a betrayal. during this work of transfer Translation. He warns that they will have to pay for it in the next world, because they are thereby preventing the propagation of the Popish superstition The author uses this polemical term to describe how the Catholic Duke allegedly views the spread of his own faith, or perhaps rephrases the Duke's "Catholic religion" into Protestant terminology. and hindering the extermination extirpation of heretics.

From all of this, it follows irrefutably that this transfer is held, first and principally, as most necessary original: "pro maximè necessaria", because through it the entire Electoral Palatinate is brought back under the Pope's obedience, and many countless Protestant Evangelical Christians, whom they call heretics...