Page:Balthasar Hübmaier.djvu/82

 Hübmaier's various talents enabled him speedily to take a leading position at Ingolstadt, and he approved himself on trial as not only an eloquent lecturer and preacher, but a good man of affairs. At Easter, 1515, he was made vice-rector of the university. The rector at that time was the Margrave Friedrich von Brandenburg, but the rectorship of a nobleman must have been merely nominal and ornamental, and the real manager of the affairs of the university was Hübmaier. We have only one recorded incident of his administration of this office: an annalist of the city narrates that on one occasion he was fined ten ducats and confined to his house three days for releasing a student who had been imprisoned for assaulting a woman.

The growing fame of Hübmaier as a pulpit orator secured for him a call to Regensburg as chief preacher in the cathedral. The Danube with its tributaries was the great commercial highway of Southern Germany before railways were known; and Regensburg, or Ratisbon, situated at the confluence of the Danube and Regen, was then as now a much more important town than Ingolstadt. The cathedral, which was then nearing completion, is