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 of this process was seen in Bavaria. Originally Bavaria had been as hostile to the Church as any other part of Germany, and no attempt was there made to execute the Edict of Worms. But what others sought by hostility to the Papacy, the Dukes of Bavaria won by its conciliation, and between 1521 and 1525 a firm alliance was built up between the Pope and the Dukes on the basis of papal support for the Dukes even against their Bishops. Adrian VI granted them a fifth of all ecclesiastical revenues within their dominions, a source of income which henceforth remained one of the chief pillars of the Bavarian financial system; and another Bull empowered the temporal tribunals to deal with heretics without the concurrence of the Bavarian Bishops, who resented the ducal intrusion into their jurisdictions. The territorial ambition of the Dukes was thus gratified; and the grievances of the laity against the Church were to some extent satisfied by the adoption of measures intended to reform clerical morals; and they both were thus inclined to defend Catholic dogma against Lutheran heresy. A similar grant of Church revenues to the Archduke Ferdinand for use against the Turk facilitated a like result; and Austria and Bavaria became the bulwarks of the Catholic Church in Germany. Other Catholic Princes, like Duke George of Saxony, maintained the faith with more disinterested motives but with less permanent success; while the ecclesiastical Electors of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, were prevented by Lutheran sympathies in the chapters or in the cities of their dioceses from playing the vigorous part in opposition to the national movement which might otherwise have been expected from them.

A like process of crystallisation pervaded the Reforming party. In 1524 Luther effected the final conversion of the Elector Frederick of Saxony, and his brother John who succeeded him in the following year was already a Lutheran. In the same year the youthful and warlike Landgrave Philip of Hesse was won over by Melanchthon and enjoined the preaching of the Gospel throughout his territories. Margrave Casimir of Brandenburg took a similarly decisive step in concurrence with his Estates at Bayreuth in October. The banished Duke Ulrich of Württemberg was also a convert, and Duke Ernest of Luneburg, a nephew of the Elector Frederick, began a reformation at Celle in 1524. Charles V's sister Isabella listened to Osiander's exhortations at Nürnberg and adopted the new ideas, and her husband, Christian II of Denmark, invited Luther and Carlstadt to preach in his kingdom. He was soon deprived of his throne, but his successor Frederick I adopted a similar religious attitude and promoted the spread of reforming principles in Denmark and in his duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. The Grandmaster of the Teutonic Order, Albrecht of Brandenburg, had also been influenced by Osiander, and, turning his new faith to practical account, he converted the possessions of the Order into the hereditary duchy of Prussia, a fief of the Polish Crown, which received at once a purified