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 religion and a new constitution. In the neighbouring Duchy of Pomerania the Catholic Bogislav X was succeeded in 1523 by his two sons George and Barnim, of whom the latter was a Lutheran.

The feeble government established at the Diet of Worms in 1521 was quite unable to control this growing cleavage of the nation into two religious parties; but it made some efforts to steer a middle course and it reflected with some fidelity the national hostility to the papal Curia. It had met the Diet for the first time in February, 1522, and it entertained some hopes that the new Pope, Adrian VI, would do something to meet the long list of gravamina which had been drawn up in the previous year and sent to Home for consideration; but it was late in the summer before Adrian reached the Vatican, and his policy could not be announced to the Diet until its next meeting in November. The papal Nuncio was Francesco Chieregati, an experienced diplomatist, and he came with a conciliatory message. He said nothing about Luther in his first speech to the Diet, and in an interview with Planitz, the Elector Frederick's Chancellor, he admitted the existence of grave abuses in the Papacy, and the partial responsibility of Leo X for them; nor did he deny that Luther had done good work in bringing these abuses to light; though of course the monk's attacks on the sacraments, on the Fathers of the Church, and on Councils could not be tolerated. But this peaceful atmosphere did not endure. Adrian seems to have come to the conclusion that his instructions to Chieregati did not lay sufficient emphasis on papal dignity, and a brief which he addressed to his Nuncio on November 25 was much more minatory. His threats were conveyed to the Diet by Chieregati's speech on January 3, 1523; Luther was denounced as worse than the Turk, and was accused of not merely polluting Germany with his heresy but of aiming at the destruction of all order and property. The Estates were reminded of the end of Dathan and Abiram, of Ananias and Sapphira, of Jerome and Hus; if they separated themselves from God's Holy Church they might incur a similar fate.

Yet the Pope did not deny the abuses of which complaint had been made, and his frank acknowledgement of them supplied the Diet with a cue for their answer. They refused the Nuncio's demand that the Lutheran preachers of Nürnberg should be seized and sent to Home, and appointed a committee to deal with the question. This body reported that the Pope's acknowledgement of the existence of abuses made it impossible to proceed against Luther for pointing them out; and it carried war into the enemy's territory by demanding that the Pope should surrender German annates to be appropriated to German national purposes, and summon a Council, in which the laity were to be represented, to sit in some German town and deal with the ecclesiastical situation. This report met with some opposition from the Elector Joachim of Brandenburg, Duke George of Saxony, and the