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 appeared, losing a third of their numbers in the retreat; the town thereupon surrendered at discretion; and Jacob Wehe was discovered hiding, and executed outside the walls. Truchsess now turned back to crush the contingents from the Lake and the Hegau and the Baltringen band, which had captured Waldsee and was threatening his own castle at Waldburg. He defeated the latter near Wurzach on April 13, but was less successful with the former, who were entrenched near Weingarten. They were double the number of Truchsess' troops, and after a distant cannonade the Swabian general consented to negotiate; the peasants, alarmed perhaps by the fate of their allies, were induced to disband on the concession of some of their demands and the promise of an inquiry into the rest.

Truchsess had every reason to be satisfied with this result, for from all sides appeals were pouring in for help. In the Hegau Radolfzell was besieged; to the south-east the cardinal archbishop of Salzburg, Matthew Lang, was soon shut up in his castle by his subjects of the city and neighbouring country, while the Archduke Ferdinand himself would not venture outside the walls of Innsbruck. Forty thousand peasants had risen in the Vorarlberg; Tyrol was in ferment from end to end; and in Styria Dietrichstein's Bohemian troops could not save him from defeat at the hands of the peasants. In the south-west Hans Müller, the leader of the Stühlingen force, moved through the Black Forest, and raising the Breisgau villagers appeared before Freiburg. The fortress on the neighbouring Schlossberg was unable to protect the city, which admitted the peasants on May 24. Across the Rhine in Elsass twenty thousand insurgents captured Zabern on May 13, and made themselves masters of Weissenburg and most of the other towns in the province; Colmar alone withstood their progress. Further north in the west Rhine districts of the Palatinate, Lauterburg, Landau, and Neustadt fell into the rebels' hands, and on the east side of the river they carried all before them. In the Odenwald George Metzler, an innkeeper, had raised the standard of revolt before the end of March, and Jäcklein Rohrbach followed his example in the Neckarthal on the first of April. Florian Geyer headed the Franconian rebels who gathered in the valley of the Tauber, and the Austrian government in Württemberg had barely got rid of Ulrich when it was threatened by a more dangerous enemy in the peasants under Matern Feuerbacher. Further north still, the Thuringian commons broke out under the lead of Thomas Münzer.

So widespread a movement inevitably gathered into its net personalities and forces of every description. The bulk of the insurgents and some of their leaders were peasants; but willingly or unwillingly they received into their ranks criminals, priests, ex-officials, barons, and even some ruling Princes. Florian Geyer was a knight more or less of Sickingen's type, who threw himself heart and soul into the peasants' cause. Götz von Berlichingen, the hero of Goethe's drama known as Götz of the Iron