Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/227

 the national government seemed to have abdicated their control over ecclesiastical policy in favour of the territorial Princes; and the separatist principle, which had long dominated secular politics, appeared to have legally established itself within the domain of religion.

The Diet had presumed too much upon Charles' hostility to the Pope, but there were grounds for this assumption. Although his letter arrived too late to affect the Diet's decision, the Emperor had actually written on July 27, suggesting the abolition of the penal clauses in the Edict of Worms, and the submission of evangelical doctrines to the consideration of a General Council. But this change of attitude was entirely due to the momentary exigencies of his foreign relations. Clement VII was hand in glove with the League of Cognac, formed to wrest from Charles the fruits of Pavia. The Emperor, threatened with excommunication, replied by remarking that Luther might be made a man of importance; while Charles' lieutenant, Moncada, captured the castle of St Angelo, and told the Pope that God himself could not withstand the victorious imperial arms. Other Spaniards were urging Charles to abolish the temporal power of the Papacy, as the root of all the Italian wars; and he hoped to find in the Lutherans a weapon against the Pope, a hope which was signally fulfilled when Frundsberg led eleven thousand troops, four thousand of whom served without pay, to the sack of Rome.

Moreover Ferdinand was in no position to coerce the Lutheran princes. The peasant revolts in his Austrian duchies were not yet subdued, and he was toying with the idea of an extensive secularisation of ecclesiastical property. He had seized the bishopric of Brixen, meditated a partition of Salzburg, and told his Estates at Innsbruck that the common people objected altogether to the exercise of clerical jurisdiction in temporal concerns. And before long considerations of the utmost importance for the future of his House and of Europe further diverted his energies from the prosecution of either religious or political objects in Germany; for 1526 was the birth-year of the Austro-Hungarian State which now holds in its straining bond all that remains of Habsburg power.

The ruin which overtook the kingdom of Hungary at Mohdcs (August 30, 1526) has been ascribed to various causes. The simplest is that Hungary, and no other State, barred the path of the Turks, and felt the full force of their onslaught at a time when the Ottoman Power was in the first flush of its vigour, and was wielded by perhaps the greatest of Sultans. Hungary, though divided, was at least as united as Germany or Italy; it was to some extent isolated from the rest of Europe, but it effected no such breach with Western Christendom as Bohemia had done in the Hussite wars, and Bohemia escaped the heel of the Turk. The foreign policy of Hungary was ill-directed and inconsequent; but if the marriage of its King with the Emperor's sister and that of its Princess