Page:Luther's correspondence and other contemporary letters 1521-1530.djvu/196

 for ten florins instead of the six he now gets from the Elector. You know well enough what he wants. He is a poor man and a good one ; besides, he is a foreigner, and will not stay here long, so it is said.

The priests of Baal in the Low Countries have got their Jezebel* to demand Brother Henry* from the people of Bremen as a prisoner of the empire. What the Bremers will do we do not yet know.* I advised the collector of Alstedt, when he was here, that he should have nothing to do with the spirit of the prophet Thomas.* I do not know whether anything has been done since then. Certainly I cannot endure that "Spirit," whoever he is. He praises my work, as Thomas himself writes me,* and yet he despises it and seeks other and greater things. Besides, he speaks in such absurd and unusual words and phrases, which are not found in Scripture, that you would think him crazy or drunk. He avoids us and will not meet us, and yet he boasts wonderful things of himself. I have, therefore, asked the collector of Alstedt to urge the man to confer with us about his teaching; I do not know whether he will get him to do it. Our Spirit is not of the kind that fears to be heard and compared with all other spirits, good and evil. Farewell and pray for me.

Martin Luther.

��594. THE EMPEROR TO THE DUKE OF SESSA,* HIS AMBAS- SADOR IN ROME.

Bergenroth, 1509-25, no. 59a Valladoud, August 23, 1523.

. . . The nuncio of the Pope has asked him to publish the edict which he has given during the Diet of Worms, prohibit- ing the printing and reading of the works of Martin Luther. He has done so, and sends him a letter for the Pope in which he informs him of the measures taken against Luther.

I Margaret, Princess Regent of the Netherlands.

■Henry of Zutphen.


 * They refused the demand (Iken, Heinrich v. Z., p. 5a).

collector of Alstedt was a certain Hans Zeis, who was on friendly termi with Ifunser.
 * Thomas Munzer {cf. Vol. I, p. 324, n. i), then preaching in Alstedt. The


 * Munzer's letter in Enders (It, 169).

■ Lewis de Cordova, Dtike of Sessa.

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