Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/699

 TJie Revolt of Germany against tJie Papacy 593 could not be avoided when it should please God to visit his Luther's judgments upon the stiff-necked and perverse generation of ^ovva"r/a "Romanists," as the Germans contemptuously called. the sup- violent reali- ' 1 ^ IT zation or his porters of the Pope. Yet he always discouraged hasty reform, reforms He was reluctant to make changes, except in belief. He held that so long as an institution did not actually mislead, it did no harm. He was, in short, no fanatic at heart. Section 103. The Diet at Worms, i 520-1 521 The Pope's chief representative in Germany, named Ale- Views of the ander, wrote as follows to Leo X about this time : "I am sentative"^^ pretty familiar with the histor^ of this German nation. I know on.P"bHc ^ ■' ■^ opinion in their past heresies, councils, and schisms, but never were affairs Germany so serious before. Compared with present conditions, the struggle between Henry IV and Gregory VH was as violets and roses. . . . These mad dogs are now well equipped with knowledge and arms ; they boast that they are no longer ignorant brutes like their predecessors ; they claim that Italy has lost the monopoly of the sciences and that the Tiber now flows into the Rhine. Nine-tenths of the Germans are shouting ' Luther,' and the other tenth goes so far at least as ' Death to the Roman curia.' " Among the enemies of Luther and his supporters none was Charles '"s more important than the young Emperor. It was toward the pathy°wkh"^ end of the year ic:2o that Charles came to Germany for the the German J ^ J reiormers first time. After being crowned King of the Romans at Aix- la-Chapelle, he assumed, with the Pope's consent, the title of Emperor elect, as his grandfather Maximilian had done. He then moved on to the town of Worms, where he was to hold his first diet and face the German situation. Although scarcely more than a boy in years, Charles had already begun to take life very seriously. He had decided that Spain, not Germany, was to be the bulwark and citadel of all his realms. Like the more enlightened of his Spanish subjects, he realized the need of reforming the Church, but he had no