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Rh ance of having been accepted by the complete representation of the Empire,60 Luther had long since been made a captive on his way home and carried to safety in the Wartburg in accordance with a plan of which he was informed already in Worms — cf. the letter which he wrote at Frankfurt to Cranach.

12. Luther on the Wartburg

Concerning the importance of Luther's sojourn at the Wartburg we have a good dissertation from the pen of the able historian Max Lenz.61

At the Wartburg Luther began to translate the Bible into German. It was W. Walther, who for the first time made us acquainted with what the declining Middle Ages possessed in the way of German Bibles in a methodically correct and very thorough manner. It was a truly monumental work that Walther gave us in his "Die deutsche Bibeluebersetzung des Mittelalters," 1889-1902. Together with 202 manuscripts Walther brings to light, from the 55 years, 1466-1521, 18 complete, printed German Bibles, 22 Psalteries and 12 printed productions of other biblical books. With this enough material was placed at our disposal to answer the question, whether Luther's translation was original work or only a revision of older German Bibles. A resumption of this not exactly modern question was again necessitated through the activity of the church historian Krafft in Bonn, 1883,62 who contended that the latter answer was the correct one, and whose contention was at once spread all over by the Catholic Church as the absolute result of investigation — cf., especially the article on Dietenberger, that Wedewer wrote in 1884 for the Catholic "Kirchenlexicon von Wetzer u. Welte," and his monogravure of 1888 on