Two images of Charles V: a portrait by Lucas Cranach the Elder, top; and Lambert Sustris, bottom. You decide which is propaganda.
from
The Heresiarchs, by Sigismunda Killinger & Lise Freitag (1987)
As 1546 opened, both parties in the looming German conflict positioned themselves for maximum advantage. In Wittenberg, Luther’s funeral was carried out with ceremony overshadowing even that of the Elector Johann, fourteen years before. Katerina von Bora was given preeminence even over the two electresses, the dowager Elizabeth of England and the elector’s young wife, Dorothea of Denmark. It was a spectacle, commemorated in prints from the shop of Lucas Cranach, clearly meant to tie the Ernestine Wettins even more tightly to the memory and spirit of Luther. Friedrich’s own public display of grief bordered on the immoderate.
Aware time was running out, princes rushed to take or cross sides for their various reasons. The Archbishop of Cologne defected to the party of the Lutherans, followed not too far behind by the Elector Palatine. Originally the elector intended to join the party of the Lutherans but stay out of the League of Schmalkald. However, the Saxon Elector, and more particularly Luther’s treatise
Of the Anti-Christ and His Servants, convinced him mere conversion would do nothing but expose him to danger from both sides, and that the only way to secure the safety of his rule was to join the League outright. Luther’s words had also terrified the Elector of Brandenburg from the party of the emperor into a paralyzed neutrality, and Duke Moritz had been rendered so insecure in his dominions that he dared not return to them from the side of the emperor for a long while out of fear of a violent reception.
Charles V meanwhile, secured the help of the Duke of Bavaria through another marriage alliance. Friedrich had tried, at the last minute, the stratagem of luring Bavaria into an alliance with the promise that if the imperial throne was vacated at that moment, the combined votes of Saxony, Brandenburg, Cologne and the Palatinate would be sufficient to overthrow the Habsburgs, and that if he guaranteed the Lutherans their liberty he might represent an effective compromise choice. In the end, the only result of this intrigue though was that the correspondence in which it was proposed was turned over to Charles, and the alliance between Bavaria and the Emperor sealed, though Bavaria did not promise too much more assistance beyond its own neutrality. Likewise, Cleves, though still technically in the camp of the emperor, suddenly withdrew all its promises of material assistance.
The Emperor had more success with the Margrave of Kustrin, who renounced his membership in the League, and Margrave Albrecht Alcibiades of Brandenburg-Kulmbach, who famously declared that with sufficient pay he would join the service of the devil himself. Then on June 19th Charles signed a secret treaty giving Moritz the administratorship of the archbishopric of Magdeburg and the bishopric of Halberstadt, partly in exchange for his agreement to not introduce the reformation into those cities. Lutheran spies at Moritz’s court shocked at this bargain reached out to the elector, and soon it was Friedrich’s turn to publish purloined correspondence. His agents were able to reveal in early July the treaty’s text, which confirmed in the view of many Lutherans the worst fears stated in
Of the Antichrist, that Moritz was willing to sell his subjects’ souls in order to curry favor with the emperor. The black legend of Duke Moritz had now truly taken root.
Also in June Charles concluded his treaty with Pope Paul by which the papacy promised money and troops to restore the German Princes to the Church, and in return Charles was given the right to sell church property in Spain and levy taxes on the clergy there to finance the project.
It was Philip of Hesse who was chosen to meet with Charles to try and ascertain his motives for the upcoming Diet, which was to be held at Regensburg. Philip encountered Charles on his way there, at Speyer. Friedrich had agents present, who reported back that Charles was headed to Speyer with only 400 soldiers. Friedrich immediately began considering the possibility of launching a surprise strike aimed at capturing the emperor and either wringing from him under duress the necessary concessions, vacating the imperial throne by an enforced abdication and electing some less troublesome compromise candidate, or even killing Charles outright. Yet this would ruin his policy until this point of not offering a provocation by which he could be condemned as disturbing the peace of the empire. Moreover, he could not be absolutely sure this itself was not a trap the emperor was laying for him.
In the end, Friedrich chose to behave with the same ambiguity he had in his march to Dueren. He announced at the last minute, to do as none of the other princes of the Schmalkaldic League had done, and attend the Diet in person. What he did not say, but nonetheless decided, was that he would bring with him 7,000 infantry. Here too as in the Cleves campaign Friedrich marched his forces fast. They were in Nuernberg before word reached Charles at Regensburg of the advance. The emperor and his allied princes fled in a panic, and was at already at Passau when he paused to issue the imperial ban on Friedrich. However, in his rush he had left behind his guns at Regensburg. The forty guns Friedrich had previously seized at Dueren he had been forced to leave behind when he evacuated at the end of 1542, making of them a rich gift to the dukes of Cleves. The ones he presently acquired, which Charles had bought at great cost, could have otherwise been used against the walls of the cities of Saxony. Instead, Friedrich returned with them forthwith to Coburg. For all intents and purposes, Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria tipped his cap to him as the Saxons passed through his territory, offering no resistance as thousands of Saxon soldiers crossed his territory. Such was the value of the Bavarian alliance to Charles.
Simultaneous with Friedrich’s “attendance” of the Diet, his brother Johann the Younger moved deftly to take advantage of Moritz’s own absence from his dominions. Saxon armies seized all the lands of Albertine Saxony, the willingness of Moritz’s retainers to resist sapped by the news of his collusion with the Emperor. Both Dresden and Leipzig were taken without violence, and Ernestine garrisons were even admitted to the formidable Festung Konigstein, which would be strengthened and adorned until over the centuries it became the unique symbol of Saxon, and then German, resolve.
Everywhere in ducal Saxony, the court officers, knights, churchmen, and councilors of town and village were demanded to take the same oath, renouncing all allegiance to the pope, the king of Spain and their servant Moritz, in favor of God, Luther’s Church and the Elector of Saxony. Johann the Younger rounded up those of sufficient prominence who refused and shipped them off to the Veste Coburg, deep in the Ernestines’ own lands, where they would be lodged, their survival both contingent on the good deportment of their families left behind and at the expense of those families. If the most loyal followers of Moritz were reduced to penury in this way, and the proceeds fund what was sure to be a vastly expensive war, what was the harm?
Immediately on his return from Regensburg Friedrich was met by the Duke Johann at Leipzig. There, with pageantry and fanfare, the brothers produced legal authority that the 1485 Partition of Leipzig had violated the term of the Golden Bull of 1357 in that it had divided the territories of an electoral prince, which was not permitted. Then they ripped up and burned the document, canceled the partition, and officially restored the former Albertine Saxony to their lands, characterizing their act as one of deliverance of a people from a miscreant prince who meant to deliver the souls of the people charged to his care to Satan. Clearly, the time for tip-toing to avoid provocation was over.
The next Saxon attack was also of a legal, rather than military, nature: no sooner had Charles, and the territorial princes who had assembled originally for the diet, issued the ban that he received a legal brief, no doubt prepared beforehand, asserting the ban was a nullity because it was issued without the correct constitutional process, which required the approval by a full Diet. And so the point could not be mistaken, this response was handed to Charles by Henry VIII’s own ambassador. At that very moment, Friedrich and Philip met at Gotha, on the border of their two territories, and announced their attention to unite their forces and march to defend any Protestant prince attacked by Charles anywhere in the empire.
All this had been conducted parallel to the campaign of the South German Protestants. The Palatinate, Wuerttemberg, Augsburg, Constance, and Ulm appealed to the Swiss to close the passes to armies from Italy traveling to support the emperor and began hiring mercenaries. Those mercenaries, under the leadership of the experienced commander Sebastian Shaertlin, immediately began disrupting competing imperial efforts to recruit the Swiss, and advanced on the opposite side of Friedrich on the imperial Diet at Regensburg. In fact, the timeline is cloudy, but it is possible that if Schaertlin had not been frightened off by the threats of the Duke of Bavaria he and Friedrich could have trapped the emperor there. Friedrich next sent letters that beseeched Schaertlin to invade Tyrol and occupy the pass at Innsbruck to hold off reinforcements. Once again, the South German war council overruled him, and Schaertlin withdrew to Augsburg.
Through that route arrived Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who at Landshut promptly presented the Emperor with an additional 10,000 Italian infantry. The army at the Emperor Charles V numbered a total of 30,000. At the moment, Friedrich realized that he and Philip could command a total of 45,000 soldiers, giving them a momentary advantage. However, Friedrich knew over time that Charles could call on an endless flow of reinforcements, especially given the support he had from the papacy, whereas the Protestants’ armies were soldered together by the present crisis, and were likely to scatter as the moment wore on and resources were spent. Friedrich knew he must act, or else lose the initiative.
It was at this point Friedrich received word that the Imperial general Maximiliaan van Egmont, Count of Buren had crossed the Rhine, seeking to join up with the Emperor, with 10,000 infantry and 7,000 cavalry. Friedrich for once was able to prevail upon the rest of the League’s princes that Buren could not be allowed to combine his army with Charles’ and that he represented the easier target. In September, not even waiting for all the forces of his sprawling coalition to muster, Friedrich struck west into Franconia, trying to intercept Buren. On September 13, Friedrich and Buren met at Rieneck. In this first pitched battle of the war, Friedrich found himself unprepared against a more experienced general. With 26,000 soldiers on the field, facing Buren’s 17,000 total, he was defeated. The Elector of Saxony lost 6,000 soldiers that day, but was able to withdraw in good order north into the territory of his ally the Landgrave of Hesse. Buren lost 4,000, and was able to proceed to join Charles, as planned, on September 23. It was Friedrich’s first reversal of the war, and would not be his last.
