Those who hated the beauty of the modern
church building used this period of unrest to attack and
destroy what they did not like because they did not understand
it. Impoverished knights tried to make up for past losses by
grabbing the territory which belonged to the monasteries.
Discontented princes made use of the absence of the Emperor
to increase their own power. The starving peasants, following
the leadership of half-crazy agitators, made the best of
the opportunity and attacked the castles of their masters and
plundered and murdered and burned with the zeal of the old
Crusaders.
A veritable reign of disorder broke loose throughout the
Empire. Some princes became Protestants (as the ``protesting''
adherents of Luther were called) and persecuted their
Catholic subjects. Others remained Catholic and hanged their
Protestant subjects. The Diet of Speyer of the year 1526
tried to settle this difficult question of allegiance by ordering
that ``the subjects should all be of the same religious denomination
as their princes.'' This turned Germany into a checkerboard
of a thousand hostile little duchies and principalities and
created a situation which prevented the normal political
growth for hundreds of years.
In February of the year 1546 Luther died and was put
to rest in the same church where twenty-nine years before he
had proclaimed his famous objections to the sale of Indulgences.
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