The prodigious stupid bigotry of the people also was irksome to me; I thought there was something in it very sordid. The entire empire the priests have over both the souls and bodies of the people, gave me a specimen of that meanness of spirit, which is nowhere else to be seen but in Italy, especially in the city of Rome.
At Venice I perceived it quite different, the civil authority having a visible superiority over the ecclesiastic, and the Church being more subject there to the State than in any other part of Italy.
For these reasons I took no pleasure in filling my memoirs of Italy with remarks of places or things. All the antiquities and valuable remains of the Roman nation are done better than I can pretend to by such people who made it more their business; as for me, I went to see, and not to write, and as little thought then of these Memoirs as I ill furnished myself to write them.
I left Italy in April, and taking the tour of Bavaria, though very much out of the way, I passed through Munich, Passau, Lintz, and at last to Vienna.
I came to Vienna the 10th of April 1631, intending to have gone from thence down the Danube into Hungary, and by means of a pass, which I had obtained from the English ambassador at Constantinople, I designed to have seen all the great towns on the Danube, which were then in the hands of the Turks, and which I had read much of in the history of the war between the Turks and the Germans; but I was diverted from my design by the following occasion.
There had been a long bloody war in the empire of Germany for twelve years, between the emperor, the Duke of Bavaria, the King of Spain, and the Popish princes and electors on the one side, and the Protestant princes on the other; and both sides having been exhausted by the war, and even the Catholics themselves beginning to dislike the growing power of the house of Austria, 'twas thought all parties were willing to make peace. Nay, things were brought to that pass that some of the Popish princes and electors began to talk of making alliances with the King of Sweden.
Here it is necessary to observe, that the two Dukes of Mecklenburg having been dispossessed of most of their dominions by the tyranny of the Emperor Ferdinand, and being in danger of losing the rest, earnestly solicited the King of Sweden to come to their assistance; and that prince, as he was related to the house of Mecklenburg, and especially as he was willing to lay hold of any opportunity to break with the emperor, against whom he had laid up an implacable prejudice, was very ready and forward to come to their assistance.
The reasons of his quarrel with the emperor were grounded upon the Imperialists concerning themselves in the war of Poland, where the emperor had sent 8000 foot and 2000 horse to join the Polish army against the king, and had thereby given some check to his arms in that war.
In pursuance, therefore, of his resolution to quarrel with the emperor, but more particularly at the instances of the princes above-named, his Swedish Majesty had landed the year before at Stralsund with about 12,000 men, and having joined with some forces which he had left in Polish Prussia, all which did not make 30,000 men, he began a war with the emperor, the greatest in event, filled with the most famous battles, sieges, and extraordinary actions, including its wonderful success and happy conclusion, of any war ever maintained in the world.
The King of Sweden had already taken Stettin, Stralsund, Rostock, Wismar, and all the strong places on the Baltic, and began to spread himself in Germany. He had made a league with the French, as I observed in my story of Saxony; he had now made a treaty with the Duke of Brandenburg, and, in short, began to be terrible to the empire.