Everywhere anxiety reigned supreme, for there were lacking both preparedness and unanimity. The Catholic Princes of the Empire were not much better than the rest. Petty interests and jealousies outweighed in many instances a sense of the common needs. At Spires, for instance, Duke George of Saxony stipulated, as a condition of any promise of assistance, that he should be given precedence over both the Dukes of Bavaria. While the Catholic Estates agreed, at the Diet of Augsburg, to the grants for the war against the Turks, the Protestant Estates were not to be induced to give a favourable decision until the Emperor had sanctioned the so-called religious Peace of Nuremberg in 1532.[227]
In the summer of that same year Suleiman passed Buda-Pesth with 300,000 men. Thence he continued his march along the Danube with the intention of taking Vienna, this time at any cost. The Emperor Charles V. hurried in person to command the great army which was collecting near Vienna; the Sultan was to be encountered and a decisive battle fought. Throughout the Empire the greatest enthusiasm for the cause prevailed. The Electoral Prince, Joachim of Brandenburg, was nominated by the Emperor to the command of the troops of the Saxon lowlands, since this country had not been unanimous in the choice of a Captain, probably owing to the religious dissensions.
The Protestant Prince Joachim requested a pious letter from Luther. This Luther sent him, promising him his prayers, and saying that “he would take the field in spirit with his dear Emperor Carol [as he now calls him], and fight under his banner against Satan and his members.” He prayed God to bestow on them all “a glad spirit,” granting them not to trust in their own strength, but to fight with the “fear of God, trusting in His Grace alone,” and to ascribe the honour to heaven only; hitherto there had been too much of the “spirit of defiance on both sides,” and each party had gone into the field “without God,” “which on every occasion had been worse for the people of God than for the enemy.” Luther was evidently quite incapable of writing on the subject without his polemical ideas casting their shadow over his field of vision.
The Turks did not venture to give battle, but, to the joy of the Christian army, retreated, laying waste Styria on their march. The Imperial troops were disbanded and an armistice was concluded between King Ferdinand and Suleiman. But in 1536 the hostilities were renewed by the Turks; Hungary was as good as lost, and in 1537 Ferdinand’s army suffered in Slavonia the worst reverse, so at least Luther was informed, since the battle of Mohacz in 1526. On the strength of a rumour he attributed the misfortune to the treason of the Christian generals. In his conversations he set down the defeat to the account of Ferdinand, his zealous Catholic opponent; he had permitted “such a great and powerful army to be led miserably into the jaws of the Turks.”[228] Ferdinand, the Emperor’s brother, was, of course, to blame for the unfortunate issue of the affair; “hitherto the Turk has been provoked by Ferdinand and has been victorious; when he comes unprovoked, then he will succumb and be defeated; if the Papists commence the war they will be beaten.”[229] “Luther saw in the misfortune of King Ferdinand a just punishment on him and his friends who angered God and worshipped lies.”[230] He believed the cause of the success of the Turks to be the “great blasphemy of the Papists against God and the abominable sin against one and the other Table of the Commandments of God”; also “the great contempt of God’s Word amongst our own people.”[231]
While the Protestant Princes and cities again showed a tendency to exploit the Turkish peril to the advantage of the religious innovations, Luther, in view of the needs of the time, pulled himself together and, when consulted, openly advised the Elector Johann Frederick to give his assistance against the Turks should this be asked of him. (May 29, 1538.[232])
He writes to the Elector: “‘Necessitas’ knows no ‘legem,’ and where there is necessity everything that is termed law, treaty or agreement ceases.... We must risk both good and evil with our brothers, like good comrades, as man and wife, father and children risk all things together.” “Because many pious and honest people will also have to suffer,” it was meet that the Prince should, “with a good conscience, render assistance in order to help and protect, not the tyrants, but the poor little flock.”
Yet, immediately after, he deprives his counsel of most of its weight by declaring in fatalistic language, that there was nevertheless little to be hoped for, since God “had fashioned the rod which they will not be able to resist.”
He tells him concerning King Ferdinand, “that there was nothing to be anticipated from him, but only trouble and inevitable misfortune”; of the Catholics in general he assures him, that their “blasphemy” against the Evangel and their resistance to “their conscience and the known truth” made it impossible for them to escape a “great chastisement,” since “God liveth and reigneth.”
Again, as though desirous of deterring the Elector on personal grounds, he reminds him that they (the “tyrants” as he calls the Princes of the Catholic party) “had not so far even requested assistance, and had not been willing to agree to peace though the need was so great.”[233] He also thoughtfully alludes to the danger lest the tyrants, after having secured a victory with the help of the Protestants, should make use of their arms to overthrow the Evangel by force: “We must be wary lest, should our adversaries vanquish the Turks—which I cannot believe they will—they then turn their arms against us,” “which they would gladly do”; but, he adds, “it rests in God’s hands not in their desire, what they do to us, or what we are to suffer, as we have experienced so far,” for instance after the retreat of the Turks from Vienna when, “after all, nothing was undertaken against us”; for the people would refuse to follow them in any attack upon the Evangel.