Even now the papacy, witless of new developments, could very well suppose the new heresy transient. Charles V, the new Emperor, was thoroughly orthodox; and not many of the German nobles were ostensibly otherwise. But Charles was under a deep obligation to Frederick the Elector of Saxony for his election; and Frederick was one of those who had begun, for racial and financial reasons, to contemplate "home rule" in matters ecclesiastical. Frederick accordingly was allowed to protect Luther, whose courage in going to the Diet of Worms, with Huss's fate in common memory, further established his popular influence. Manhood always loves manhood. After 1526, however, the process of the Reformation in Germany was substantially one of wholesale confiscation of Church lands and goods by the nobles, who were thus irrevocably committed to the cause; and though Luther and his more single-minded colleagues were naturally disgusted, there was no other way in which they could have won, popular sympathy counting for nothing in such a matter without military force. A rupture took place, finally, between the Emperor and the new Medicean pope, Clement VII, over the desperate politics of Italy, the papacy for once taking a national course in resisting an imperialist invasion. But the invaders triumphed; Italy was overrun anew; Rome was sacked (1527) with all the atrocity which historically distinguishes the Christian conquests of the city from those of the ancient Gauls and Goths; and during the critical years of the establishment of Protestantism the emperor was in no mood to quarrel with his German friends in the interests of a pope whose friendship he could not trust. All the political conditions were thus abnormally favourable to the Lutheran movement. At the same time, every menace from Rome led naturally to intensification of the Lutheran heresy; and though it always remained nearer Catholicism that did Calvinism, it emphasized more and more its differences. In the meantime the success of the movement of Zwingli at Zurich had proved independently that the strength of the Reformation lay in its appeal to economic interest. Confiscation of the possessions of the Church by the municipal authorities was a first step, and one for which, once taken, the community would fight rather than revoke it. With signal unwisdom, the Roman curia had contrived to allot most of the Swiss town livings to Italians, so that the vested interests were alien and not local. The municipality, on the other hand, sagaciously pacified those interests by guaranteeing pensions or posts as teachers or preachers to the whole twenty-four cantons of the chapter; and there and in some other cantons the economic Reformation, thus effected, was permanent.