In the initial stage of this combat the great military event was the rout of the Smalkaldic allies at Muhlberg, in April, 1547, where Charles captured John Frederic of Saxony, transferred his dominions--save only a few scattered territories in Thuringia--to his ally, Maurice, and reduced all north Germany save the city of Magdeburg. It seemed for a moment as if this battle might decide the contest. Charles summoned a Diet at Augsburg in 1548, and carried all his proposals without opposition. He strengthened his political position by the reconstitution of the Imperial Chamber, by the organization of the Netherlands into a circle of the empire, and by the formation of a new military treasury. He obtained the consent of the Diet to a religious compromise called the Interim which, while insisting on the seven sacraments in the Catholic sense, vaguely agreed to the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith, and declared that the two questions of the Communion in both kinds and the celibacy of clergy were to be left till the summoning of a free Christian council. The strict Lutheran party--and Pomerania was a stronghold of strict Lutheranism--regarded the Interim as a base betrayal of Protestant interests. Their pamphleteers called it the _Interitum_, or the death-blow, and the conversion of a prince like Joachim of Brandenburg to such a scheme was regarded as an ominous sign for the future. In reality, however, the success of the emperor rested upon the most brittle foundations. That he was chilly, reserved, un-German, and therefore unpopular was something, but not nearly all. The princes of Germany had conquered practical independence in the thirteenth century, and were jealous of their prerogatives. The Hanseatic towns formed a republican confederacy in the north, corresponding to the Swiss confederacy in the south. There was no adequate central machinery, and the Jesuit order was only just preparing to enter upon its career of German victories. The Spanish troops made themselves detestable, outraging women--a dire offence in a nation so domestic as Germany--and there was standing feud between the famous Castilian infantry and the German lansquenets. The popes did not like the emperor's favourite remedy of a council, and busily thwarted his ecclesiastical schemes. Henry II of France was on the watch for German allies against a powerful rival. The allies were ready. A great spiritual movement can never be stifled by the issue of one battle. For good or evil, men had taken sides; interests intellectual, moral, and material had already been invested either in the one cause or the other; there had been brutal iconoclasm; there had been ardent preaching, so simple and moving that ignorant women understood and wept; there had been close and stubborn dogmatic controversy; there had been the shedding of blood, and the upheavals in towns, and the building of a new church system, and the growth of a new religious literature. Almost a whole