In 1528, under the authority of the Emperor, Balthasar Hubmayer, a preacher, printer, and travelling bookseller of Nikolsburg, was burned in Vienna, together with his wife and two apprentices, for spreading false doctrines. Hubmayer had at first accepted the Lutheran views, but had, later, associated himself with the Anabaptists. In 1529, the persecution of the printers and of the Protestants in Austria was for the time relaxed because of the peril of Vienna from the Turks, an exigency which absorbed the full attention of the imperial authorities. In 1564, was published in Rome an _Index librorum prohibitorum_, the first of a long series. The censorship was by no means left exclusively in the hands of the imperial or of the ecclesiastical authorities. With no little variation of policy both as to the theory or standard of supervision and as to the methods of carrying out the restrictions imposed, many of the States established censorship of their own, and the same course was taken by a number of the cities like Nuremberg, Strasburg, Frankfort, and others, in which the printing business had begun to assume importance, and where the Church authorities had not already taken charge of the function. In Nuremberg, one of the earliest instances of the exercise of a city censorship occurred in 1527, in the case of a volume containing woodcuts illustrating the history of the Tower of Babel, for which cuts a rhyming text had been supplied by the cobbler-poet, Hans Sachs. The book had been printed without a licence or permission from the magistracy. The magistrates decided that the book must be suppressed. They further cautioned Sachs that the writing of verses was not his proper business, and that he should keep to his own trade of shoemaking. _Nun seye solches seines Amtes nicht, gebuhre ihm auch nicht.... Rathes ernster Befehl dass er seines Schuhmachens warte, sich auch enthalte Büchlein oder Reymen hinfür ausgehen zu lassen._ The edict was simply an emphatic reiteration of the old proverb, “Shoemaker, stick to your last,” or _Ne sutor supra crepidam_. The difficulty appears in this case to have been due not to the Lutheran tendencies of Sachs’s rhymes, but to the lack of respect shown to the magistrates in issuing a book without a permit; and to the further breach of authority on the part of a man licensed only as a shoemaker, undertaking also to carry on the avocation of a poet. Sachs’s later history shows, however, that it did not prove practicable to keep the poetic shoemaker from writing and from printing his productions.