The same may be said of the Reformation, the religious renaissance, which was both a development of and a reaction from its fellow. It could hardly be expected that a revolution which rent Western Christianity asunder should spare the unity of the craft guilds. True, it did not act in the same way: by making the reading of the Bible obligatory it encouraged the education of the people, and in this way it raised the craftsman. It found, and not without reason, its first adherents among workmen,--Saxon miners, carders from the town of Meaux; it turned towards democracy, towards theories of equality. Those who carried it to extremes, like the Anabaptists of Münster, pictured a government in which all the guilds, great and small, should be made equal; their ideal was to turn all organized crafts, superior and inferior, into a sort of public service; to establish a kind of Biblical communism. Their leader and prophet was John of Leyden, an aged working tailor.[114] If this was only a passing birth-throe of Protestantism at least the guilds took a large share in the great movements which shook Holland and England. It really seems that the Reformation brought a renewal of vigour and activity to those states in which it triumphed. But in many countries the fight between the two faiths was so fierce that many cities were devastated and ruined by it. In Germany, after the Thirty Years' War, Magdeburg, Wurtzburg, Heidelberg, Spire, and Mannheim were simply heaps of ruins, almost deserted. The Teutonic Hanse which had been so powerful was a wreck; the Protestant and Catholic towns had broken the union in which their strength lay. In a hundred places, since it was admitted that the religion of the prince was law for his subjects (_cujus regio, hujus religio_) whole bodies of people and industries moved away; workmen and masters went in search of refuge among their co-religionists. The guild system was profoundly disturbed by this; the new-comers, when they were too numerous, were not always very warmly welcomed by their brothers in God, and even when they were received, they practically forced their way into a closed system which they strained to breaking.