Luther, alarmed for the future of his work, abandoned his retreat at Wartburg (March 1522) and returned to Wittenberg, where he had recourse to stern measures to put an end to the confusion. He drove Carlstadt from the city, and even followed him to other places where he tried to find refuge, till at last, after a very disedifying scene between them in a public tavern, he forced him to flee from Saxony. Carlstadt's greatest offence in the eyes of his master was his preaching against the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, though Luther himself admitted that he should have liked to deny the Real Presence if only to annoy the Pope, were it not that the words of Scripture proved too strong. Carlstadt adopted a different interpretation, but Luther was not the man to tolerate individual judgment in the case of one of his own lieutenants. Carlstadt was denounced as a heretic and a blasphemer, for whom no punishment could be sufficiently severe. Munzer, too, was banished, and with the assistance of the Elector, Luther was enabled to overcome all his opponents. Luther owed his success in the opening years of his campaign mainly to his ability in gauging the feelings of the different classes whose support he wished to obtain, as well as to his complete mastery of the German language. In appealing to the monks and nuns, who were longing to escape from the obligations they had contracted, he offered them complete liberty by denouncing their vows as opposed to the freedom of the Gospel and consequently sinful. Many of the monks and nuns abandoned their cloisters and fled to Wittenberg to seek the pleasures denied them hitherto, and to put in practice Luther's teaching on the necessity of marriage. Though he encouraged bishops and priests to marry, and though he forwarded his warmest congratulations to Carlstadt on his betrothal to a fifteen year old maiden (1522), Luther himself hesitated long before taking his final plunge; but at last, against the advice of his best friends, he took as his wife Catherine Bora, one of the escaped nuns who had sought refuge in Wittenberg. His marriage (1525) was a source of amusement to his opponents as it was of dismay to his supporters. Melanchthon complained bitterly of the step his master had taken, but he consoled himself with the thought that the marriage might out an end to his former frivolity, and might allay the suspicions that his conduct had aroused.[23] To the princes, the free cities, and the landless knights he appealed by holding out hopes that they might be enriched by a division of the ecclesiastical estates and of the goods of the monasteries and churches. With the overthrow of the Pope and of the bishops the princes were led to expect that they might themselves become spiritual dictators in their own dominions. To the friends of the Humanist movement and the great body of the professors and students he represented himself as the