Thus spoke Luther, with all his accustomed frankness, fervency, power, and bluntness, equally indifferent to the favour of the people or of their rulers. But what fruit, indeed, could be looked for from his words, uttered evidently with violent inward emotion, when popular passion was so excited? Was it not rather to be feared that the peasants would greedily fasten on the first portion of his pamphlet, which was directed against the nobles, and then shut their ears all the more closely against the second, which concerned their own misconduct? The pamphlet could hardly have been written, and much less published, before new rumours and forebodings crowded upon Luther, such as made him think its contents and language no longer applicable to the emergency, but that now it was his duty to sound aloud the call to battle against the enemies of peace and order. 'In my former tract,' he said, 'I did not venture to condemn the peasants, because they offered themselves to reason and better instruction. But before I could look about me, forth they rush, and fight and plunder and rage like mad dogs.... The worst is at Mühlhausen, where the arch-devil himself presides.' In South Germany, on that very Easter Sunday when Luther set out for Eisleben, the scene of horror was enacted at Weinsberg, where the peasants, amid the sound of pipes and merriment, drove the unhappy Count of Helfenstein upon their spears, before the eyes of his wife and child. Luther's ignorance of this and similar atrocities, at the time when he was writing his pamphlet at Eisleben, is easily intelligible from the slow means of communication then existing. Soon the news came, however, of bands of rioters in Thuringia, busy with the work of pillage, incendiarism, and massacre, and of a rising of the peasantry in the immediate neighbourhood. Towards the end of April they achieved a crowning triumph by their victorious entry into Erfurt, where the preacher, Eberlin of Günzburg, with true loyalty and courage, but all in vain, had striven, with words of exhortation and warning, to pacify the armed multitude encamped outside the town, and their sympathisers and associates inside.