At the same time, however, Luther had now won firm ground for the Evangelical cause upon a fixed and extensive territory. Within these limits it was possible to construct a new Church system, upon stable foundations and with a new constitution. John, the new Elector of Saxony, did not enjoy, it is true, the same high consideration throughout the Empire as his brother Frederick, Luther's great protector, and he was also his inferior as a statesman. But with Luther himself both he and his son John Frederick had already maintained a friendly personal intercourse, such as his predecessor had carefully avoided. Nor did his disposition lead him, like Frederick, to pay any such regard to the possible preservation of Church unity in the German Empire and Western Christendom; on the contrary, he soon showed his readiness to undertake independently, as sovereign of his country, the establishment of a new Evangelical Church. Prussia had just preceded him in a reform embracing the whole country, under the former Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, their present Duke. The Elector now found a further ally for the work in the Landgrave Philip of Hesse, the most active and politically the most important of all. As a young man of only twenty years of age, in the beginning of 1525, he had rendered valuable service by his energy, resolution, and warlike ability, in the defeat of Sickingen, and again when opposed to the seditious peasants. Already before the Peasants' War commenced, he had acquired, mainly through Melancthon, whom he had met when travelling, a knowledge and love of the evangelical doctrines. His father-in-law, Duke George of Saxony, had vainly endeavoured, after their common victory over the insurgents, to alienate him from the cause of the hateful Luther, who he said was the author of so much mischief. But the menaces hurled against that cause by the Catholic States of the Empire served only to attach him more closely and loyally to John and John Frederick, and thence resulted in the following spring the League of Torgau, which was joined also by the princes of Brunswick-Lüneburg, Anhalt, and Mecklenburg, and the town of Magdeburg. The co-operation of the territorial princes made it possible to procure for the Reformation and its Church system a firm position in the German Empire against the Emperor and the hostile Catholic States. And, at the same time, it offered means for establishing on the ground newly occupied by the Reformation itself, firm and generally recognised regulations of Church polity, and defending them from being disturbed by the proceedings of fanatics. [Illustration: Fig. 35.--PHILIP OF HESSE. (From a woodcut of Brosamer.)]