Hans, Margrave of Brandenburg-Küstrin, was one who had war against the Catholic clergy much at heart. In a letter to the Elector Maurice he spoke of the clergy as “priests of Baal and children of the devil.” It was a proof of his Evangelical zeal, that, on July 15, 1551, he ordered the church of St. Mary at Görlitz to be pillaged and destroyed by Johann von Minckwitz. All the altars, images and carvings were hacked to pieces, all the costly treasures stolen. Minckwitz had great difficulty in rescuing the treasures from the hands of a drunken mob of peasants who were helping in the work, and conveying them safely to the Margrave at Küstrin.[786] In the spring of 1552, when Maurice of Saxony levied a heavy fine on the town of Nuremberg for having revolted against the Emperor, the magistrates sought to indemnify themselves by taking nearly 900 lbs. weight of gold and silver treasures out of the churches of Our Lady, St. Lawrence and St. Sebaldus and ordering them to be melted down or sold.[787] In June and July, 1552, Margrave Albert of Brandenburg-Kulmbach laid waste the country around Mayence with fire and sword to such an extent, that the bishop of Würzburg, in order to raise the unheard-of sums demanded, had, as we find it stated in a letter of Zasius to King Ferdinand dated July 10, to lump together “all the gold and silver plate in the churches, the jewels, reliquaries, monstrances, statues and vessels of the sanctuary” and have them minted into thalers. “At Neumünster one reliquary was melted down which alone was worth 1000 florins.”[788] The citizens of Würzburg were obliged to give up all their household plate and the cathedral itself the silver statue of St. Kilian, patron of the diocese.[789] When the commanders and the troops of the Elector Maurice withdrew from the Tyrol after the frustration of their undertaking owing to the flight of the Emperor to Carinthia, all the sacred objects of value in the Cistercian monastery of Stams in the valley of the upper Inn were either broken to pieces or carried off. The soldiers broke open the vault, where the earthly remains of the ruling Princes had rested for centuries, dragged the corpses out of their coffins and stripped them of their valuables.[790] The inventory of the treasures of art made of precious metal and other substances which perished at Stams must be classed with numerous other sad records of a similar nature dating from that time.[791]