It is perfectly true, that, occasionally, Luther has words of praise and recognition for the good qualities of the “fine, pious nobles,” if only on account of those who were inclined to accept his teaching. But far more often he trounces them unmercifully because they either failed to respond or were set on thwarting him. The language in which he writes of them sometimes becomes unspeakably coarse. “They are called nobles and ‘von so-and-so.’ But merd also comes ‘von’ the nobles and might just as well boast of coming from their noble belly, though it stinks and is of no earthly use. Hence this too has a claim to nobility.” Then follows his favourite saying: “We Germans are Germans and Germans we shall remain, i.e. swine and senseless brutes.”[202] The rulers and the great ones of the Empire were the first to win his favour. The writing “An den Adel,” the first of his so-called “reformation writings,” he addresses to the nobles in the hope of thus attaining his aims by storm. When, however, he was disappointed, and they refused to meet him half-way, he abused the princes and all the secular authorities in Germany and wrote: “God Almighty has made our princes mad”; “such men were formerly rated as knaves, now we are obliged to call them obedient, Christian princes.” To him they were “fools,” simply because they were against him and thus belonged to the multitude who “blasphemed” the Divine Majesty.[203] After the defeat of the peasants in 1525 he supported those princes favourable to his teaching at the expense of the peasants, so that the latter were loud in their complaints of him. In this connection, looking back at the overthrow of the Peasant Revolt, he wrote to those in power: “Who opposed the peasants more vigorously by word and writing than I? … and, if it comes to boasting, I do not know who else was the first to vanquish the peasants, or to do so most effectually. But now those who did the least claim all the honour and glory of it.”[204] After the Peasant War he was so filled with hatred of the peasant class and so conscious of their dislike for himself personally, as to be hardly able to speak of them without blame and reproach. “The peasants do not deserve,” he says, “the harvests and fruits that the earth brings forth and provides.”