"In the first place, in raising at your pleasure the toll on the Baltic; for I have been told by honest trustworthy seafaring folk, that you have exacted from people, not only from fifteen to thirty, but up to forty, nay, even to fifty out of a hundred, and have troubled all hearts by this rapacity; and as no improvement has taken place, but commerce has been thereby miserably straitened, and many honest people have been lamentably brought to beggary, the minds of men being thereby much embittered, your best friends began at first to condemn you secretly, and at last through their falling fortunes were made your worst enemies. Would you throw the blame on the toll gatherers? They are your servants. It is a well-known rule of law: what I do by my servant is as though done by myself. You appear to me exactly like him who carried off a pair of shoes secretly and offered them afterwards to the holy Benno. "The states and cities of the Empire, so long as they were in your hands, contributed fully and sufficiently to your maintenance; many, nay too many, to say the least of it, as a proof of their fidelity, have lost soul and body, wealth and life, nay all their privileges, and, in a great measure, religion itself. Ratisbon testifies to this. Augsburg laments over it. All grieve together over it. You have allowed the old regiments to dissolve, have completed no companies, nor paid either new or old, notwithstanding you have demanded, and in fact received large sums of money from many Diets; I say nothing of what you have extorted from your enemies in their own countries. How has this money been spent? In superfluous pomp and luxury which is hateful to every one. We have observed this silently, and made a virtue of necessity. The children of Israel, when they had intercourse with the daughters of their enemies, and afterwards boasted of their victory, and tormented their brethren of Judah with the hardest yoke of bondage, were both times severely punished by God. And shall it fare better with you who have exercised more than Turkish cruelty in many evangelical places? The corn from the monastery of Magdeburg, the Dukedom of Brunswick and other places, has been thrashed out and carried off in heaps from the country, sold at a very high price, and the money spent for your own use, nothing given to the poor soldiers; the country people, harassed to death, are dying of hunger; and many fortresses, from avarice, either not supplied with provisions, or not amply provided with powder and shot, and, in short, general mismanagement. Now we see ourselves everywhere abandoned by fortune, so that at last we discover there is no money in hand, and no people to be got, as those who were available have run away, and the remainder will no longer be restrained by martial law. Dear friends, think you of the saying of Boccalini: 'When the prince leads the life of Lucifer, what wonder that the subjects become devils!'