When the Augsburg gunner, Samuel Zimmermann the elder, wrote the experiences of his life up to 1591, in a folio volume, under the title of '_Charms against all Stabs, Strokes, and Shots, full of great secrets_,' he mentions only the defensive incantations, which he did not consider as the works of Belial; but it is apparent from his manuscript that many devilish arts were known to him, which he intended to conceal. Another well-known Zimmermann, who was hardened, received a fearful blow from a dagger; there was no wound to be seen, but he died shortly after from the internal effect of the blow. In 1558 there was an invulnerable soldier in the regiment of Count Lichtenstein, who, after every skirmish, shook the enemy's balls off his dress and his bare body; he often showed them, and the holes burnt through his clothes; he was at last slain by some foreign peasants. When the Italians and Spaniards entered the Netherlands in 1568, they carried along with them, with little success, whole packets and books full of magic formulas of conjurations and charms. The French found talismans and magic cards fastened round the necks of the prisoners and the dead, of the Brandenburg troops who had been led by Burgrave Fabian von Dohna, in 1587, as auxiliaries to the Huguenots. When the Jesuit George Scheerer preached at the Court Chapel at Vienna in 1594, before the Archduke Matthias and his Generals, he found it necessary to exhort them earnestly against the use of superstitious charms for cuts, stabs, shots, and burns. It is therefore unjust in later writers to state, that the art of rendering invulnerable was introduced at Passau by a travelling scholar in the seventeenth century, as Grimmelshausen informs us, or as others will have it, that it was brought into the German army by Kaspar Reithardt von Hersbruck, the executioner; for when Archduke Leopold, the Bishop of Passau, raised the reckless and ill-disciplined bands which spread terror through Alsace and Bohemia by their barbarities, his soldiers only adopted the old traditions which were rooted in German heathenism, and had lingered on through the whole of the middle ages; nay, even the name, "_Passau art_," which has been customary since then, may rest on a misunderstanding of the people, for in the sixteenth century all who bore charms about them to render them invulnerable were called by the learned soldier, "_Pessulanten_," or "_Charakteristiker_," and whoever understood the art of dissolving a charm was a "_Solvent_." It is possible that the first of these popular designations was changed into "_Passauer_." Even in the first year of the Thirty years' war, the art of rendering invulnerable was eagerly discussed. A good account of it can be found in 'The true narrative of the siege and capture by storm of the city of Pilsen in Bohemia, 1619.' The passage according to our dialect is as follows: