In 1523, the first application for censorship in the city of Basel was made by Erasmus in connection with the reprinting of certain French writings which he claimed to be libels of himself. The censorship of the city was under the direction of the magistrates. The magistrates forbade the printing of books in any other languages than Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and German. In 1598 the censors of the city required that there be placed in their hands catalogues of books that were forthcoming in order that they might designate those calling for special attention. [Sidenote: Zürich] Between the years 1520 and 1580, the presses of Zürich were busied with the production of the works of the Calvinist reformers. Froschauer, who was one of the first of the Zürich printers, was a close friend of Zwingli, whose special tenets he had adopted, and he placed at the disposal of the Zwinglians the machinery of his printing concern for the production and distribution of the Zwinglian treatises and tracts. Zürich presents also an example of early and strenuous Protestant censorship. Zwingli brought about a prohibition on the part of the civil authorities of Zürich for the sale within the city of the Lutheran publications. [Sidenote: Augsburg] The city of Augsburg occupied a similar place among the centres of Catholic book-production to that held by Basel and Zürich for the works of the Protestants. The presses of the great publisher Koberger and his associates were devoted during the last third of the 15th and the first half of the 16th century to the production of editions of the works of the more scholarly of the Catholic theologians. The books were addressed to scholars and were comparatively high in price. The work of the German reformers had as one result the checking of the activities of the Augsburg publishers. In 1520, the civil authorities of Augsburg, at the instance of the local ecclesiastics, issued prohibitions for the sale in the city of the works of Luther and of Zwingli. It was the multiplicity of prohibitory authorities in the book centres of Germany that actually worked against the influence of the prohibitory system. There was also in these German cities a lack of any effective censorship machinery such as existed in Spain either for the examination of texts in advance of printing, or for the seizure of books and the punishment of printers after publication. There were, during the century after the Reformation, instances (aggregating a considerable number) of writers who on the ground of their heretical utterances had been punished in one way or another and some of whom had even suffered death, but there was no general or effective repression of literary production and distribution throughout Germany, either on the part of the Catholic censors working against Protestant writings or under the influence of the Protestant divines utilising for the prohibition of Catholic books the civil authority. [Sidenote: Nuremberg]