It will be a very bad business." (_Franciscus Sickingen Palatino bellum indixit, res pessima futura est._) His colleague, Melanchthon, a few days later, hastened to deprecate the insinuation that Luther had had any part or lot in initiating the revolt.

"Franz von Sickingen," he wrote, "by his great ill-will injures the cause of Luther; and notwithstanding that he be entirely dissevered from him, nevertheless whenever he undertaketh war he wisheth to seem to act for the public benefit, and not for his own.
He doth even now pursue a most infamous course of plunder on the Rhine." In another letter he says: "I know how this tumult grieveth him (Luther),"[22] and this respecting the man who had shortly before written of the princes that their tyranny and haughtiness were no longer to be borne, alleging that God would not longer endure it, and that the common man even was becoming intelligent enough to deal with them by force if they did not mend their manners.

A more telling example of the "don't-put-him-in-the-horse-pond" attitude could scarcely be desired.

That it was characteristic of the "great reformer" will be seen later on when we find him pursuing a similar policy anent the revolt of the peasants.
After the fall of the Landstuhl all Sickingen's castles and most of those of his immediate allies and friends were of course taken, and the greater part of them destroyed.

The knighthood was now to all intents and purposes politically helpless and economically at the door of bankruptcy, owing to the suddenly changed conditions of which we have spoken in the Introduction and elsewhere as supervening since the beginning of the century: the unparalleled rise in prices, concurrently with the growing extravagance, the decline of agriculture in many places, and the increasing burdens put upon the knights by their feudal superiors, and last, but not least, the increasing obstacles in the way of the successful pursuit of the profession of highway robbery.