at Frankfort, the ancient place of
election. Each party unanimously chose its candidate. Louis, of Bavaria,
receiving five votes, while Frederic received but four, was
unquestionably the legitimate emperor. Most of the imperial cities
acknowledged him. Frankfort sung his triumph, and he was crowned with
all the ancient ceremonials of pomp at Aix-la-Chapelle.

But Frederic and his party were not ready to yield, and all over Germany
there was the mustering of armies. For two years the hostile forces were
marching and countermarching with the usual vicissitudes of war. The
tide of devastation and blood swept now over one State, and now over
another, until at length the two armies met, in all their concentrated
strength, at Muhldorf, near Munich, for a decisive battle. Louis of
Bavaria rode proudly at the head of thirty thousand foot, and fifteen
hundred steel-clad horsemen. Frederic of Austria, the handsomest man of
his age, towering above all his retinue, was ostentatiously arrayed in
the most splendid armor art could furnish, emblazoned with the Austrian
eagle, and his helmet was surmounted by a crown of gold.

As he thus led the ranks of twenty-two thousand footmen, and seven
thousand horse, all eyes followed him, and all hearts throbbed with
confidence of victory. From early dawn, till night darkened the field,
the horrid strife raged. In those days gunpowder was unknown, and the
ringing of battle-axes on helmet and cuirass, the strokes of sabers and
the clash of spears, shouts of onset, and the shrieks of the wounded, as
sixty thousand men fought hand to hand on one small field, rose like the
clamor from battling demons in the infernal world. Hour after hour of
carnage passed, and still no one could tell on whose banners victory
would alight. The gloom of night was darkening over the exhausted
combatants, when the winding of the bugle was heard in the rear of the
Austrians, and a band of four hundred Bavarian horsemen came plunging
down an eminence into the disordered ranks of Frederic. The hour of
dismay, which decides a battle, had come. A scene of awful carnage
ensued as the routed Austrians, fleeing in every direction, were pursued
and massacred. Frederic himself was struck from his horse, and as he
fell, stunned by the blow, he was captured, disarmed and carried to the
presence of his rival Louis.

The spirit of Frederic was crushed by the awful, the irretrievable
defeat, and he appeared before his conqueror sp