what an extent
pestilence then raged in the cities is scarcely credible; it frequently
carried off more than half the inhabitants. In 1626 and the following
years, it depopulated wide districts; from 1631 to 1634 it returned
again, and still worse in 1636.

At all events it gave to each town for years plenty of space, and
proportionate peace; and the places--not very numerous--which were only
once destroyed in the course of the war, were able to recover
themselves. But the most fearful cases of all, were those where the
same calamities were two, three, and four times repeated. Leipzig was
besieged five times, and Magdeburg six, and most of the smaller towns
were more frequently filled with foreign soldiers; thus both large and
small towns were equally ruined.

But this was not all; over wide territories raged a plague of quite
another kind,--religious persecution,--which was practised by the
Imperial party wherever it established itself. The army was followed
everywhere by crowds of proselytizers, Jesuits, and mendicant monks on
foot. These performed their office by the help of the soldiers.
Wherever the Roman Catholics had a footing, the leaders of the
Protestant party, and above all the shepherds of souls, were swept
away, more especially in the provinces which were the Emperor's own
domains. Much had been done there before the war, but still in the
beginning of the war in upper Austria, Moravia, Bohemia, and Silesia,
the active intelligence of the country and the greater part of the
community were evangelical. Their general character was improved.
Whoever, after imprisonment and torture, would not give up his faith
was obliged to abandon the country, and many, many thousands did so.
The citizens and country people were driven in troops by the soldiers
to confession. It was considered a favour when the fugitives were
allowed a short insufficient delay for the sale of their movable goods.

The fate of a small town in one of these provinces, the only one which
was restored at a later period to the spiritual life of Germany, is
here given, not on account of the monotony of misery, but because other
characteristic points of the old burgher life are displayed.

Where the Riesengebirge descend into the Silesian plain, in a fruitful
valley on the shores of the Bober, lies the old town of Loewenberg, one
of the first places in Silesia which was brought under the regulations
of the German law; it had already in the middle