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Updated: June 6, 2025
The Emperor had now lost the greater part of Bohemia, and the Saxons were advancing against Austria, while the Swedish monarch was rapidly moving to the same point through Franconia, Swabia, and Bavaria. A long war had exhausted the strength of the Austrian monarchy, wasted the country, and diminished its armies.
Their route lay through the vast cornfields at the base of the hills whose highest summit was crowned by the great castle of Hapsburg. They had gone some distance, when John of Swabia suddenly rushed upon the emperor, and buried his lance in his neck, exclaiming, "Such is the reward of injustice!"
It has become of late the fashion among certain French writers and their imitators to sneer at the Prussians as semi-Slaves, to call them Borussians, and contrast them with the so-called Germans proper of Bavaria, Swabia and the Rhine; whereas the fact of ethnography is that the Prussians are an amalgamation of the best that is, the hardiest and most enterprising elements of all the German districts.
When the German branch of the Carlovingian dynasty became extinct the five German nations Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Lorraine resolved to make the German kingship elective. For some generations the Crown was bestowed on the Saxon Ottos.
The campaign had, a month anterior to this event, been opened by the French, who had attacked the Austrians in their still scattered positions. Disunion prevailed as usual in the Austrian military council. The Archduke Charles proposed the invasion of France from the side of Swabia.
The death of Maximilian and the election of Charles V. were a year old now. But none knew better than the Basel printers how much the League of Swabia and the Swiss Confederation had weighed in the close contest of claims between those three strangely youthful competitors for the Emperor's crown; Charles, but nineteen; Francis I., one-and-twenty; and Henry VIII., not twenty-five.
Similarly in Swabia, lads and lasses, hand in hand, leap over the midsummer bonfire, praying that the hemp may grow three ells high, and they set fire to wheels of straw and send them rolling down the hill. Sometimes, as the people sprang over the midsummer bonfire they cried out, "Flax, flax! may the flax this year grow seven ells high!"
He took care, indeed, so closely to fetter the latter, as to prevent the Italian army from acquiring any great reputation in Alsace and Swabia; but this bold step of the court awakened him from his security, and warned him of the approach of danger.
Swabia was in luck on that day, for the two youths acquitted themselves honourably, each fighting fifteen rounds without being touched, and each inflicting a couple of very small scratches upon their enemies. 'A white day for the Swabians, said Greif, when he at last sat down to a sausage and a glass of beer for breakfast.
The latter had taken the route across the Danube into Swabia, where Gustavus Horn came so close upon them, that the two armies were only separated from each other by half a German mile.
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