September they commenced their retreat through Carinthia and Croatia, which they ravaged on their way.
The precipitate withdrawal of the Turks was followed by an equally sudden abandonment of the campaign by Charles V. After all his brave words it was a shock to his friends and admirers when he made no effort to seize the fruits of victory and recover Hungary for his brother; for a vigorous prosecution of the war in 1532 might have restored to Christendom lands which remained under Turkish rule for nearly two centuries longer. There are explanations enough for his course; the German levies refused to pass the imperial frontiers, regarding self-defence as the limit of their duty; the Spaniards and Italians confined their efforts mainly to pillaging German villages; and Cranmer, who accompanied Charles' Court, describes how they spread greater desolation than the Turks themselves and how the peasants in revenge fell upon and slew the Emperor's troops whenever opportunity offered; so that delay in disbanding his army might have fanned the enmity between Charles' German and Spanish subjects into war. But other reasons accounted for the Emperor's departure from Germany, which was once more sacrificed to the exigencies of Charles' cosmopolitan interests. The Pope, irritated alike by the Emperor's bestowal of Modena and Reggio on the Duke of Ferrara, and by his persistence in demanding a General Council, was proposing to marry his niece Catharine de' Medici to Henry, Duke of Orleans; and a union between Clement and Francis I would again have threatened Charles' position in Italy. He regarded two objects as then of transcendent importance, the reconciliation of the Pope and the convocation of a General Council. They were quite incompatible, yet to them Charles sacrificed the chance of regaining Hungary.
The result can only be described as a comprehensive failure. The Emperor's interviews with Clement in February, 1533, did not prevent the Pope's alliance with France, nor his sanction of Cranmer's appointment to the see of Canterbury, which enabled Henry VIII to complete his divorce from Catharine of Aragon. Charles' two years' stay in Germany had effected little; Ferdinand, indeed, was King of the Romans but his influence was less than before, while the power of the Protestants had been greatly increased. The Emperor had crossed the Alps in the spring of 1530 with a record of'almost unbroken success; he recrossed them in the autumn of 1532 having added a list of failures; the German labour had proved herculean, but Charles had proved no Hercules. For another decade Germany was left to fight out its own political and religious quarrels with little help or hindrance from its sovereign. His intervention in 1530-2 had brought peace to no one; the Protestants had little security against the attacks of the Reichskammer-gericht; the Catholics were unable to prevent the progress of heresy; and while Charles was journeying farther and farther away from Germany the
