letter. I have put with them a letter to Hartmami Ibach/ which you will easily send him ; I have no messenger. Justus Kern " has gone to AUstedt with a letter of commendation from me and is not coming back as yet ; what he is doing or suffer- ing, I do not know.
Friends write me from Basle that Carlstadt's printers have been put in prison and it wanted little but his books would have been burned; also that he has been there himself » but secretly. Oecolampadius and Pellican write that they agree with his opinions, and Anemond de Coct* is so obstinate that he threatens to write against me unless I give up my opinion. Behold Satan's portents ! But so far as I can gather they are none of them convinced by Carlstadt's proofs, but rather by their own way of thinking. They previously held this opinion about the matter in question, but now they venture to speak it out more freely since they have found the author and a leader of this doctrine. Christ will preserve me and all that are His. I am not convinced by his proofs, but rather strengthened in my own way of thinking; nor have I remained in that error, though I have been grievously tempted.* It is certain that our view is the true one, no matter whether I or they or everybody else shall desert it. Farewell, and pray for me. Martin Luther.
656. PETER ALBINIANUS TRETIUS TO LUTHER.
UNPUBLISHED. Text in Appendix I. Venice, January 13, 1525.
Pietro Albiniani (or Albignani) Trezzio was a jurist of some repute. He had spent much of his early life at Trino, where he studied Canon Law under Alexander de Nevo. Later he lived at Venice. He must have been an old man at this time, as his Rrst work was published in 1475, and he had a son, John Baptista Tretius, at this time a dean at
^ An evangelical preacher who had a somewhat checkered career. He was at this time chaplain of the Saxon knight John von Minkwits at Sonnenwalde.
' Kern, a former monk, had married in Nuremberg and come from there to Wittenberg (C/. L. to Spalatin, Enders v, 86). He afterwards became Mtlnzer's successor in Allstedt. His matrimonial entanglements were a source of consider- able trouble at the time of the Visitation of 1533. Cf, Enders, v, 87, n. i.
- Anemond de Coct (died 1525), "the French Hutten" (Baum, Bucer, 267), a
knight of Dauphin^, driven out of his own land because of his evangelical opin- ions, lived a wandering life, chiefly in Switzerland. In 1523 he spent some time in Wittenberg. He was in turn a Lutheran, a Zwinglian, an Anabaptist and again a Zwinglian.
- Cf. supra no. 652.
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