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The Thirty Years War — Volume 03 by Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
page 25 of 108 (23%)
a neighbouring ally. He chose the city of Mentz for his winter
quarters, and the settlement of these state affairs, and showed a
greater partiality for this town, than seemed consistent with the
interests of the German princes, or the shortness of his visit to the
Empire. Not content with strongly fortifying it, he erected at the
opposite angle which the Maine forms with the Rhine, a new citadel,
which was named Gustavusburg from its founder, but which is better known
under the title of Pfaffenraub or Pfaffenzwang.--[Priests' plunder;
alluding to the means by which the expense of its erection had been
defrayed.]

While Gustavus Adolphus made himself master of the Rhine, and threatened
the three neighbouring electorates with his victorious arms, his
vigilant enemies in Paris and St. Germain's made use of every artifice
to deprive him of the support of France, and, if possible, to involve
him in a war with that power. By his sudden and equivocal march to the
Rhine, he had surprised his friends, and furnished his enemies with the
means of exciting a distrust of his intentions. After the conquest of
Wurtzburg, and of the greater part of Franconia, the road into Bavaria
and Austria lay open to him through Bamberg and the Upper Palatinate;
and the expectation was as general, as it was natural, that he would not
delay to attack the Emperor and the Duke of Bavaria in the very centre
of their power, and, by the reduction of his two principal enemies,
bring the war immediately to an end. But to the surprise of both
parties, Gustavus left the path which general expectation had thus
marked out for him; and instead of advancing to the right, turned to the
left, to make the less important and more innocent princes of the Rhine
feel his power, while he gave time to his more formidable opponents to
recruit their strength. Nothing but the paramount design of reinstating
the unfortunate Palatine, Frederick V., in the possession of his
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