152 THE SWISS REFORMATION.
evangelical missions to the Emperor Maximilian at Vienna, to the kings of Bohemia, and Poland. On his first journey to Poland he made the personal acquaintance of Albert, Duke of Prussia, who esteemed him highly and supplied him with funds. He entered into correspondence with Queen Elizabeth, in the vain ho]De of an invitation to England^ He desired to be sent as delegate to the religious conference at Poissy in France, 1561, but was again disappointed. He paid four visits to the Grisons (November, 1561; March, 1562; May, 1563 ; and April, 1564), to counteract the intrigues of the Spanish and papal party, and to promote the harmony of the Swiss Church with that of Wiirtemberg. On his second visit he went as far as the Valtellina. He received an informal invitation to attend the Council of Trent in 1561 from Delfino, the papal nuncio, in the hope that he might be induced to recant ; he was willing to go at the risk of meeting the fate of Hus at Constance, but on condition of a safe conduct, which was declined.^ At last he wished to unite with the Bohemian Brethren, whom he admired for their strict discipline combined with pure doctrine ; he translated and published their Confession of Faith. He was in constant need of money, and his many begging letters to the Dukes of Wiirtemberg and of Prussia make a painful impression ; but we must take into account the printing expenses of his many books, his frequent journeys, and the support of three nephews and a niece. In his fifty-ninth year he conceived the plan of contracting a marriage, and asked the Duke to double his allowance of two hundred guilders, but the request was declined and the marriage given up.^
He died Oct. 4, 1565, at Tiibingen, and was buried there. Dr. Andreae, the chief author of the Lutheran Formula of Concord, preached the funeral sermon, which the learned
1 See his letters to Duke Albert of Prussia, and the report of Pallavicini, XV. 10; and Sixt, 485 sqq., 490 sqq.
2 Sixt, 510 sqq.
§ 38. THE . REFORMATION IN THE ITALIAN VALLEYS. 153
Crusius took down in Greek. Duke Christopher erected a monument to his memory with a eulogistic inscription.^
The very numerous Latin and ItaUan books and fugitive tracts of Vergerio are chiefly polemical against the Roman hierarchy of which he had so long been a conspicuous member.2 He exposed, with the intemperate zeal of a proselyte, the chronique scandaleuse of the papacy, including the mythical woman-pope, Johanna (John VIII.), who was then generally believed to have really existed.^ He agreed with Luther that the papacy was an invention of the Devil ; that the pope was the very Antichrist seated in the temple of God as predicted by Daniel (11 : 36) and Paul (2 Thess. 2: 3 sq.), and the beast of the Apocalypse ; and that he would soon be destroyed by a divine judgment. He attacked all the contemporar}^ popes, except Adrian VI., to whom he gives credit for honesty and earnestness. He is especially severe on '•' Saul IV." (Paul IV.), who as Cardinal Caraffa had made some wise and bold utterances on the corruption of the clergy, but since his elevation to the "apostate chair, which corrupts every one who ascends it," had become the leader of the Counter-Reformation with its measures of violence and • blood. Such monsters, he says, are the popes. One contradicts the other, and yet they are all infallible, and demand absolute submission. Rather die a thousand times than have any communion with popery and fall away from Christ, the
1 The epitaphium, in eighteen hexameters, plays ingeniously on his name, — Peter, who denied the Lord, and, after his con^rsion, fed his sheep ; Paul, who first persecuted and then built up the Clmrch ; and Vergerius, " vergens ad orcum and vergens ad astra poli." The monument in the Georgenkirche was destroyed by the Jesuits in 1636 and restored 1672, but has disappeared since, according to Schott (Herzog'^, XVI. 357), whose statement (againt Sixt, 527) is confirmed by Dr. Weizsacker (in a private letter of Jan. 5, 1891).
2 Many of them appeared anonymously or under such false names as Athanasius, Fra Giovanni, Lambertus de Nigromonte, Valerius Philarchus, etc.
3 This mediaeval fiction was probably a Roman satire on the monstrous regiment of bad women who controlled the papacy in the tenth century. It was first disproved by David Blondel. See vol. IV. 265 sq.