Erasmus
Freiburg (1529 – 1535)

Following sudden, violent, iconoclastic rioting in early 1529 led by Œcolampadius his former assistant, in which elected Catholic councilmen were deposed, the city of Basel definitely adopted the Reformation—finally banning the Catholic Mass on April 1, 1529.

Erasmus, in company with other Basel Catholic priests including Bishop Augustinus Marius, left Basel on the 13 April 1529 and departed by ship to the Catholic university town of Freiburg im Breisgau to be under the protection of his former student, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. Erasmus wrote somewhat dramatically to Thomas More of his frail condition at the time: "I preferred to risk my life rather than appear to approve a programme like theirs. There was some hope of a return to moderation."

In Spring early 1530 Erasmus was bedridden for three months with an intensely painful infection, likely carbunculosis, that, unusually for him, left him too ill to work. He declined to attend the Diet of Augsburg to which both the Bishop of Augsburg and the Papal legate Campeggio had invited him, and he expressed doubt on non-theological grounds, to Campeggio and Melanchthon, that reconciliation was then possible: he wrote to Campeggio "I can discern no way out of this enormous tragedy unless God suddenly appears like a deus ex machina and changes the hearts of men" and later "What upsets me is not so much their teaching, especially Luther’s, as the fact that, under the pre-text of the gospel, I see a class of men emerging whom I find repugnant from every point of view."

He stayed for two years on the top floor of the Whale House, then following another rent dispute bought and refurbished a house of his own, where he took in scholar/assistants as table-boarders such as Cornelius Grapheus' friend Damião de Góis, some of them fleeing persecution.

Despite increasing frailty Erasmus continued to work productively, notably on a new magnum opus, his manual on preaching Ecclesiastes, and his small book on preparing for death. His boarder for five months, the Portuguese scholar/diplomat Damião de Góis, worked on his lobbying on the plight of the Sámi in Sweden and the Ethiopian church, and stimulated Erasmus' increasing awareness of foreign missions.

There are no extant letters between More and Erasmus from the start of More's period as Chancellor until his resignation (1529–1533), almost to the day. Erasmus wrote several important non-political works under the surprising patronage of Thomas Bolyn: his Ennaratio triplex in Psalmum XXII or Triple Commentary on Psalm 23 (1529); his catechism to counter Luther Explanatio Symboli or A Playne and Godly Exposition or Declaration of the Commune Crede (1533) which sold out in three hours at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and Praeparatio ad mortem or Preparation for Death (1534) which would be one of Erasmus' most popular and most hijacked works.
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