In stark contrast to Anna, Heinrich Diek had a particularly lousy 1540. These were days when the religious politics of the Protestant reformation were as incendiary as the weather, and the Continent descended into paranoid witch hunts over why dozens of tinder-dry, narrow-laned, thatched German and Austrian towns were going up in smoke. For some Lutheran Germans, the culprits had to be the Catholics. For Austrians, the arsonist bogeymen could only be agents of Süleyman the Magnificent’s rampant Ottomans, who had been at the gates of Vienna in 1529 and who were now bloodying the noses of the Venetians.
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