The prodigious stupid bigotry of the people also was irksome to me; I
thought there was something in it very sordid. The entire empire the
priests have over both the souls and bodies of the people, gave me a
specimen of that meanness of spirit, which is nowhere else to be seen
but in Italy, especially in the city of Rome.
At Venice I perceived it quite different, the civil authority having
a visible superiority over the ecclesiastic, and the Church being more
subject there to the State than in any other part of Italy.
For these reasons I took no pleasure in filling my memoirs of Italy
with remarks of places or things. All the antiquities and valuable
remains of the Roman nation are done better than I can pretend to by
such people who made it more their business; as for me, I went to see,
and not to write, and as little thought then of these Memoirs as I ill
furnished myself to write them.
I left Italy in April, and taking the tour of Bavaria, though very
much out of the way, I passed through Munich, Passau, Lintz, and at
last to Vienna.
I came to Vienna the 10th of April 1631, intending to have gone from
thence down the Danube into Hungary, and by means of a pass, which I
had obtained from the English ambassador at Constantinople, I designed
to have seen all the great towns on the Danube, which were then in the
hands of the Turks, and which I had read much of in the history of
the war between the Turks and the Germans; but I was diverted from my
design by the following occasion.
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