Author Description

Writing at the start of the new year, 1632, Samuel Michael (c. 1597-1632), organist at Leipzig's St. Nicholas Church, looked back over the harrowing events of the previous year. At the start of 1631, he would have witnessed princes and dignitaries from the Holy Roman Empire descending on Leipzig for pressing negotiations meant to prolong Saxony's prosperous neutrality since the outbreak of war; during that summer, he then would have read with dismay of alliances crumbling and Saxony preparing for war; then in August 1631 he finally would have come face to face with the second horseman of the apocalypse as the armies of the Catholic League and Emperor Ferdinand II descended on Saxony; he might have felt the rumble of wagons as the well-todo fled the city in fear, heard the plodding of infantry, the roar of siege guns raining down cannonballs onto the roofs of the besieged town, the cries of women and children huddled for safety in Michael's own church, or the blasts.