Epistola Ioannis Monlucii, episcopi Valentini regis Gallorum legati ad Poloni[a]e Ordines de Illustrissimo Andium duce in Regnum Polonicum allegendo

the year 72, and which he took care to have printed at Geneva and Basel, convicted by the truth itself, could not dissemble that the King, unarmed and having no one with him who had any weapons other than a sword, could scarcely escape their hands. On the following day, however, they shut him inside the city and, persisting in a most stubborn siege, brought him to the greatest lack of supplies, until, with reinforcements called up and gathered from all sides, they were routed and put to flight in a fierce battle and forced to lift the siege. But they will say, why was it that the King called up the Swiss? It is a custom of the French Kings, and one observed for a very long time, when an army is being prepared in Belgium, as was happening then (for at that time the Duke of Alba had arrived with great forces), that the Kings also call up several cohorts of Swiss to join them, lest they be caught unprepared for any turn of fortune. If the King had been thinking about a war against the Evangelicals, he would have had with him that day the heavy cavalry called up from provinces separated by a long distance. But he was so unprepared for waging war that he could scarcely gather a proper army in two whole months. The Evangelicals, however, or at least their leaders, had warned all the reformed churches most secretly by letters and messengers to take up arms all on the day of Saint Michael,