not impelled by lack of reverence, but by a prudent desire to prevent their falling into the hands of the Hussites. Both sides perpetrated cruelties happily unknown save in the ferocity of religious wars. During the siege of Prague all Bohemians captured were burned as heretics whether they used the cup or not; and on July 19 the besieged demanded of the magistrates sixteen German prisoners, whom they took outside of the walls and burned in hogs-heads in full sight of the invading army. We can estimate the mercilessness of the strife when it was reckoned among the good deeds of George, Bishop of Passau, who accompanied Albert of Austria, that by his intercession he saved the lives of many Bohemian captives.[1]
It is not our province to follow in detail this bloody struggle, in which for ten years the Hussites successfully defied all the forces that Martin and Sigismund could raise against them. When the crusaders came they presented a united front, but within the line of common defence they were torn with dissensions, bitter in proportion to their exaltation of religious feeling. The right of private judgment when once established, by admitting the doctrines of Wickliff and Huss, was not easily restrained, nor could it be expected that those who were persecuted would learn from persecution the lesson of tolerance. In the wild tumult, intellectual, moral, and social, which convulsed Bohemia, no doctrines were too extravagant to lack believers.
In 1418 it is related that forty Pikardi with their wives and children came to Prague, where they were hospitably received and cared for by Queen Sophia and other persons of rank. They had no priest, but one of their number used to read to them out of certain little books, and they took communion in one element. They vanish from view without leaving a trace of their influence, and were doubtless Beghards driven from their homes and seeking a refuge beyond the reach of orthodoxy. Yet their name remained, and was long used in Bohemia as a term of the bitterest contempt for those who denied transubstantiation. Subse quently, however, there was a more portentous demonstration of
- ↑ Laur. Byzyn. Diar. Bell. Hussit. (Ludewig VI. 161-3, 167-70, 181).—Andreæ Ratispon. Chron. (Eccard. Corp. Hist. I. 2147)—Schrödl, Passavia Sacra, p. 289.—Naucleri Chron. p. 933 (Ed. 1544).—Hist. Persecut. Eccles. Bohem. pp. 43-44.
