unknown in Fulneck.[1] His married life now began, and in the society of his wife, a Hungarian lady, Comenius spent what were probably his happiest years.
The year in which he entered upon his pastorate at Fulneck is memorable for the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, and from this time onwards the position of the non-Catholic bodies, exposed as they were to the relentless persecution of Pope Paul V. and the Jesuits, was most precarious. Their hopes were finally overthrown by the battle of the White Mountain in November 1620, and by execution of the chief Bohemian Protestants, which followed at Prague in June 1621.
Comenius’ wanderings were now to begin. In 1621 Fulneck was plundered and burned by Spanish troops. On this occasion he lost everything that he possessed, including the greater part of his library and the manuscript of some Didactic works on which he had been engaged, and took refuge, in company with many others of the Brethren, on the estate of Karl von Zerotin. Here he remained for three years, during which time he occupied himself in reading books on education,[2] and wrote besides several religious works in the Czech language. To this period must also be ascribed his metrical translation of the Psalms, a composition of great poetic merit; his Labyrinth of the World, an allegorical description of life, dedicated to Karl von Zerotin; and a map of Moravia that was for a long time the best in existence.[3]
It was doubtless in this literary activity that he sought relief for the sorrow caused him by the death of his wife and his two children,[4] who were carried off in 1622 by an epidemic that was raging through Moravia. He was thus once more left alone in the world.
In 1624, with startling rapidity, if we consider the cir-
