Page:Bohemia's claim for freedom.djvu/20

 Says Count Lützoff: "These princesses often brought in their train German chaplains and other dependants, and the Bohemian nobles also acquired the German language, and to a certain extent it became the language of the Bohemian Court, the German princesses naturally teaching their native tongue to their children from their infancy."

The height of this influence was reached in 1256, when the Czech king, Przemysl II, took the German name of Ottokar, and when he married the Austrian Duchess Margarite.

This was the first attempt to combine the Crowns of Austria and Bohemia, but then, as now, this attempt was doomed to failure from the absence of any national basis for the combination. But the failure has not been without a good influence, for it turned the Czech mind definitely towards the traditions of the great national Princes Svatopluk, Boleslav, and Bretislaw, and made them realise the danger of any attempt at combination with the German nation, and showed them at the same time that their salvation lay in the development of their own national characteristics and the preservation of the Slavonic spirit.

This national awakening of Bohemia, which was increasingly manifest in subsequent years, showed that the Czechs as a nation had adopted the wisest course, and it culminated in 1310, when King John was induced to grant a great number of popular privileges, very much like Magna Charta, thus resigning all right to foster German influence in his country. King John will be re- 16