Page:Bohemia An Historical Sketch.djvu/154

 gical controversy) was also unparalleled in the history of the country. The theological disputations between the papal, the Calixtine, and the Taborite ecclesiastics were constantly renewed, and, as was inevitable in a country so thoroughly absorbed in religious controversy, fanatical and grotesque doctrines often came to the surface. We read of preachers who asserted that the millennium had already begun, and of the Adamite enthusiasts, whom Žižka almost immediately suppressed, and whose importance has been most unduly exaggerated by Aenaeas Sylvius and other adherents of the papal cause. It is much to be regretted that—as Palacký, the great Bohemian historian, tells us—contemporary records for these years are scarcer than almost for any other period.

King Sigismund left Prague in a state of the most violent irritation against the Bohemian nation. He attempted to organize the adherents of Rome by appointing certain of the most prominent nobles who belonged to that party leaders or commanders of each district of the country, instructing them to maintain peace and extirpate heresy.

This measure, which, as the greatest part of the land was in arms against the king, was of little practical importance, only tended to increase the animosity of the Bohemians against Sigismund. The Praguers, even before the king had raised the siege of their town, had decreed very severe measures against the priests and Germans who had left the city before the siege. All their property was confiscated for the benefit of the town. The once very strong German element in Prague was for the time completely annihilated. Dissensions had at this moment already broken out between the citizens of Prague and their Taborite allies, whose fanaticism in destroying churches and convents caused great exasperation. Žižka and his followers therefore left Prague and marched to Southern Bohemia, where in a campaign, for which want of space makes any lengthier mention impossible, they defeated several of the papal lords who still maintained the cause of King Sigismund. The Praguers, meanwhile, continued the siege of the Vyšehrad, the occupation of which by King Sigismund's troops was a permanent menace to their town. Sigismund, hearing that the garrison was sorely pressed, marched to its relief with an army of 20,000 men, the greater part of whom were Hungarians. Many of the