Page:History of the Thirty Years' War - Gindely - Volume 1.djvu/78

 corporate property, should remain as they were in the year 1609, and (2) that subjects living upon the royal domains might build churches. To these latter, therefore, were granted a right which in the rest of the country only the higher ranks enjoyed.

On the occasion of the negotiations for the Adjustment, the Protestants made the remark that according to the old conception in the country, they reckoned the ecclesiastical with the royal domains. In this position they were right, so far as this: the Kings of Bohemia did claim a kind of manorial right over Church lands, and in financial straits often managed them at pleasure. By a peculiar law, which formed an article in the Bohemian constitution, only the domains of the metropolitan chapter were exempt from this arbitrary treatment The Catholics also deferred to the view that the King might act at pleasure in regard to the ecclesiastical lands, and a few years before these contests the Chancellor, ZdenẽkZdeněk [sic] von Lobkowitz, defended in a decision this royal usage. It would have been better if the Protestants in 1609 had made mention of the ecclesiastical with the royal domains, thus cutting off future occasions of strife. Perhaps they did not do this for fear of meeting from the Catholics with a resistance which they might not overcome, and hoped that they would still practically enforce their claims, since usage confirmed their view of the ecclesiastical as being part of the royal domains.

It was not long before contests over this point broke out. The Protestant citizens of Braunau—a city belonging to the abbot of the Benedictine monastery of the same name—determined to build a church, and arranged, both in the country and abroad, for collecting the means.