Page:Lectures on The Historians of Bohemia by Count Lutzow (1905).djvu/25

 struck off. At the same hour, and in the same hall, Unislav, Domassa, and the two sons of Mutina were captured. Another man, Nevsa, who did not indeed belong to the clan, but who was an intimate friend of Mutina, fled seeing what had happened, and would have escaped from the castle through the shrubs if his red tunic had not caused him to be recognized. He was immediately captured and deprived of sight. And as it often happens that a bloodthirsty wolf rages and murders in the sheep-fold, and does not calm his fury nor desist from slaughter till he has killed all the sheep, thus Svatopluk, already stained with the blood of one man, was now yet more exasperated, and he decreed that the whole clan should, without distinction of age, and without delay, be decapitated. He said to the counts who were standing around him, “He who fulfils my wishes will receive a large weight of gold, but he who kills Bosý (one of the leaders) and his son will receive hundredfold more than the others, and will inherit their estates.”’

I cannot for want of time translate the account of the great massacre that now ensued; it was one of those sudden outbreaks of fury with which the usually placid and peaceful Slavic race is sometimes seized, and of which the massacre of the Streltsi by Peter the Great and the recent tragedy at Belgrade are later examples.

Before leaving Cosmas I will again draw attention to the great influence which the study of the classics had on him. Thus he speaks of the ‘gods,’ though the Bohemians had accepted Christianity long before the time of the massacre of the Versovic; he writes of ‘lictors,’ and describes the fury of a hungry lion in