Page:Lectures on The Historians of Bohemia by Count Lutzow (1905).djvu/29

 of King John in 1310, and it is therefore appropriate now to mention the writings of a chronicler who deals principally with the reign of King John—the Don Quixote of Bohemia, as he has been aptly called. I allude to the Latin chronicle of Beneš of Weitmil, a canon of St. Vitus’s cathedral at Prague. The chronicle is divided into four books, the first three of which contain the history of Bohemia from 1283 to 1345. The fourth book, which is much more detailed and has little connexion with the first ones, contains accounts of the last campaign and death of King John, and of the events of the reign of King Charles up to 1374. Beneš, indeed, undertook his work by command of the last-named patriotic sovereign, and is stated to have been on terms of friendship with his king. The chronicle of Weitmil formerly enjoyed great fame, and the learned Jesuit Balbinus wrote in the seventeenth century that ‘nothing could be more famous, nothing more truthful, than this chronicle.’ Palacký, whose Würdigung der alten böhmischen Geschichtschreiber is still the standard work on the subject, has somewhat qualified this rather exaggerated praise. He writes that the art of Weitmil as a historian is not superior to that of Cosmas and his continuators, though he certainly wrote of more stirring events than his predecessors.

As being of interest to an English audience, I shall quote part of Weitmil’s account of the last campaign and the death of King John. I should, however, mention that Weitmil’s account of this famous event differs in some particulars from those of French and English chroniclers, as well as from that of Palacký on which the description of the death of King John which I gave in my Bohemia, a Historical Sketch is founded.