Page:Lectures on The Historians of Bohemia by Count Lutzow (1905).djvu/39



T is deeply to be regretted that we possess comparatively scanty records of the history of Bohemia during the period of the Hussite wars, the period on which Bohemia's claim to historical fame principally depends. It is against the works dealing with this period that the terrible destruction of books instituted by the Jesuits was principally directed. It is only recently that it has been attempted to collect and edit the contemporary records of the Hussite wars.

The great historian Palacký has ably pointed out the difficulties that beset those who attempted this task, thus refuting the foolish fables derived from German or Roman sources that had hitherto done duty as a history of the Hussite wars. For political reasons into which I do not wish to enter here the Austrian Government considered it desirable that these traditions which described the Hussites as brutal and cruel fanatics, enemies of all order in Church and State, should remain in vigour. This utterly false view has adherents up to the present day, and it is only a few years ago that a member of one of the greatest Bohemian families though not of one of those which dwelt in the country during the period of independence declared in the parliament of Prague that he and his adherents saw in the Hussites not noble heroes, but a gang of robbers and incendiaries, the communists of the fifteenth century. Hus, the speaker continued,