Page:Lectures on The Historians of Bohemia by Count Lutzow (1905).djvu/96

 this period, which are almost unequalled in history. ‘The Bohemians,’ he writes, ‘had not even the resource of appealing to their sovereign; for no petty Austrian official or Jesuit missionary was more determined than Ferdinand to kill or exile all Bohemians who did not conform to the Church of Rome.’ Thus when remonstrances were made to Ferdinand on behalf of the Protestants of Kutna Hora he angrily declared that the citizens of Kutna Hora were ‘not men but brutes’, because they would not accept the one saving creed. Even during the vicissitudes of the Thirty Years’ War, Ferdinand always considered the conversion of Bohemia to the Roman Church as a matter of the greatest importance. The papal see gave him no more than his due when it declared him to be ‘a second Constantine.’

Little or no Bohemian literature of this period exists. The national language, considered a language of heretics, was persecuted in every way. Jesuits, who were accompanied by soldiers, scoured the country in every direction, and as the Jesuit was generally ignorant of the national language, he destroyed all Bohemian books. It was the intention of the government to induce the Bohemians to forget as far as possible all traditions of their past glory. It is a striking proof of this tendency that even Pope Pius II’s book on the history of Bohemia was prohibited.

The few writers on Bohemian history wrote mainly in German and Latin, though their sympathy was generally with their own people.