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 departure from Prague Prokop the Great and his victorious army returned to the capital of Bohemia. By no means intoxicated by their brilliant successes, the Bohemians proposed to their enemies to enter into fresh negotiations, which were to take the customary but generally ineffectual form of a religious disputation. I shall again refer to these deliberations in the next chapter.

It will, I think, appear clearly from this account that the third crusade, as indeed all the crusades against Bohemia, was doomed to failure from its beginning. It is evident that the German princes, with the exception of those of Austria and Saxony, countries which always had much intercourse with Bohemia, were far more absorbed in their own quarrels and rivalries than in the affairs of Bohemia. The Germans were at first inclined to underrate the importance of the Hussite movement. When bitter experience taught them that this supposition was erroneous they, with the superstition so characteristic of that age, took refuge in the idea that the Hussites were superhuman beings sent by a demoniacal power to chastise mankind, and that it was therefore hopeless to attempt to resist them. Another circumstance which contributed largely to the failure of these expeditions was the incapacity and mutual distrust of the generals. King Sigismund was above all things desirous to be recognised by the Bohemians as their King, and then to obtain their aid in his incessant wars against the Turks. He was in some respects no very strict upholder of the claims of the Church of Rome, and it is noteworthy that while bitterly opposing the articles of Prague, which demanded the poverty of the clergy, he himself acted in accordance with these articles by largely distributing Church lands among those members of the