Page:The Hussite wars, by the Count Lützow.djvu/40

 by the aid of gifts of money, procured false witnesses against him, and had been abetted by the Hungarian King Sigismund—these faithful Bohemians, I say, suffered many troubles, tribulations, annoyances and vexations from the enemies of truth and the blasphemers who robbed them, and tortured them by cruel imprisonment, hunger, thirst and death. For the enemies of the truth pursued the clerics and laymen who were zealous for the chalice, through various parts of the kingdom, and delivered them over to the miners [of Kutna Hora], and sold some men to them; these miners, who were Germans, and cruel persecutors of the Bohemians, and particularly of those who loved the teaching of Christ, with much blasphemy tortured them, and inhumanly threw them, particularly at time of night, into the deepest pits and shafts—some still alive, and others after they had decapitated them; and they did this principally at the shaft near the church of St. Martin, beyond the Kouřim gate, calling this shaft Tábor; and so great was the vast cruelty of the miners against the faithful Christians who were zealous for God’s law, that during a brief time more than 1,600 men who were in favour of sacred Communion with the chalice were miserably murdered by them and thrown into the shaft, when the executioners had become weary of murdering. But assuredly this inhuman raging against the faithful of Christ was followed by Divine vengeance; for after two years this mining city was, in punishment of the murder of many faithful there, thoroughly destroyed and consumed by fire.” When we read this page and many similar ones we understand why the Hussites—though their antagonists far surpassed them in cruelty—sometimes acted with great ferocity during the Hussite wars.

The severe fighting which took place at Prague, during which the entire Malá Strana and numerous buildings in other parts of the city were burnt down, caused many Utraquists—