Page:The Hussite wars, by the Count Lützow.djvu/63

 of Sigismund, might aid their Slavic brethren, and Polish troops had already begun to attack the marches of Brandenburg. The Slavic dynasty of the Obotrites in Mecklenburg also rose in arms against the new margrave. By a rapid and victorious campaign against these numerous enemies Frederick isolated the Bohemians from their possible allies in Germany. He believed—wrongly, as events proved—that Sigismund had sufficient forces to crush all resistance in Bohemia. Sigismund had, indeed, invaded Bohemia with a large army, and his forces were greatly increased when, somewhat later, numerous crusaders joined him before Prague. The beginning of the campaign was successful. Králové Hradec, one of the Hussite strongholds, was occupied after very slight resistance, and the royalist army then marched to Kutna Hora, a mining city whose inhabitants were almost all Germans and fervent adherents of the Church of Rome. Sigismund was, therefore, enthusiastically received at Kutna Hora and, sanguine as he sometimes was, he no doubt concluded from this friendly reception that the feeling of the Bohemian people was not as hostile to him as he had previously imagined.

Yet it was just at this moment that the Bohemian movement acquired a distinctly revolutionary character. Čeněk of Wartenberg had left Breslau deeply embittered, and his dynastic tendency disappeared, or at least became obscured for a time. He formally renounced his allegiance to Sigismund, dismissed