Page:The Hussite wars, by the Count Lützow.djvu/76

 A desperate hand-to-hand fight ensued, and Žižka, who, as was his custom, fought in the fronk rank, was for a time in great danger, till the flails and fighting-clubs of his Táborites drove back the Germans. Meanwhile a new troop of Táborites arrived, led by priests carrying the Sacrament, as was customary, particularly in moments of great peril; many citizens of Prague, summoned by the ringing of the church bells in the numerous churches of the city, hurried to the aid of the defenders of the Vitkov. The defeat of the Germans was soon complete, and many of them, rushing down the slopes of the Vitkov—then much steeper than at present—perished in the Vltava. As soon as victory appeared certain the Táborites and Praguers knelt down and intoned the Te Deum Laudamus, while the whole city was filled with unspeakable joy. About the same time as the attack on the Vitkov took place, the crusaders in or near the Vyšehrad and Hradčany castles attacked the parts of the city which were near those strongholds; they were, however, easily repulsed, principally, as it appears, in consequence of the superiority of the Bohemian artillery.

The battle of the Vitkov—or rather of the Žižkov, as the hill since that memorable day bore, and still bears, the name of the victorious general—may be considered as the turning point, as the Valmy or Turnham Green, of the great Bohemian civil war. The Hussites had not, indeed, obtained a decisive victory; many of the crusaders had not even been engaged. Yet the Bohemians had stemmed the tide of hostile victories. The large number of men who, even in times of great political and religious enthusiasm, think mainly of their personal advantage, began to consider the Hussite as the winning side. The nobility in Bohemia, though not in Moravia, began to desert Sigismund. The conduct of the “Hungarian King,” as the Bohemians always called Sigismund, had not been heroic; contrary to the custom of princes in that warlike period he had taken no part in the fighting. A contemporary chronicler, who, being a fervent Catholic and a canon of St. Stephen’s cathedral in Vienna,