Page:The Hussite wars, by the Count Lützow.djvu/80

 mund. The Germans maintained that the King had not on July 14 allowed the artillery to fire on the town of Prague, for fear of destroying a city which he considered his own property. Ebendorffer of Haselbach, who has already been quoted, lays great stress on this point. He was imbued with that dislike of the Austrian for the Bohemian which has endured for centuries, and is by no means extinct at the present day. He and other writers have even, quite unjustly, accused Sigismund of having caused the disaster of the Vitkov by withholding reinforcements. The Bohemian nobles of the party of Sigismund were also incensed against him. They thought—and as subsequent events proved, rightly—that the King’s influence, if effectively used, could have induced the papal see to make the not very far-reaching concessions which then appeared to be sufficient. They also believed that the horrible cruelties committed by German soldiers against Bohemians, quite irrespectively of their religious creed, had exasperated the people, whom it would be easier to pacify if the foreigners departed. Other causes contributed to the dispersion of the crusaders; in the absence of all sanitary regulations various epidemics—collectively described by the contemporary chroniclers as “the plague”—broke out among the vast agglomeration of men which surrounded the walls of Prague. Great fires broke out, which destroyed numerous tents in the camps. Their origin was never known, but the Germans strongly suspected their Bohemian allies. It is more probable that the incendiaries were Táborite women, who managed to pass secretly into the enemy’s lines. Other difficulties also arose. Many of the crusaders, at the moment when Pope Martin’s bull had caused great enthusiasm, had enlisted for a limited time. These men—as did the American volunteers at the beginning of the civil war—now began to declare that their term of service had elapsed, and begged