Page:The Hussite wars, by the Count Lützow.djvu/95

 urged to take part in a temporary retreat during the battle of the Vitkov, said: “A true Christian must never retire before Antichrist.” The ferocity with which the Germans carried on the war, of course, continuously strengthened the advanced party among the Hussites. To the Germans the national hatred of the Bohemian Slav proved an even stronger incentive to cruelty than the fanaticism which urged them to exterminate heretics. It is certain that among the countless Bohemian peasants, men and women, who, in the neighbourhood of Prague, were ruthlessly slaughtered by the so-called crusaders, there were many who had always been faithful to the Catholic Church and had never even heard of the Hussite doctrine. The unfortunately well-founded conviction that the Germans intended to destroy their race and extirpate their language excited the Bohemians to greater fury, and their revenge was sometimes terrible, though it must never be forgotten that the cruelty of the Hussites was never as great nor as general as that of their antagonists.

The first symptoms of discord among the Hussites were not of great importance, and were founded on differences of social rank, which at a feudal period necessarily separated the nationalist nobles from the peasantry, and even from the Utraquist townsmen. There were certainly among the advanced Táborites levellers, to whom the distinction conferred by learning, as represented by the university of Prague, was as distasteful as were the privileges of knighthood and nobility. More serious, however, were the theological dissensions which, almost immediately after the victory of the Vitkov had secured temporary safety, broke out between Utraquist and Táborite priests on certain guestions of ritual and doctrine.

The prominent leaders of the two Hussite parties attempted to mediate in these disputes, which, within a nation then almost entirely absorbed in theological controversies, were bound to lead to a rupture, and eventually to civil war; this apprehension somewhat later became fully justified.