Page:The Peace League of George Poděbrad, King of Bohemia.pdf/9

 That it was just George of Poděbrad who achieved this, will not surprise anybody who knows the conditions of his reign, his political circumspection and his high nobility of mind amongst the rulers of his time. Undoubtedly this is due to king George not being the offspring of a reigning family; he owed his accession to the throne only to his intellectual capacities by means of which he rose above his epoch generally.

His ways of thinking, his conception, brought him near to modern times and he was several generations ahead of his time. At the very beginning of his reign the hussite king felt that there would soon break out a conflict between himself and the Pope who would not tolerate a Hussite upon the throne, though he might take an oath of submission to his bishops. George’s policy aimed at adjourning this conflict as long as possible and at fortifying in the meantime not only his own position in the Czech State but also the position of the Czech State amongst the other states. Therefore he continually postponed the sending off of an official embassy to Rome which was to promise to the Pope obedience not only in the name of the king, but also of the whole country, for he anticipated that, on this occasion, the conflict would break out as really later was the case.

Therefore, George did all in his power in order to strenghtenstrengthen [sic] the Czech State internally by means of perfect internal order, and surrounded his state with a dense net of treaties with all neighbouring states with a view to ensure therewith a quiet development of the state and to secure for the nation peace and prosperity. And as he was successful in this, he became not only the king of a strong state, but an important ruler for the whole of Central Europe, who decided and settled the quarrels and conflicts of the neighbouring states, interfering thus with the powers and rights of the roman emperor and the Pope who formerly attributed those and similar rights to themselves, basing themselves upon the medieval theory according to which the highest power on earth was bestowed upon them by the Almighty himself.

And finally George undertook the significant attempt to liberate and to make independent the secular government of Europe generally from the hitherto existing clerical supremacy of Rome, to put exclusively into the hands of the former the direction of the affairs of the state, to remove the hitherto prevailing theory of the two swords: the spiritual—ecclesiastical—and the secular, and at the same time he deprived Rome of one of the most important things of that epoch: the direction and conduct of the Ottoman—wars, a thing which already—Turkish then should have become a European affair, as was the case much later. All