Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/386

 according to the example of his father, Charles IV., whose memory was still revered in Bohemia. He demanded that all chains and barricades that had been erected in Prague during the recent street-fighting should be removed, and that the Romanist priests and monks should no longer be molested. Sigismund did not, as had probably been expected, proceed immediately to Prague. Disliking and distrusting all compromises, he was determined to appear in Bohemia only at the head of so large a military force that the country would be absolutely at his mercy. Sigismund believed that such a force could most easily be raised by recurring to the time-honoured expedient of proclaiming a crusade. The term crusade, originally employed to designate warlike expeditions undertaken to free Palestine from Mahomedan rule, had long been misused to describe wars undertaken from worldly and often base motives. The last crusade had been the one undertaken by the subsequently deposed Pope John XXIII. against his enemy the King of Naples. On the advice of Sigismund, Pope Martin V., whom the council of Constance had in 1418 chosen as pope, proclaimed a crusade against Bohemia on March 1, 1420. In this document the new pope declared that Sigismund, his beloved son in Christ, wishing to deserve the high dignity conferred on him by providence, had determined to extirpate the deadly poison of the heresy of Wycliffites and Hussites, and that he (the pope) greatly extolled this plan of the king and prayed for its success with eyes uplifted to heaven, for whose advantage this matter was undertaken. The pope therefore entreated and exhorted all kings, dukes, marquises, princes, counts and barons, potentates, captains, magistrates and other officials and their representatives, also all communities of cities, castles, fortresses, villages and other localities, and all who were zealous for the name and fame of