Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/99

 Hussite movement has, as I have already remarked, been much overlooked by historians.

As so often occurs under similar circumstances, the members of the Bethlehem community gradually and perhaps unconsciously assumed an attitude of aloofness and apartness which could not fail to cause displeasure in the narrow atmosphere of a mediæval city. The followers of Hus specially incurred the dislike of the German inhabitants of Prague. Some of these men had indeed at first welcomed the teaching of Waldhauser and Milic, but at the beginning of the fifteenth century racial discord became more intense in Prague. The Bohemians were greatly irritated by the depredations and cruelties which the German soldiers, sent into the country by Venceslas’s antagonist, Rupert of the Palatinate, committed. Hus shared the general feeling of his countrymen, and in a passage in one of his sermons that has already been quoted spoke strongly against the Germans. Though Hus always declared that he preferred a good German to a bad Bohemian, he also expressed himself strongly with regard to the attitude of the German members of the university who were suspected of favouring Rupert of the Palatinate. “The Germans,” he writes, “who are in Bohemia should go to their king (Venceslas) and swear that they will be faithful to him and to the country, but this will only come to pass when a serpent warms itself on the ice.” Another subject of national discord was the troublous state of affairs at the university. Though the foundation of German universities such as that of Vienna had considerably reduced the number of German students, their preponderance, founded on the artificial system of voting by “nations,” still continued. It had indeed become even more onerous, for since the foundation of the University of Cracow the Germans had secured a majority in