United States or Suriname ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He forgot that the indomitable John Ziska and the iron-flailed peasantry stood between him and his vow. He had first to conquer the reformers before he could punish them, and this was to prove no easy task. The dreadful work of religious war began with the burning of Hussite preachers who had ventured from Bohemia into Germany.
At first they seem to have been almost Catholics, but as the Hussite Wars went on they fell, it is said, under the influence of the Taborites, and adopted many radical Taborite opinions.
It was not again subdued until the legions of Napoleon trod over its mountain paths. Sigismund, Emperor of Germany, had sworn to put an end to the Hussite rebellion in Bohemia, and to punish the rebels in a way that would make all future rebels tremble. But Sigismund was pursuing the old policy of cooking the hare before it was caught.
He found his country distracted by internal dissensions, exhausted by the Hussite wars and threatened by powerful neighbours. His first task was to set his house in order; in this he achieved complete success, and soon found himself reigning over a strong, happy and united country.
Such, undoubtedly, was the meaning of the Jacquerie in France, with its wild and apparently senseless vengeance; of the Wat Tyler revolt in England, with its systematic attempt to envisage the vague tradition of the primitive village community in the legends of the current ecclesiastical creed; of the numerous revolts in Flanders and North Germany; to a large extent of the Hussite movement in Bohemia, under Ziska; of the rebellion led by George Doza in Hungary; and, as we shall see in the body of the present work, of the social movements of Reformation Germany, in which, with the partial exception of Ket's rebellion in England a few years later, we may consider them as virtually coming to an end.
The tendency of this action was clear. The government wanted to destroy the memory of the glorious past of Bohemia, of John Hus and the Hussite movement, of the suffering of the Czech nation after the defeat of the White Mountain, to restrict all progressive and liberal movements and to kill the 'Sokol' idea, and further to destroy the consciousness that Czechs and Slovaks are the same nation and belong to the great Slav family.
This pious enthusiast easily found a small body of followers in a time when men were weary of war after the cruelties of the Hussite conflicts; but here, too, his theory developed in practice into a kind of Quietism under priestly control, an austere Puritanism, which is the very opposite of the personal freedom of Anarchism. Vorläufer des Neueren Socialismus, Pt. i., p. 230.
Moreover, the Hussites were led and inspired by one of the greatest military leaders of all ages, John Žiška. This is not the place to tell of the doings of those Hussite armies and their exploits, and how they kept all Europe at bay so that every Bohemian might feel secure in the faith that was in him.
He was waiting for the troops which the Cardinal of Winchester had collected in England as a crusading army against the Hussite heretics, a kind of Protestants who were giving trouble. Bedford induced Winchester to bring his men to France, but they had not arrived. The Duke of Burgundy, the head of the great French party which opposed Charles, had been invited by the Maid to Reims.
As has been said by an eminent historian of Russia, the refusal to submit to a single form of authority brings into activity a disposition to rid one's self of all social and moral ties. The Hussite revolt against Rome speedily results in the Taborite revolt against society: Luther calls the Anabaptists into being. The same phenomenon is repeated in Russia, in England and in Scotland.
Word Of The Day