The population of the country, which had numbered four millions, was speedily reduced to less than eight hundred thousand. Some were executed, many thrown into lifelong imprisonment, and, according to Slavata, thirty thousand Czech women wandered into exile. "The lands of the executed and exiled Protestants were confiscated and given to foreigners. The schools were closed, the national language suppressed, and the once famous University degenerated into a Jesuit college."
"Almost all the literature of Bohemia subsequent to Hus," remarks Count Lützoff, "was imbued with the spirit of that great reformer and patriot. All this was therefore doomed to destruction. If we except the classical literature, there is none which boasts so many books the existence of which can be proved with certainty, yet of which all traces are lost, as the older Bohemian writings. Jesuits, accompanied by soldiery, were empowered to search for heretical books in all Bohemian dwellings, from the castle of the nobleman to the hut of the peasant."
At the same time Ferdinand proceeded to alter the constitution of Bohemia in order that it might coincide with his own intolerant and autocratic religious and political notions. The Bohemian Crown was declared to be not elective, but hereditary in the Hapsburg line. The Germanising of the country was taken well in hand, and proceeded under the successors of Ferdinand for the next three hundred years.
But the national spirit of the Czechs could not be entirely crushed even by Hapsburgs and
29
