the nobility recognized their special privileges of jurisdiction. Before this time the representatives of the towns had already been again admitted to the sittings of the Diet (15018).
The extension of Luther's teaching in Bohemia, which began about this period, revived the religious strife, which had lately decreased. The new doctrine found adherents among the utraquists, many of whom considered that the compacts did not go far enough in the cause of Church reform. The Germans, who had hitherto been the most strenuous opponents of this reform, now accepted the teaching of Luther in great numbers. "The Bohemians were surprised to see the Germans now themselves receive communion in the two kinds, and renounce the authority of the Roman Church."[1]
In 1522 King Louis, who had up to that date resided in Hungary, where he had also been accepted as king, arrived in Bohemia. The tyranny and defraudations of Zdeněk Lev of Rožmital had caused great dissatisfaction in Bohemia, and joy was great when the king, shortly after his arrival in Bohemia, dismissed him from his office of supreme burgrave. The king thus attempted to reassert the royal prerogative which had recently fallen almost into oblivion. John of Wartenberg, a weak man, became burgrave, and the king appointed as regent Duke Charles of Münsterberg, a grandson of King George. Duke Charles, whom after the death of his cousin, Duke Bartholomew, King Vladislas had often consulted on the affairs of the State, was intellectually far inferior to his cousin, and quite unequal to his difficult task.[2] He and the burgrave and other officials of the new government appear to have favoured the more advanced utraquists, who were then meditating a union with the Lutherans of Germany. The new officials thus fell into disfavour with the king, who at that moment was parti-
- ↑ Public opinion at that period so completely identified the Bohemians with the idea of heresy, that Luther himself was "accused" of being a Bohemian. In a letter to Count Schlick, a Bohemian noble, Luther says: "Odium nominis vestri nullus vestrum tanto onere, quanto ego, unquam portauit, Quoties rogo Bohemus natus quoties fugam molitus ad Bohemos, adhuc hodie criminor?"
- ↑ The late Professor Rezek, in an interesting article published in the Časopis Musea Kralovstvi Českého (Journal of the Museum of the Bohemian Kingdom), deals with the formerly little known relations of the dukes of Münsterberg to Kings Vladislav and Louis.
