must be considered the cause of a complete revolution. The Reformation was a misfortune for Europe. Among the Hussites there were few men of moral and honourable character.
It is perhaps hardly necessary to state before the present audience that the Hussite movement was at first an entirely religious one. The Hussites did not, indeed, at first lay much stress on dogmatic distinctions, but they principally strove to reform the discipline and morality of the Bohemian clergy, which had sunk to a level that it is almost impossible to imagine at the present day.
The repeated invasions of Bohemia by savage hordes collected from all parts of Europe, necessarily obliged the Bohemians to defend their country, which indeed they successfully did. Mediaeval warfare of course was accompanied by horrible cruelties, but it has been successfully proved by Palacký that the atrocities committed by the Romanist invaders of Bohemia—who wished to exterminate the whole population, as had once been done with the Albigenses—were in every way greater and more terrible than the reprisals of the Bohemians.
The period of the Hussite wars so greatly exceeds in interest every other epoch of the Bohemian history, that I shall devote to a notice of the writings dealing with this stirring time more notice than is justified by the number of those writings which have been preserved. I shall then briefly refer to the later historians up to the year 1526—an important date, for it marks the accession of the House of Habsburg and the beginning of the Romanist reaction.
The first historian whom I shall mention is Peter of
