served in the armies of Sigismund it may be noted that he was one of the king’s men who garrisoned the Vyšehrad, and he writes as a royalist and a Romanist. Yet that strange antipathy to everything German which is innate in the Bohemian appears in his book also. Thus, when referring to the death of Albrecht of Habsburg, who for a short time succeeded Sigismund as King of Bohemia, he writes: ‘He died, after an illness of some weeks, about the octave of St. Gallus; may his soul rest in peace, for he was a good man though a German, brave and merciful.’
Before referring to some other chroniclers belonging to this period whose writings have been edited and collected in one volume by Palacký, I must mention the name of the great Bohemian general John Žižka of Trocnov. Though Žižka is undoubtedly known as a maker rather than a writer of history, yet I feel justified by the example of Bohemian writers on the literature of the country in including Žižka among the historians of Bohemia. Very scant but very precious relics of Žižka’s writings have been preserved; they consist of a war-song that has aptly been named the Bohemian Marseillaise of the fifteenth century, a document containing the regulations of war used by the Hussites which give a strange insight into the thoroughly democratic organization of the Bohemian armies, and of several letters on political and military subjects. Of these the most valuable is the celebrated letter ‘to the allies of Domažlice.’ I do not hesitate to affirm that this letter, plain and matter of fact as it is, is perhaps the most valuable record of the Hussite wars. The citizens of Domažlice[1], a Bohemian town not far from
- ↑ In German, Tauss.
