have recently, not quite unjustly, accused the cardinal of being the cause of one of the most disgraceful defeats which any German army ever suffered.
It has already been stated that the Bohemian envoys, on returning from their fruitless mission to Cheb, had informed their countrymen that they must expect an immediate new attack of the Germans. With a rapidity and energy that contrast strangely with the attitude of the Germans, who had for two years been deliberating on the plan of this campaign, Prokop immediately gave the necessary orders to concentrate his troops and move them in the direction of the menaced frontier. All the troops in Silesia marched to Prague, leaving only small garrisons in some Silesian cities. In a letter addressed to the nobles of Moravia, Prokop and the other Táborite captains called on them to march to the district of Plzeň with as large force as they could muster, “as the King of Hungary had assembled many foreigners to fight against God’s truth and for the destruction of the inhabitants of Bohemia and Moravia who believed in God’s truth.[1] The Moravians readily responded to the call; we find among those who hurriedly marched into Bohemia the names of two of the greatest Moravian nobles, Lord John of Tovačovský and Lord Lacek of Sternberg. The Utraquist nobles of Bohemia did not at this moment show as great a zeal for the Utraquist cause as on former occasions. The strong distrust, soon amounting to hatred, of the advanced parties which the Bohemian nobles felt, and which finally caused the downfall of Bohemia, was already very evident.[2] Though a considerable number of Bohemian nobles sent their retainers to join the Táborite
- ↑ Letter published by Palacký, Urkundliche Beiträge, etc., Vol. II. p. 215.
- ↑ It is interesting to note that Bishop Stubbs, though he did not devote much study to Bohemian history, saw this point more clearly than most historians have done. “It may be questioned,” he writes, “whether in the long run Bohemia could not have rejected the yoke of Rome and the rule of the Luxemburg family, had not the national party itself been divided and the Hussites—the Táborites are meant—as the weaker gone to the wall” (Germany in the later Middle Ages, p. 173).
