Note 54 — Chapter XI · THE REFORMATION, POLITICALLY CONSIDERED

The subsequent fortunes of the Hussite party were determined as usual by the political and economic forces. The King of Bohemia had joyfully accepted Huss’s doctrine that the tithes were not the property of the churchmen; and had locally protected him as his “fowl with the golden eggs,” proceeding to plunder the Church as did the German princes in the next age.54 When, later, the revolutionary Hussites began plundering churches and monasteries, the Bohemian nobles in their turn profited,55 and became good Hussites accordingly; while yet another aristocracy was formed in Prague by the citizens who managed the confiscations there.56 As happened earlier in Hungary and later in Germany, again, there followed a revolt of the peasants against their extortionate masters;57 and there resulted a period of ferocious civil war and exacerbated fanaticism. Ziska, the Hussite leader, had been a strong anti-German;58 and when the emperor entered into the struggle the racial hatred grew more intense than ever. On the Hussite side the claim for “the cup” (that is, the administration of the eucharist with wine as well as bread, in the original manner, departed from by the Church in the eleventh century) indicated the nature of the religious feeling involved. More memorable was the communistic zeal of the advanced section of the Taborites (so called from the town of Tabor, their headquarters), who anticipated the German movement of the Anabaptists,59 a small minority of them seeking to set up community of women. For the rest, all the other main features of later Protestantism came up at the same time—the zealous establishment of schools for the young;60 the insistence on the Bible as the sole standard of knowledge and practice; inflexible courage in warfare and good military organization, with determined denial of sacerdotal claims.61