Epistle of Peter were quoted to show that the German nation should yield obedience to the king’s mandate. The canon law and the civil law agreed in giving to the inhabitants of a land the rule over foreigners who might happen to be within its borders.
True to their oath, the foreign professors and scholars seceded in a body, with bag and baggage. On a single day two thousand withdrew from Prague, and, according to Æneas Sylvius, five thousand altogether.[1] Many of them went to Leipzig, where that university took its start from this secession, 1409. Cambridge owed its origin to a secession of students from Oxford, and Paris university had also witnessed secessions. The university of Prague, which was at once reduced to five hundred students, was eulogized by the council of Constance, 1416, as having been originally “that noble university—studium Pragense—which was numbered amongst the greatest jewels of our world. From being, without doubt, the chief school among the Germans, it had been turned by partisan envy into a desert and solitude.”[2] Since the emigration of the Germans the institution has remained a Bohemian school, with a separate faculty for German students. With the secession, the city also lost its importance as a German centre of trade.
The honor, or the stigma, of being the chief author of this change fell upon Huss, although he denied the charge of
- ↑ Æneas Sylvius, chap. 35. Uno dic supra duo millia Pragam reliquere; nec diu post circiter tria millia secuti, apud Lipsicam Misnaæ civitatem . . . universale studium erexere. Procopius, a chronicler of the fifteenth century, follows the figures of Æneas. So Berger, p. 64, who includes in the number the dependents of the emigrant students, and Kügelgen, Gefangenschaftsbr., p. ix. Cochlæus, Hist. Huss, p. 114, speaks of 30,000 students at Prague. XXX millia studentum ante Huss. pestem. Two thousand, he says, emigrated to Leipzig and 3,000 to Erfurt. Höfler, p. 247, gives the number of those who left Prague as at least 20,000. The matriculation rolls of the university of Leipzig show less than 1,000. students the first year, but this number cannot be taken as decisive for the size of the secession. Some of the students went to other universities.
- ↑ Doc., p. 649.
