2
despised, intruder into the Teutonio commonwealth. His vigorous administration established order amongst its wild and warlike nobles and knights[1]: Churches, Monasteries, and Schools were built; the Capital became, to quote the description given by Æneas Sylvius in the next century, “a town as large and as noble as Etruscan Florence.” Above all, the establishment in 1348 of the University of Prague at a time when no German University yet existed, made the Bohemian Capital in many respects the most important city in the Empire.
But while the Bohemian kingdom rose to a higher position than it had ever held before, the danger of Germanization, long the bugbear of Bohemian patriots, was proportionately increased. Thousands of German students flocked to Prague, where they far out-numbered those of Bohemian birth. The rivalry of nations put on the guise of an opposition of philosophies. The Bohemians became Realists; the Germans adopted the principles of Nominalism. At a later time this apparently irrelevant circumstance exercised an important influence upon the fortunes of the Bohemian reform-movement. For, while the liberal tendencies which soon began to develop themselves in the Bohemian “nation” at Prague were not unlike those of the anti-papal party which at the beginning of the fifteenth century succeeded in completely crushing the Franciscans and establishing its own supremacy in the University of Paris, a difference of philosophical creed prevented the smallest sympathy arising between the reform-parties in the two Universities. At Constance the nominalist Reformers of Paris were among the noisiest of those who clamoured for the condemnation of the realist Reformers of Prague.
The very period at which the danger of Germanization was at its height, at which the national language seemed in the eyes of the Bohemian nationalist to be in no small danger of actual extinction, was a most flourishing epoch in the history of Bohemian literature. The tone of the Bohemian literature of this period, like that of most of the vernacular literature of the Middle Ages, was decidedly anti-hierarchical. The Jesuits of later times assumed that everything that was Bohemian must necessarily be heretical; but enough has escaped the ravages of their Vandalism to enable those who have explored that unknown field of literature to pronounce that there were poets in Bohemia in the fourteenth century not unworthy of comparison with the father of English poetry. Satires on the Clergy must have lent some help to the Bohemian reformers; nor were there wanting writers of those vernacular hymns, the existence of which is a sure sign of the growth of religious feeling too deep to be satisfied by the
- ↑ The constitution of the country was not feudal. The Bohemian Knights were a distinct inferior order of nobility, not the vassals of the Baronage.
