bishop of Prague—pacified him. Rokycan strongly and successfully appealed to his feelings as a Slav and a Bohemian. It was thus as a leader of the whole united Hussite army that Zizka started on his last campaign. All the Taborite leaders, the Praguers under Prince Korybut and the Calixtine nobles joined Zizka’s colours. It was indeed a fateful moment in the history of Bohemia. The allies were determined to establish the rule of the chalice in the sister-land Moravia. The scanty and often-defeated Austrian troops of Sigismund’s son-in-law Albert, who held the country for the Germans, could have offered little resistance. Prince Korybut had frankly and sincerely accepted the articles of Prague, and the formerly suspicious Bohemians had begun to trust his loyalty. Had Moravia been conquered, the estates of that country would undoubtedly, jointly with those of Bohemia, have elected Korybut as king. Republican rule over an extensive country being in the fifteenth century practically an impossibility, this was certainly the one moment when the foundation of a Slavic and utraquist state in Bohemia and Moravia was possible. Fate, never favourable to Bohemia, willed it otherwise. Before crossing the Moravian frontier, the Hussites laid siege to the castle of Pribislav near that frontier. During the siege Zizka was attacked by the plague and died[1] on October 11, 1424. His death put a stop to the campaign in Moravia. The moderate Taborites adopted the name of Orphans, thus indicating that it would be impossible to them to replace their dead leader.
It is a proof of the military spirit that was general among the Hussites that, deeply as they felt the loss of their leader, they did not hesitate for a moment in continuing their resistance to the ever-returning German invaders. In Prokop the Great and Prokop the Less they found leaders who were no unworthy successors of Zizka. The Bohemians now no
- ↑ An account of Zizka’s death—founded on the narrative of a contemporary chronicler—will be found in my History of Bohemian Literature, p. 152.
