should send ambassadors to Cheb, where they were to meet Sigismund himself and several of the German princes.
The negotiations at Cheb—as all parties perhaps expected—met with no result. Differences of opinion as to the composition and the powers of the future Council were the principal obstacle.
The new crusade against Bohemia, destined to be the last one, thus became inevitable. The Bohemian ambassadors returned to Prague (May 31), informed the people that all hope of peace had vanished, and called the whole nation to arms against the expected invaders. Prokop the Great, for the moment, became actually, though not nominally, dictator of Bohemia. He assembled an army of 50,000 infantry and 5000 cavalry, to which all the utraquist parties contributed; but it was noticed that many lords of that faith, though they sent their contingents, did not themselves join Prokop's standards. Prince Korybut of Poland, however, rejoined the Bohemian forces in the hour of peril, though only as a volunteer. The army of the crusaders, commanded by Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg, with whom was Cardinal Cesarini—King Sigismund having returned to Nuremberg—only crossed the Bohemian frontier on August 1. The crusaders, and particularly the papal legate, were full of hope that this expedition would at last succeed in extirpating the Bohemian heretics. The cardinal had just received a large sum of money from the new Pope, Eugenius IV,[1] to aid in the expenses of the campaign, and was so certain of victory that he had already written to Sigismund asking for a grant of land in Bohemia, as soon as the country should have been conquered.
The army of the crusaders, according to the lowest estimates, consisted of 90,000 infantry and 40,000 horsemen. Again attacking Bohemia from the west, they first laid siege to the town of Tachov, known already from one of the former crusades. Unable to capture the strongly-fortified city, they stormed the little town of Most, and here, as well as in the surrounding country, committed the most horrible atrocities[2] on a population a large part of which had never belonged to the utraquist faith. The crusaders, advancing in very slow marches, now penetrated
