town, and this continued throughout the eighteenth century.[1] The new nobility of Bohemia rarely visited Prague, and resided mainly in Vienna in the vicinity of the court. The new nobles, mostly men of modest and often mean birth, who owed their fortune to the Thirty Years' War, were greatly attracted by the splendour of that court, which in splendour rivalled the court of Madrid. New titles were widely distributed among these men. The ancient nobility of Bohemia had been somewhat averse to the bearing of titles of duke, count, or baron, considering them as German dignities, and they had usually been merely described as "pan" (lord). The generals and courtiers who now replaced them naturally had no such repugnance. The fate of the Bohemian peasantry in the period subsequent to the peace of Westphalia was an unspeakably miserable one. Frequent insurrections, which were repressed with merciless cruelty, were the consequence. I rejoice that the extent of this book relieves me from the duty of giving a detailed account of the cruelties committed by an alien soldiery against almost unarmed peasants. In a petition which the peasants of the district of Časlav addressed to the Imperial authorities at Prague they stated that "their fate was worse than that of the slaves of the Tartars or Turks." It is but too true that there was a considerable amount of truth in their complaint. The agents whom the new Bohemian nobles—almost always absentees—entrusted with the control of their peasants were probably more cruel than the overseer of Russian moujiks or the slave-driver of the southern States in America. In Russia both master and man were generally Slavs and members of the orthodox Church; the southern slave-driver often treated his slaves with contemptuous good nature. But the agent of the German and Romanist nobles of Bohemia both hated and despised the peasants—who were Slavs, and often still secretly heretics. The Bohemian peasants have since the year 1848 enjoyed complete liberty, and the present organization of the village communities grants them overwhelming power—often to the detriment of
- ↑ In a curious letter written from Prague on November 7, 1716, Lady Mary Montague says that at Prague "there were some remains of its former splendour," but that it was "old built and thinly inhabited." Of the ladies she writes that they were dressed according to the fashions of Vienna, "after the manner that the people of Exeter imitate those of London."
