considered war inevitable. There were occasional dissensions among the defenders. Thus the Táborite women took possession of a nunnery and expelled the nuns who had remained there, and some of the citizens complained that they and their wives and daughters had been insulted by Táborites whose puritanic feeling was offended by the richness of their garb. These occurrences had at the time little importance; all were at that moment busy in strengthening the fortifications. Žižka practically assumed sole command of the defending army. His colleague, Nicholas of Hus, had returned to Tábor and successfully repulsed an attack which the royalists made on that city. Though I find in the scanty contemporary records little proof of the antagonism between Nicholas and Žižka which has been assumed by most modern writers, it is certain that the departure of Nicholas of Hus was favourable to the unity of the commandership.
It was during the defence of Prague that Žižka first gave evidence of his military genius. With that intuition which only born leaders of armies possess, he had found that the key of his position was the Vitkov hill, and he immediately ordered that hill to be fortified, and he placed his scanty artillery behind the earthworks which had been hurriedly thrown up. The Vitkov hill consists of a narrow ridge parallel to the Vltava river, which is very steep, both in the direction of the river, and in that of the open country around Prague; from the city only the hill is easily accessible. Its possession secured to the defenders the possibility of communicating with the country districts of Bohemia, where some cities were still in the hands of the Hussites.[1]
By the end of June all the vast army of the crusaders had assembled around Prague. The strength of the forces
- ↑ See General Köhler, Die Entwicklung des Kriegswesen in der Ritterzeit. Vol. V. pp. 389–390. Though General Köhler was, like all writers on this campaign, obliged to rely mainly on Březova—who is here somewhat carried away by national enthusiasm—Köhler’s account of the attack on the Žižkov is far more lucid than that of any other modern writer.
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