roach were
to be permitted. On January 9, 1433, three hundred Bohemians, mounted on
horseback, entered Basle, accompanied by an immense multitude. It was a
very different entrance from that of Huss to Constance, nearly twenty
years before, and was to have a very different termination. Procop Holy
headed the procession, accompanied by others of the Bohemian leaders. A
signal triumph had come to the party of religious reform, after twenty
years of struggle.

For fifty days the negotiations continued. Neither side would yield. In
the end, the Bohemians, weary of the protracted and fruitless debate,
took to their horses again, and set out homewards. This brought their
enemies to terms. An embassy was hastily sent after them, and all their
demands were conceded, though with certain reservations that might prove
perilous in the future. They went home triumphant, having won freedom of
religious worship according to their ideas of right and truth.

They had not long reached home when dissensions again broke out. The
emperor took advantage of them, accepted the crown of Bohemia, entered
Prague, and at once reinstated the Catholic religion. The fanatics flew
to arms, but after a desperate struggle were annihilated. The Bohemian
struggle was at an end. In the following year the emperor Sigismund
died, having lived just long enough to win success in his long conflict.
The martyrdom of Huss, the valor and zeal of Ziska, appeared to have
been in vain. Yet they were not so, for the seeds they had sown bore
fruit in the following century in a great sectarian revolt which
affected all Christendom and permanently divided the Church.

_THE SIEGE OF BELGRADE_

The empire of Rome finally reached its end, not in the fifth century, as
ordinarily considered, but in the fifteenth; not at Rome, but at
Constantinople, where the Eastern empire survived the Western for a
thousand years. At length, in 1453, the Turks captured Constantinople,
set a broad foot upon the degenerate empire of the East, and crushed out
the last feeble remnants of life left in the pygmy successor of the
colossus of the past.

And now Europe, which had looked on with clasped hands while the Turks
swept over the Bosphorus and captured Constantinople, suddenly awoke to
the peril of its situation. A blow in time might have saved the Greek
empire. The blow had not been struck, and now Europe had itself to save.
Terror seized upon the nations which had let their pet