for not only in its laws and commerce,
but also in science and art it exhibited all the vigour and
independence of German life. About 1289 the King of Bohemia rode as a
German elector to the election of the Emperor, and waved the golden
glass at the coronation; the Bohemian minstrels and chroniclers wrote
in the Swabian language and style, and Bohemian artists painted
pictures of saints and windows for the German churches. Under the
Luxemburgers Bohemia became the centre of the empire. The Bohemian
throne was adorned with the German Imperial eagle and crown, and the
flower of Germany's youth flocked to the many-turreted Moldavian city,
in order to win in the first German university a nobler patent of
nobility than the sword could give. It seemed then for a considerable
period as if this fine compact Sclave country, lying with its mountain
ramparts in the midst of Germany like a gigantic fortress, was likely
to become the kernel of a great united empire, spreading far beyond the
Rhine on the west, and to the Vistula on the east, or even perhaps to
the swamps of the Theis. But just at this time an energetic reaction of
Sclave popular feeling was roused in Bohemia against the Germans, and a
long struggle ensued which fearfully shook the political, religious,
and social life of Germany, rent the unity of the Roman Catholic
Church, weakened the empire and threw it into confusion, depopulated
large districts by a war full of cruelty, and amidst the flames of
burning cities and the waning of millions, gave the death-blow to the
Holy Roman Empire of the middle ages. It was the peculiar destiny of
Germany that this great struggle should first break out among the
teachers and scholars in the halls of the universities, and that the
funeral pile of a Bohemian professor should give a new direction to the
policy of German princes and people.

The auto-da-fe of Huss did not appear to the Germans a very striking or
blamable occurrence; people in those days were hastily condemned to
death, and there hardly passed a year that the torch was not laid to
the stake in every large city. However great the grief and indignation
of the national party of Bohemia might be at these proceedings, the
wild fanaticism of the people was first roused by another, and greater
crime of the reckless Emperor Sigismund, who, at the head of the
orthodox German fanatics, began the strife by the great massacre in
1420; this outrage gave the Bohemians the strengt