sufficiently show. Former kings had invested the Bohemian nobles with
possessions which he, moved by cupidity, determined to have back. This
is the method he took to obtain them. All the nobles of the land were
invited to meet him at Willamow, where he received them in a black tent,
which opened on one side into a white, and on the other into a red one.
Into this tent of ominous hue the waiting nobles were admitted, one at a
time, and were here received by the emperor, who peremptorily bade them
declare what lands they held as gifts from the crown.
Those who gave the information asked, and agreed to cede these lands
back to the crown, were led into the white tent, where an ample feast
awaited them. Those who refused were dismissed with frowns into the red
tent, where they found awaiting them the headsman's fatal block and axe.
The hapless guests were instantly seized and beheaded.
This ghastly jest, if such it may be considered, proceeded for some time
before the nobles still waiting learned what was going on. When at
length a whisper of the frightful mystery of the red tent was borne to
their ears, there were no longer any candidates for its favors. The
emperor found them eagerly willing to give up the ceded lands, and all
that remained found their way to the white tent and the feast.
The emperor's next act of arbitrary tyranny was directed against the
Jews. One of that people had ridiculed the sacrament, in consequence of
which three thousand Jews of Prague were massacred by the populace of
that city. Wenceslas, instead of punishing the murderers, as justice
would seem to have demanded, solaced his easy conscience by punishing
the victims, declaring all debts owed by Christians to Jews to be null
and void.
His next act of injustice and cruelty was perpetrated in 1393, and arose
from a dispute between the crown and the church. One of the royal
chamberlains had caused two priests to be executed on the accusation of
committing a flagrant crime. This action was resented by the Archbishop
of Prague, who declared that it was an encroachment upon the prerogative
of the church, which alone had the right to punish an ecclesiastic. He,
therefore, excommunicated the chamberlain.
This action of the daring churchman threw the emperor into such a
paroxysm of rage that the archbishop, knowing well the man he had to
deal with, took to flight, saving his neck at the expense of his
dignity. The furious Wenceslas, finding that the chief offender had
escaped, vented his wrath on the subordinates, several of whom were
seized. One of them, the dean, moved by indignation, dealt the emperor
so heavy a blow on the head with his sword-knot as to bring the blood.
It does not appear that he was made to suffer for his boldness, but two
of the lower ecclesiastics, John of Nepomuk and Puchnik, were put to
the rack to make them confess facts learned by them in the confessional.
They persistently refused to answer. Wenceslas, infuriated by their
obstinacy, himself seized a torch and applied it to their limbs to make
them speak. They were still silent. The affair ended in his ordering
John of Nepomuk to be flung headlong, during the night, from the great
bridge over the Moldau into the stream. A statue now marks the spot
where this act of tyranny was performed.
The final result of the emperor's cruelty was one which he could not
have foreseen. He had made a saint of Nepomuk. The church, appreciating
the courageous devotion of the murdered ecclesiastic to his duty in
keeping inviolate the secrets of the confessional, canonized him as a
martyr, and made him the patron saint of Bohemia.
Puchnik escaped with his life, and eventually with more than his life.
The tyrant's wrath was followed by remorse,--a feeling, apparently,
which rarely troubled his soul,--and he sought to atone for his cruelty
to one churchman by loading the other with benefits. But his mad fury
changed to as mad a benevolence, and he managed to make a jest of his
gratuity. Puchnik was led into the royal treasury, and the emperor
himself, thrusting his royal hands into his hoards of gold, filled the
pockets, and even the boots, of the late sufferer with the precious
coin. This done, Puchnik attempted to depart, but in vain. He found
himself nailed to the floor, so weighed down with gold that he was
unable to stir. Before he could move he had to disgorge much of his
new-gained wealth, a proceeding to which churchmen in that age do not
seem to have been greatly given. Doubtless the remorseful Wenceslas
beheld this process with a grim smile of royal humor on his lips.
The emperor had a brother, Sigismund by name, a man not of any high
degree of wisdom, but devoid of his wild and immoderate temper.
Brandenburg was his inheritance, though he had married the daughter of
the King of Hungary and Poland, and hoped to succeed to those countries.
There was a third brother, John, surnamed "Von Görlitz." Sigismund was
by no means blind to his brother's folly, or to the ruin in which it
threatened to involve his family and his own future prospects. This last
exploit stirred him to action. Concerting with some other princes of the
empire, he suddenly seized Wenceslas, carried him to Austria, and
imprisoned him in the castle of Wiltberg, in that country.
A fair disposal, this, of a man who was scarcely fit to run at large,
most reasonable persons would say; but all did not think so. John von
Görlitz, the younger brother of the emperor, fearing public scandal from
such a transaction, induced the princes who held him to set him free. It
proved a fatal display of kindness and family affection for himself. The
imperial captive was no sooner free than, concealing the wrath which he
felt at his incarceration, he invited to a banquet certain Bohemian
nobles who had aided in it. They came, trusting to the fact that the
tiger's claws seemed sheathed. They had no sooner arrived than the claws
were displayed. They were all seized, by the emperor's order, and
beheaded. Then the dissimulating madman turned on his benevolent brother
John, who had taken control of affairs in Bohemia during his
imprisonment, and poisoned him. It was a new proof of the old adage, it
is never safe to warm a frozen adder.
The restoration of Wenceslas was followed by other acts of folly. In the
following year, 1395, he sold to John Galcazzo Visconti, of Milan, the
dignity of a duke in Lombardy, a transaction which exposed him to
general contempt. At a later date he visited Paris, and here, in a
drunken frolic, he played into the hands of the King of France by ceding
Genoa to that country, and by recognizing the antipope at Avignon,
instead of Boniface IX. at Rome. These acts filled the cup of his folly.
The princes of the empire resolved to depose him. A council was called,
before which he was cited to appear. He refused to come, and was
formally deposed, Rupert, of the Palatinate, being elected in his stead.
Ten years afterwards, in 1410, Rupert died, and Sigismund became Emperor
of Germany.
Meanwhile, Wenceslas remained King of Bohemia, in spite of his brother
Sigismund, who sought to oust him from this throne also. He took him
prisoner, indeed, but trusted him to the Austrians, who at once set him
free, and the Bohemians replaced him on the throne. Some years
afterwards, war continuing, Wenceslas sought to get rid of his brother
Sigismund in the same manner as he had disposed of his brother John, by
poison. He was successful in having it administered to Sigismund and his
ally, Albert of Austria, in their camp before Zuaym. Albert died, but
Sigismund was saved by a rude treatment which seems to have been in
vogue in that day. He was suspended by the feet for twenty-four hours,
so that the poison ran out of his mouth.
The later events in the life of Wenceslas have to do with the most
famous era in the history of Bohemia, the reformation in that country,
and the stories of John Huss and Ziska. The fate of Huss is well known.
Summoned before the council at Constance, and promised a safe-conduct by
the Emperor Sigismund, he went, only to find the emperor faithless to
his word and himself condemned and burnt as a heretic. This base act of
treachery was destined to bring a bloody retribution. It infuriated the
reformers in Bohemia, who, after brooding for several years over their
wrongs, broke out into an insurrection of revenge.
The leader of this outbreak was an officer of experience, named John
Ziska, a man who had lost one eye in childhood, and who bitterly hated
the priesthood for a wrong done to one of his sisters. The martyrdom of
Huss threw him into such deep and silent dejection, that one day the
king, in whose court he was, asked him why he was so sad.
"Huss is burnt, and we have not yet avenged him," replied Ziska.
"I can do nothing in that direction," said Wenceslas; adding,
carelessly, "you might attempt it yourself."
This was spoken as a jest, but Ziska took it in deadly earnest. He,
aided by his friends, roused the people, greatly to the alarm of the
king, who ordered the citizens to bring their arms to the royal castle
of Wisherad, which commanded the city of Prague.
Ziska heard the command, and obeyed it in his own way. The arms were
brought, but they came in the hands of the citizens, who marched in long
files to the fortress, and drew themselves up before the king, Ziska at
their head.
"My gracious and mighty sovereign, here we are," said the bold leader;
"we await your commands; against what enemy are we to fight?"
Wenceslas looked at those dense groups of armed and resolute men, and
concluded that his purpose of disarming them would not work. Assuming a
cheerful countenance, he bade them return home and keep the peace. They
obeyed, so far as returning home was concerned. In other matters they
had learned their power, and were bent on exerting it.
Nicolas of Hussinez, Huss's former lord, and Ziska's seconder in this
outbreak, was banished from the city by the king. He went, but took
forty thousand men with him, who assembled on a mountain which was
afterwards known by the biblical name of Mount Tabor. Here several
hundred tables were spread for the celebration of the Lord's Supper,
July 22, 1419.
Wenceslas, in attempting to put a summary end to the disturbance in the
city, quickly made bad worse. He deposed the Hussite city council in the
Neustadt, the locality of greatest disturbance, and replaced it by a new
one in his own interests. This action filled Prague with indignation,
which was redoubled when the new council sent two clamorous Hussites to
prison. On the 30th of July Ziska led a strong body of his partisans
through the streets to the council-house, and sternly demanded that the
prisoners should be set free.
The councillors hesitated,--a fatal hesitation. A stone was flung from
one of the windows. Instantly the mob stormed the building, rushed into
the council-room, and seized the councillors, thirteen of whom, Germans
by birth, were flung out of the windows. They were received on the pikes
of the furious mob below, and the whole of them murdered.
This act of violence was quickly followed by others. The dwelling of a
priest, supposed to have been that of the seducer of Ziska's sister, was
destroyed and its owner hanged; the Carthusian monks were dragged
through the streets, crowned with thorns, and other outrages perpetrated
against the opponents of the party of reform.
A few days afterwards the career of Wenceslas, once Emperor of Germany,
now King of Bohemia, came to an abrupt end. On August 16 he suddenly
died,--by apoplexy, say some historians, while others say that he was
suffocated in his palace by his own attendants. The latter would seem a
fitting end for a man whose life had been marked by so many acts of
tyrannous violence, some of them little short of insanity.
Whatever its cause, his death removed the last restraint from the mob.
On the following day every church and monastery in Prague was assailed
and plundered, their pictures were destroyed, and the robes of the
priests were converted into flags and dresses. Many of these buildings
are said to have been splendidly decorated, and the royal palace, which
was also destroyed, had been adorned by Wenceslas and his father with
the richest treasures of art. We are told that on the walls of a garden
belonging to the palace the whole of the Bible was written. While the
work of destruction went on, a priest formed an altar in the street of
three tubs, covered by a broad table-top, from which all day long he
dispensed the sacrament in both forms.
The excesses of this outbreak soon frightened the wealthier citizens,
who dreaded an assault upon their wealth, and, in company with Sophia,
the widow of Wenceslas, they sent a deputation to the emperor, asking
him to make peace. He replied by swearing to take a fearful revenge on
the insurgents. The insurrection continued, despite this action of the
nobles and the threats of the emperor. Ziska, finding the citizens too
moderate, invited into the city the peasants, who were armed with
flails, and committed many excesses.
Forced by the moderate party to leave the city, Ziska led his new
adherents to Mount Tabor, which he fortified and prepared to defend.
They called themselves the "people of God," and styled their Catholic
opponents "Moabites," "Amalekites," etc., declaring that it was their
duty to extirpate them. Their leader entitled himself "John Ziska, of
the cup, captain, in the hope of God, of the Taborites."
But having brought the story of the Emperor Wenceslas to an end, we must
stop at this point. The after-life of John Ziska was of such stir and
interest, and so filled with striking events, that we shall deal with it
by itself, in a sequel to the present story.
_SEMPACH AND ARNOLD WINKELRIED._
Seventy years had passed since the battle of Morgarten, through which
freedom came to the lands of the Swiss. Throughout that long period
Austria had let the liberty-loving mountaineers alone, deterred by the
frightful lesson taught them in the bloody pass. In the interval the
confederacy had grown more extensive. The towns of Berne, Zurich,
Soleure, and Zug had joined it; and now several other towns and
villages, incensed by the oppression and avarice of their Austrian
masters, threw off the foreign yoke and allied themselves to the Swiss
confederacy. It was time for the Austrians to be moving, if they would
retain any possessions in the Alpine realm of rocks.
Duke Leopold of Austria, a successor to the Leopold who had learned so
well at Morgarten how the Swiss could strike for liberty, and as bold
and arrogant as he, grew incensed at the mountaineers for taking into
their alliance several towns which were subject to him, and vowed not
only to chastise these rebels, but to subdue the whole country, and put
an end to their insolent confederacy. His feeling was shared by the
Austrian nobles, one hundred and sixty-seven of whom joined in his
warlike scheme, and agreed to aid him in putting down the defiant
mountaineers.
War resolved upon, the Austrians laid a shrewd plan to fill the Swiss
confederates with terror in advance of their approach. Letters declaring
war were sent to the confederate assembly by twenty distinct expresses,
with the hope that this rapid succession of threats would overwhelm them
with fear. The separate nobles followed with their declarations. On St.
John's day a messenger arrived from Würtemberg bearing fifteen
declarations of war. Hardly had these letters been read when nine more
arrived, sent by John Ulric of Pfirt and eight other nobles. Others
quickly followed; it fairly rained declarations of war; the members of
the assembly had barely time to read one batch of threatening
fulminations before another arrived. Letters from the lords of Thurn
came after those named, followed by a batch from the nobles of
Schaffhausen. This seemed surely enough, but on the following day the
rain continued, eight successive messengers arriving, who bore no less
than forty-three declarations of war.
It seemed as if the whole north was about to descend in a cyclone of
banners and spears upon the mountain land. The assembly sat breathless
under this torrent of threats. Had their hearts been open to the
invasion of terror they must surely have been overwhelmed, and have
waited in the supineness of fear for the coming of their foes.
But the hearts of the Swiss were not of that kind. They were too full of
courage and patriotism to leave room for dismay. Instead of awaiting
their enemies with dread, a burning impatience animated their souls. If
liberty or death were the alternatives, the sooner the conflict began
the more to their liking it would be. The cry of war resounded through
the country, and everywhere, in valley and on mountain, by lake-side and
by glacier's rim, the din of hostile preparation might have been heard,
as the patriots arranged their affairs and forged and sharpened their
weapons for the coming fray.
Far too impatient were they to wait for the coming of Leopold and his
army. There were Austrian nobles and Austrian castles within their land.
No sooner was the term of the armistice at an end than the armed
peasantry swarmed about these strongholds, and many a fortress, long the
seat of oppression, was taken and levelled with the ground. The war-cry
of Leopold and the nobles had inspired a different feeling from that
counted upon.
It was not long before Duke Leopold appeared. At the head of a large and
well-appointed force, and attended by many distinguished knights and
nobles, he marched into the mountain region and advanced upon Sempach,
one of the revolted towns, resolved, he said, to punish its citizens
with a rod of iron for their daring rebellion.
On the 9th of July, 1386, the Austrian cavalry, several thousands in
number, reached the vicinity of Sempach, having distanced the
foot-soldiers in the impatient haste of their advance. Here they found
the weak array of the Swiss gathered on the surrounding heights, and as
eager as themselves for the fray. It was a small force, no stronger
than that of Morgarten, comprising only about fourteen hundred
poorly-armed men. Some carried halberds, some shorter weapons, while
some among them, instead of a shield, had only a small board fastened to
the left arm. It seemed like madness for such a band to dare contend
with the thousands of well-equipped invaders. But courage and patriotism
go far to replace numbers, as that day was to show.
Leopold looked upon his handful of foes, and decided that it would be
folly to wait for the footmen to arrive. Surely his host of nobles and
knights, with their followers, would soon sweep these peasants, like so
many locusts, from their path. Yet he remembered the confusion into
which the cavalry had been thrown at Morgarten, and deeming that
horsemen were ill-suited to an engagement on those wooded hill-sides, he
ordered the entire force to dismount and attack on foot.
The plan adopted was that the dismounted knights and soldiers should
join their ranks as closely as possible, until their front presented an
unbroken wall of iron, and thus arrayed should charge the enemy spear in
hand. Leaving their attendants in charge of their horses, the serried
column of footmen prepared to advance, confident of sweeping their foes
to death before their closely-knit line of spears.
Yet this plan of battle was not without its critics. The Baron of
Hasenburg, a veteran soldier, looked on it with disfavor, as contrasted
with the position of vantage occupied by the Swiss, and cautioned the
duke and his nobles against undue assurance.
"Pride never served any good purpose in peace or war," he said. "We had
much better wait until the infantry come up."
This prudent advice was received with shouts of derision by the nobles,
some of whom cried out insultingly,--
"Der Hasenburg hat ein Hasenherz" ("Hasenburg has a hare's heart," a
play upon the baron's name).
Certain nobles, however, who had not quite lost their prudence, tried to
persuade the duke to keep in the rear, as the true position for a
leader. He smiled proudly in reply, and exclaimed with impatience,--
"What! shall Leopold be a mere looker-on, and calmly behold his knights
die around him in his own cause? Never! here on my native soil with you
I will conquer or perish with my people." So saying, he placed himself
at the head of the troops.
And now the decisive moment was at hand. The Swiss had kept to the
heights while their enemy continued mounted, not venturing to face such
a body of cavalry on level ground. But when they saw them forming as
foot-soldiers, they left the hills and marched to the plain below. Soon
the unequal forces confronted each other; the Swiss, as was their
custom, falling upon their knees and praying for God's aid to their
cause; the Austrians fastening their helmets and preparing for the fray.
The duke even took the occasion to give the honor of knighthood to
several young warriors.
The day was a hot and close one, the season being that of harvest, and
the sun pouring down its unclouded and burning rays upon the combatants.
This sultriness was a marked advantage to the lightly-dressed
mountaineers as compared with the armor-clad knights, to whom the heat
was very oppressive.
The battle was begun by the Swiss, who, on rising from their knees,
flung themselves with impetuous valor on the dense line of spears that
confronted them. Their courage and fury were in vain. Not a man in the
Austrian line wavered. They stood like a rock against which the waves of
the Swiss dashed only to be hurled back in death. The men of Lucerne, in
particular, fought with an almost blind rage, seeking to force a path
through that steel-pointed forest of spears, and falling rapidly before
the triumphant foe.
Numbers of the mountaineers lay dead or wounded. The line of spears
seemed impenetrable. The Swiss began to waver. The enemy, seeing this,
advanced the flanks of his line so as to form a half-moon shape, with
the purpose of enclosing the small body of Swiss within a circle of
spears. It looked for the moment as if the struggle were at an end, the
mountaineers foiled and defeated, the fetters again ready to be locked
upon the limbs of free Switzerland.
But such was not to be. There was a man in that small band of patriots
who had the courage to accept certain death for his country, one of
those rare souls who appear from time to time in the centuries and win
undying fame by an act of self-martyrdom. Arnold of Winkelried was his
name, a name which history is not likely soon to forget, for by an
impulse of the noblest devotion this brave patriot saved the liberties
of his native land.
[Illustration: STATUE OF ARNOLD WINKELRIED.]
Seeing that there was but one hope for the Swiss, and that death must be
the lot of him who gave them that hope, he exclaimed to his comrades, in
a voice of thunder,--
"Faithful and beloved confederates, I will open a passage to freedom and
victory! Protect my wife and children!"
With these words, he rushed from his ranks, flung himself upon the
enemy's steel-pointed line, and seized with his extended arms as many of
the hostile spears as he was able to grasp, burying them in his body,
and sinking dead to the ground.
His comrades lost not a second in availing themselves of this act of
heroic devotion. Darting forward, they rushed over the body of the
martyr to liberty into the breach he had made, forced others of the
spears aside, and for the first time since the fray began reached the
Austrians with their weapons.
A hasty and ineffective effort was made to close the breach. It only
added to the confusion which the sudden assault had caused. The line of
hurrying knights became crowded and disordered. The furious Swiss broke
through in increasing numbers. Overcome with the heat, many of the
knights fell from exhaustion, and died without a wound, suffocated in
their armor. Others fell below the blows of the Swiss. The line of
spears, so recently intact, was now broken and pierced at a dozen
points, and the revengeful mountaineers were dealing death upon their
terrified and feebly-resisting foes.