A Bohemian nobleman, Christopher Harant, of Polzitz, is one of those travellers to whom we are indebted for our knowledge of the state of Palestine, Egypt, and other Eastern countries whilst the Turkish power was still the dread scourge of Christendom. In those days pilgrimages were not made at ease by the aid of railways and steamboats, but in disguise and at the risk of life. Harant himself was originally a Catholic, but eventually joined the Utraquist communion, and was beheaded along with Bohemia's best and noblest, Ferdinand II., on June 21, 1621. Bohemia's liberties were then destroyed, her language and literature proscribed, her population reduced by exile and war from four millions to eight hundred thousand, and Jesuit supremacy culminated in the canonization of St John Nepomucen, the pseudo-protomartyr of the confessional, and the basis of an extraordinary blunder of the most untrustworthy of chroniclers, Hayik, crystallized in a fiction written by the Jesuit Balbinus, and finally accepted as genuine history by the Roman Curia.