ISSN:
0080-4401
Source:
Cambridge Journals Digital Archives
Topics:
History
Notes:
The great Hussite movement at the commencement of the fifteenth century has never yet been satisfactorily accounted for. Even Palacky, writing under the strict and vexatious censorship of the press at Vienna, has been unable to display in their fulness the various forces which then acted in the same or in parallel directions, and produced that tremendous explosion which shook the Church of Rome to its foundations, and placed the four millions of Bohemian or Czeskish Slavonians for a time, both morally and intellectually, at the head of the nations of Europe. That movement was at once national, intellectual, literary, religious, and also historical; that is to say, one of the forces which tended to produce it was traditional, and arose from the fact that Bohemia was originally converted by Greek missionaries, possessed a Slavonic ritual of its own, and permitted the use of the chalice to the laity. Hence the surname of the ever-victorious, though eventually totally blind, leader of the Hussites, Ziska z Kalichu, “Ziska of the Chalice,” the chalice which was borne on the banners of the Hussite armies, and is even now the only ornament allowed in the simple Protestant chapels thinly scattered through the north of Bohemia.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3677929
