I 150 Robert Novotný one confession often meant a struggle for the maintenance of the new conditions, and vice versa— behind their religious argumentation, Catholics may have desired a restoration of the pre-revolutionary situation. The limits of inter-confessional toleration were thus often determined by its potential to threaten either side’s position. Other factors may have come into play as well. For example, mining towns such as Kutná Hora needed experts who had been expelled during the revolution. A special case in point was the Prague, where the operation of country-wide institutions kept the metropolis open to both confessions. Of course, the circumstances in the royal towns were different from those in the liege towns. The inhabitants of the royal cities had a relatively free hand in this respect, since the sovereign’s power was weak and could not effectively influence the situation. Despite his efforts to restore pre-war conditions in the capital, King Sigismund actually only damaged his position, and his short reign (1436/7) did not have much effect. The episodic reign of Albert of Habsburg (1438/9) was followed by a fourteen year interregnum. When Ladislaus the Posthumous took the throne in 1453, his attempts to change the confessional situation were at first thwarted by his right-hand man, George of Poděbrady, only to be finally suppressed with Ladislaus’s premature death in 1457. George, who then took over the government, honoured the Compactata with an almost scrupulous diligence. The first major attempt to change the conditions—especially in Prague—was not made until almost half a century after the conclusion of the Compactata by Vladislaus Jagiellon (1471– 1516), but his efforts had the opposite effect and ended in a definitive recognition of the status quo. The Peace of Kutná Hora, concluded in 1485, marked the confirmation of the Compactata policy, and the beginning of a new era of religious tolerance.5 Of the forty Bohemian royal cities, the vast majority became Hussite during the wars, although key towns such as Plzeň, České Budějovice, and Cheb retained their Catholic faith. While the cities loyal to the Roman Church had recognised Sigismund of Luxembourg as the rightful ruler since 1420, the Hussite towns were wary of him. Therefore, under the leadership of Prague, the Hussite royal cities drew up a list of conditions for Sigismund’s confirmation, raised at the land diet in March 1435.6 Of the 22 demands made of the king, more than half concerned religious and ecclesiastical matters, mostly demanding the Utraquist confession. In contrast to the often unrealistic demands of the noble curia at the diet (all of Sigismund’s chaplains were to be Utraquists, and the same was to apply to the members of the Royal Council),7 the city’s demands were more feasible. There was a natural emphasis on the Utraquist confession of the sub-chamberlain who adminis5 František Šmahel, “Pax externa et interna. Vom Heiligen Krieg zur Erzwungenen Toleranz im hussitischem Böhmen (1419–1485),” in Toleranz im Mittelalter, eds. Alexander Patschovsky and Harald Zimmermann, Voträge und Forschungen, 45 (Sigmaringen, 1998), 221–73. 6 Latin version: “Aegidii Carlerii liber de legationibus concilii Basiliensis pro reductione Bohemorum,” in Monumenta conciliorum generalium seculi decimi quinti, vol. 1, Concilium Basileense, eds. František Palacký and Ernst Birk (Vienna, 1857), no. 204, 537–38 (contains 27 articles). A different Czech version: Archiv český, čili, Staré písemné památky české i moravské, vol. 1, 3, 4, 7, 17, ed. František Palacký and Josef Kalousek (Prague, 1840, 1844, 1846, 1887, 1895, 1899), here vol. 3, no. 10, 420 (some articles are linked here, so it includes only 22 articles). On the versions, see Ivan Hlaváček, “Husitské sněmy,” Sborník historický 4 (1956): 99–100. An analysis is in Šmahel, Die Hussitische Revolution, vol. 3, 1656–59. 7 Archiv český, vol. 3, no. 10, 419.
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