It was, therefore, as the champion of Holy Church against its oppressor, that Rupert was chosen Holy Roman Emperor. In this character he at once marched into Bohemia and won the support of Jodok and the discontented nobles. Again Wenceslaus was forced to make terms with his enemies; and again Sigismund was called in and appointed Viceroy. But Sigismund gained favour with no party. Jodok and his friends resented the power entrusted to him; the citizens of Bohemia complained of the heavy taxes which he laid upon them; and Wenceslaus resisted his proposal that he should counteract the schemes of Rupert by accompanying Sigismund to Rome, and by accepting the Imperial crown from the Pope. Finding his plans thwarted, Sigismund suddenly seized upon his brother, and carried him off as prisoner to Vienna. From this imprisonment Wenceslaus succeeded in escaping in 1403; and, on his return to Prague, he was welcomed as the liberator of Bohemia from Sigismund. In the meantime the reform movement had been approaching a crisis. The teacher who, after the death of Milic, had gained most influence in the country, was a Bohemian nobleman named Matthias of Janov. He had not devoted himself so exclusively as Conrad and Milic had done to the denunciation of moral abuses, but had also attacked practices like the worship of images and saints; and he had been the first to bring before the public the question which was afterwards to be so interesting to Bohemians, the granting of the cup to the laity in the Holy Communion. But though this latter fact gives Matthias a kind of historic interest, he seems to have been in the main a source of weakness to the cause which he defended. Never wholly disinterested in his objects, he soon flinched from the attacks of the rulers of the Church; and in 1389 he formally recanted his reforming doctrines. [Illustration: VILLAGE OF HUSINEC.] Along with the movement for ecclesiastical reform, the Bohemian national revival had been steadily making way; and the opposition of the German party had served to deepen the zeal of the reformers for the encouragement of the Bohemian languages. A most important link was formed in 1396 between the linguistic and the moral revival. In that year a man named John of Milheim founded a chapel which was to be entirely devoted to Bohemian preaching, in order, as its founder expressed it, “that the Word of God should not be fettered, and that Bohemian preachers should not be obliged to go from house to house.” The new foundation was to be called the Bethlehem Chapel, and was to be consecrated to the Holy Innocents. Strange to say, the first three preachers seem to have been somewhat hesitating and uncertain in their tendencies; and it was not till 1402 that the appointment of Jan Hus secured to the Bethlehem Chapel a special position in the history of Bohemia. [Illustration: HUSINEC, SHOWING COTTAGE WHERE HUS WAS BORN.]