Nor must we forget that Maximilian had to deal with the same insoluble problem for which Charles IV. had only provided a temporary solution. Ferdinand had reigned for nearly thirty years as King of Bohemia, before he had been forced to assume the burden of the German Empire. Maximilian had to take up both these responsibilities at the same time; and, apart from the enormous intellectual and moral difference between Maximilian of Austria and Charles of Luxemburg, the problem with which the later Emperor had to deal was infinitely more complicated than any which presented itself to the statesmen of the fourteenth century. The difference between Protestant and Catholic was in itself enough to introduce years of division and war into the Empire; but that element of confusion was now trebly increased by the new sects into which Lutheranism had been divided, and by the still keener political divisions between the Lutherans and Calvinists. In Bohemia, again, the same difficulties presented themselves in an even more complicated form; for, while many of the Bohemian Reformers had identified their cause with that of the Lutherans, the old feeling of national distinction was driving many into opposition to the aggressive character of the German movement, and compelling them to seek for a new religious centre which should be neither Papal nor German. As the Utraquists could no longer supply such a centre, the championship of Bohemian feeling rapidly passed to the leaders of the Bohemian Brotherhood. The great defender of the national and distinctive position of the Brotherhood, against the encroachments of the Lutherans, was that Blahoslav who had already become prominent as a negotiator with foreign Protestants, and who was ultimately to become the historian of the Brotherhood. He had already vindicated the specially Bohemian character of the Brotherhood against a critic who had tried to identify them with the Franco-Italian sect of the Waldenses; and so keen had Blahoslav and his friends been in the assertion of their national position, that they had been willing sometimes to speak of themselves as “the remains of the Taborites,” choosing rather to identify their cause with a Bohemian sect so different from them both in spirit and doctrine, than with a French or Italian community, however like them in every respect but race.