But the power of the Emperor was growing more and more nominal, and less and less real, and many States and cities were shaking off its burden. It was a time when authority both of Church and State was {217} in dispute. John Huss, a Bohemian preacher, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, had taken up, as we have seen on p. 195, the doctrines of our Wycliffe and preached eloquently against the evil practices which had come into the Church. He had a very large following. Just as had happened in England, the Hussite attack on the authority of the Church became associated with an attack on the civil authority too. But this latter attack was checked in England by the defeat of Wat Tyler's rebellion and by the cruel measures taken to put down the Lollards, who carried on the doctrines of Wycliffe. Huss was burnt, as a heretic, at Rome, whither he had been summoned to give an account of his doings, in spite of an assurance of safe-conduct made to him by the King of the Romans. This made Huss a martyr in the eyes of his followers, and his popular movement in Bohemia gained great force. A regular Hussite army was formed. The Bohemians were akin to the Slavs rather than the Teutons, and this revolutionary force became a menace not only in Bohemia itself but in other States of the Empire. When armies were sent against the Hussites, the latter, fired, like the Puritans later, with religious zeal, always had the advantage. But they do not seem to have tried to take possession of territory. They fought for what may be shortly called reformation in the Church. The great Reformation, under Luther's lead, was still to come, in the following century, but we may regard our own Wycliffe as its forerunner, with Huss as his disciple, preparing the way for Luther. [Sidenote: The Hussite rising] The Hussite revolution was set to rest by a compact, made in 1436, to which the Church of Rome itself was a party. Larger freedom in religious ceremonies, and relinquishment by the clergy of their worldly wealth, were the two principal points agreed in the compact. But the agreement was not very faithfully carried out. {218} CHAPTER XXIII THE TURKS IN EUROPE I have now tried to tell you the story--up to the year 1500 and the beginning of that century which was to see the new birth of learning and the reformation in the Church--of the way in which most of the countries of Europe settled down nearly into the shape in which we see them now, or see them in maps made before the Great War. There remains one corner of the picture, the south-eastern corner, which we still have to look at; and there we find that a people entirely strange to Europe entered into possession during the fifteenth century. That people were the Ottoman Turks who had succeeded to the rule of the Mahommedan world, which they had wrested from their own kinsmen the Seljuk Turks.