For fifty days the negotiations continued.  Neither side would yield.  In the end, the Bohemians, weary of the protracted and fruitless debate, took to their horses again, and set out homewards.  This brought their enemies to terms.  An embassy was hastily sent after them, and all their demands were conceded, though with certain reservations that might prove perilous in the future.  They went home triumphant, having won freedom of religious worship according to their ideas of right and truth.

They had not long reached home when dissensions again broke out.  The emperor took advantage of them, accepted the crown of Bohemia, entered Prague, and at once reinstated the Catholic religion.  The fanatics flew to arms, but after a desperate struggle were annihilated.  The Bohemian struggle was at an end.  In the following year the emperor Sigismund died, having lived just long enough to win success in his long conflict.  The martyrdom of Huss, the valor and zeal of Ziska, appeared to have been in vain.  Yet they were not so, for the seeds they had sown bore fruit in the following century in a great sectarian revolt which affected all Christendom and permanently divided the Church.

THE SIEGE OF BELGRADE

The empire of Rome finally reached its end, not in the fifth century, as ordinarily considered, but in the fifteenth; not at Rome, but at Constantinople, where the Eastern empire survived the Western for a thousand years.  At length, in 1453, the Turks captured Constantinople, set a broad foot upon the degenerate empire of the East, and crushed out the last feeble remnants of life left in the pygmy successor of the colossus of the past.

And now Europe, which had looked on with clasped hands while the Turks swept over the Bosphorus and captured Constantinople, suddenly awoke to the peril of its situation.  A blow in time might have saved the Greek empire.  The blow had not been struck, and now Europe had itself to save.  Terror seized upon the nations which had let their petty intrigues stand in the way of that broad policy in which safety lay, for they could not forget past instances of Asiatic invasion.  The frightful ravages wrought by the Huns and the Avars were far in the past, but no long time had elapsed since the coming of the Magyars and the Mongols, and now here was another of those hordes of murderous barbarians, hanging like a cloud of war on the eastern skirt of Europe, and threatening to rain death and ruin upon the land.  The dread of the nations was not amiss.  They had neglected to strengthen the eastern barrier to the Turkish avalanche.  Now it threatened their very doors, and they must meet it at home.

The Turks were not long in making their purpose evident.  Within two years after the fall of Constantinople they were on the march again, and had laid siege to Belgrade, the first obstacle in their pathway to universal conquest.  The Turkish cannons were thundering at the doors of Europe.  Belgrade fallen, Vienna would come next, and the march of the barbarians might only end at the sea.