The composition of these memoirs seems to have inspired Slavata with a taste for historical studies. In the last years of his life he wrote a vast history of all the lands ruled by the House of Habsburg, from the reign of Ferdinand I. to Slavata's own time. This book, entitled Historické Spisovani ("Historical Works"), consists of fourteen volumes, and the earlier memoirs were incorporated with it, forming (of course not in chronological order) volumes i. and ii. The work includes a lengthy treatise on the long-disputed question whether the Bohemian kingdom was an elective or a hereditary one, a question which the battle of the White Mountain settled "by blood and iron." Slavata here displays a considerable amount of erudition, though the arguments founded on his accounts of the reigns of the almost entirely mythical early Prěmyslide princes are, of course, valueless. Generally speaking, Slavata's record of earlier events, based principally on such doubtful authorities as Ænæas Sylvius and Hajek, do not possess the historical value which undoubtedly belongs to his personal recollections.
Though written in Latin, Andreas ab Habernfeld's Bellum Bohemicum and Paulus Stransky's Respublica Bojema should at least be mentioned, as they belong to this period. Habernfeld, who himself took part in the last war waged by Bohemia as an independent country, and was present at the battle of the White Mountain, has left us a clear though prejudiced account of the events of the years 1618 to 1620. Paulus Stransky, one of the many Bohemian Protestants who ended their lives as exiles, has given a short but lucid account of the ancient Bohemian constitution, and in the same volume a short history of his country.
FOOTNOTES:
[120] Edited and published by Dr. Erben in 1851.
[121] It is impossible to translate this pun. Bartholomew plays on the similarity of the name "Vrat" to the words zvratiti and převratiti (to overturn and to overthrow).
[122] It is impossible to paraphrase in fewer than eight words the Bohemian word nemistrovany.
[123] See my Bohemia, an Historical Sketch, pp. 231, 232.
[124] See Chapter IV.