The study characterizes late Renaissance and Manneristic society's political events as a labrinth, which was, in the Czech lands of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a situation synonymous with irrational intellectual and uncontrollable human forces. The perceptions of public life and political events as universally chaotic appeared widely in Europe, but in the Czech environment they were strengthened by an extraordinary escalation of antagonisms and the breakdown of the state's estate-based political system. The factual decay of the state and estate structures did not, however, make it impossible for Comenius, who was teoretically identified with the idea of the estate-based monarchy, to come out of the existing political relationships and attempt to resuscitate the situation that existed before the Battle of the White Mountain. The analysis documents Comenius continued attemps to influence actively the political events in the course of the Thirty Years' War and in the twenty years following it, and Comenius failure to achieve a single serious success. His theoretical abilities are contrasted with his lack of knowledge of the mechanisms of pragmatic politics, shown by his use of too traditional, even antiquated methods. He was reliant on dynastic continuity, arranged marriage alliances and appealed to the historical anchors of international solidarity; for emotional reasons he overvalued the subjects of his own interests (the question of Bohemia, confessional interests) and undervalued the real economic and political interests of states and other important groups in the day's power configuration. As a religious exile he became severed from the Czech environment that he on the one hand wanted to help, but which on the other he also ceased to understand. He lacked diplomacy and consistent loyalty towards the governments from whom he expected support for his political purposes. As an absolutely powerless man in terms of power politics, he could only put to use his scholarly repute and the propagandistic force of the Revelations. He could not, however, carry out even a fragment of his ambitious plans with these alone. Even if Comenius raised himself above the standard level of statesmen of the seventeenth century, he could barely bring himself closer to his goals, for the question of Bohemia was negatively adjudicated already at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War and the new balance of forces in central Europe gave no proof of the return of an antiHabsburg coalition. However, by non-standard proceedings Comenius managed to hold up the inner freedom nad spiritual integrity that made it possible for him to solve basic social problems without being limited by contemporary political consciousness and to bridge the labyrinths of seventeenth-century universal reformist conceptions.
