The Slavs Enter History
Earlier the Slavs were like flotsam on a flood. The waves carried them sometimes west toward the Elbe, sometimes south to the Mediterranean, sometimes east toward the Urals, and even north toward the Arctic. Then in the thirteenth century Teutonic and Livonian knights in the west and Mongols and Tatars in the east held them back. In the fourteenth century Bohemia led the Holy Roman Empire and the movement of reform before Luther, and Poland united with a vast country, Lithuania, to become a great power whose upper class was a highly intelligent and cultured people. In the fifteenth century Russia pulled itself out from under Tatar domination and organized its scattered lands into a vast state. Like a great wave rising with the tide, the Slavs suddenly came onto the stage of history.
John the Blind
In 1306, with the death of Wenceslaus III, the ancient Přemyslid dynasty ended in Bohemia. After a prelude of minor kings, the council of electors, made up of barons and clergy, began a new dynasty by electing John of Luxembourg king (1310). His valiant deeds made Bohemia for a generation, willy-nilly, a base of chivalry. Life without tournaments was hard for him, and since these contests did not fully satisfy him, he led armies to every corner of Europe. It became a common saying in his day that "without God's help and the King of Bohemia's, nothing can be done."
When Brescia was besieged by the army of Verona, it asked his help, and he promised to come; the Veronese, hearing of his approach, lifted the siege. Brescia, Bergamo, Cremona, Parma and even Milan willingly accepted him as their lord in return for protection. What Frederick I Barbarossa and Frederick II, "wonder of the world," had been unable to win with armies and arms, this king won with the magic of his name alone.
His bold wars enlarged Bohemia, but at the price of his people's affection. They could not forgive him, for he was often away from the country, neglected its government and never even learned to speak the people's language. In 1336, while on a crusade in Lithuania, he fell ill with a disease that made him blind. Even so, when he heard that Edward III of England had landed in Normandy and was marching on Paris, he crossed Europe with his son Charles and five hundred Bohemian knights to help the King of France. Father and son fought at Crécy against England. When the French army began to retreat, the blind king ordered two knights to tie their horses on either side of his and lead him against the victorious English. "God's will has fallen thus," he said. "People must not say that the King of Bohemia fled the field." Fifty of his knights were killed around him, and he took mortal wounds himself and was carried dying to the English king's tent. Edward sent the body to Charles with a royal message: today the crown of chivalry has fallen.
Charles IV in Prague
Charles IV did not equal his father in heroism, but was wiser. He preferred negotiation to war, though he was not so timid as to accept any compromise. Even so, he enlarged his kingdom's borders. During his thirty-two-year reign he kept Slavs and Germans in an unexpected peace. He gave government a new structure, reformed justice and made Prague one of Europe's beautiful cities. There, in the style of the Louvre, he built a royal palace and the famous fortress of Karlštejn as a repository for state documents and the royal jewels. The jewels were not for show but to form a secure financial reserve backing the country's coinage.
He called Matthew of Arras to design St. Vitus Cathedral and Tommaso da Modena to paint murals in churches and palaces. He protected peasants from oppression and fostered trade and industry. He founded the University of Prague (1347). He transmitted to his people the useful things he had himself gained from French and Italian civilization, and planted in minds the intellectual impulses that exploded in the Hussite revolution. His court became the center of Bohemian humanists, whose leader was Bishop Giovanni d'Astraża, a friend of Petrarch. Petrarch admired Charles above all the kings of his age. He met him in Prague and urged him to take up the conquest of Italy, but Charles thought and felt better than he.
His reign, despite the Golden Bull, was the golden age of Bohemian history. In Prague Cathedral a splendid, beautiful bust of him survives, carved in limestone and smiling, which keeps his memory alive.
Wenceslaus IV
Wenceslaus IV was eighteen when his father died (1378). His good nature, his love for his subjects, his moderation in taxing them and his shrewdness in running the state made everyone love him, except the nobles, who thought his popularity endangered their privileges. His occasional bursts of temper and his fondness for drink gave them a pretext to remove him. In 1394 they suddenly appeared at his country castle, imprisoned him, and restored him only on the condition that he do nothing without the consent of a council of nobles and clergy.
New struggles arose. The nobles called on Sigismund, King of Hungary, who arrested his brother Wenceslaus and took him to Vienna in custody (1402). Wenceslaus escaped some years later, returned to Bohemia, was warmly welcomed and regained his throne. The rest of his reign is intertwined with the tragedy of Jan Hus.
Czechs and Germans
Wenceslaus looked on Germans with anger and aversion and on heresy with tolerance and indifference, so he was both hated and respected. Through the rapid influx of German miners, craftsmen, merchants and students into Bohemia, fierce ethnic hostility had arisen between Teutons and Czechs. Had Hus not symbolized the people's resistance to German domination, he would not have been so supported, by the Czechs and their kings. Wenceslaus never forgot that it was German bishops who led the revolt that deposed him as king of the Romans. His sister Anne had married Richard II of England, had seen Wycliffe's efforts to separate England from the Roman Church, and probably sympathized with them.
In 1388 Adalbert Ranconis left funds to send Bohemian students to Paris or Oxford. Some of these students in England got hold of Wycliffe's works, copied them and took them home. Milíč of Kroměříž and Konrad Waldhauser denounced the moral drift of laity and clergy and awakened the people of Prague. Matthias of Janov and Thomas of Štítný continued their preaching. The emperor and even Archbishop Ernest viewed the movement with favor, and in 1391 a special church, the Bethlehem Chapel, was founded in Prague to lead the movement of church reform.
Jan Hus Begins
In 1402 Jan Hus became preacher of the Bethlehem Chapel. He was born in the village of Husinec and was known as Jan of Husinec, but later shortened the name to Hus. About 1390 he came to Prague to study, and, having no means, supported himself by serving in churches. He meant to become a priest, but, as was the way of the day, he gave himself to what the French later called the pleasant "Bohemian" life of university youth. In 1396 he took his master's degree and began to teach at the university. In 1401 he was elected dean of the faculty of arts. That same year he was ordained and gave himself an ascetic life like a monk's. As head of the Bethlehem Chapel he was Prague's most famous preacher. Many court notables were among his hearers, and Queen Sophia made him her chaplain. Hus preached in Czech and taught his congregation to take part in worship by singing religious hymns.
His accusers later insisted that from the start Hus had repeated Wycliffe's teaching about the disappearance of bread and wine from the consecrated elements of the Eucharist. Undoubtedly he had read some of Wycliffe's works and made copies, which still exist with his notes and marginal comments. At his trial he confessed: "I am certain that Wycliffe will be saved, but even if I thought he was not saved and was among the damned, I would still wish my soul to be with his."
The Break with the Archbishop
In 1403 Wycliffe's ideas had gained such acceptance at the University of Prague that the Church office extracted forty-one items from his writings, gave them to the university masters and asked whether the spread of these views in the university should be prevented. A few masters, including Hus, said no, but the majority ruled that no member of the university might defend or favor these forty-one opinions, either privately or publicly. Hus ignored the prohibition, and in 1408 the Prague clergy asked Archbishop Zbyněk to rebuke him. The Archbishop, then in dispute with the king, acted with great caution. But when Hus openly supported Wycliffe's opinions, Zbyněk excommunicated him and several companions (1409), and when they continued their priestly duties he ordered all clergy to stop religious services in Prague. He also ordered a search through Bohemia for all Wycliffe's writings to be handed over to him. Two hundred copies were found and brought to him, and Zbyněk burned them in his palace courtyard. Hus appealed to John XXIII, newly seated as pope, who summoned him to appear before the papal court. Hus refused.
Indulgences and the Stand against the Pope
In 1411 the Pope, needing money for a crusade against Ladislas, King of Naples, announced that new indulgences would be granted to the people. When this was proclaimed in Prague, to reformers it seemed that the Pope's agents were selling indulgences for money. Hus and his great supporter Jerome of Prague preached openly against the sale of indulgences, questioned the existence of purgatory and attacked the Church for shedding Christian blood to gather money. Hus went further and called the Pope a thief, a usurper and even Antichrist. Most of the people favored Hus and mocked and abused the papal agents so much that the king forbade any preaching or action against the grant of indulgences. Three young men who ignored the ban were called before the town council. Hus interceded for them, saying his sermons had stirred them. They were condemned and beheaded.
The Pope then excommunicated Hus, and when Hus ignored it, John forbade religious services in any city where Hus stayed (1411). On the king's advice Hus left Prague and lived for two years in isolation in the villages outside the city.
Hus's Writings and Ideas
In these two years he wrote his greatest works, some in Latin and some in Czech. Almost all of them take inspiration from Wycliffe, and some perhaps carry the heresies that remnants of the Waldensians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had brought to Bohemia. Hus rejected the worship of images and statues, private confession, and the excess of religious ceremony. By attacking the Germans and favoring the Slavs, he gave his movement an ethnic and popular color. In his treatise on simony he attacked clergy who bought and sold sacred things and church offices; in his book on the six errors he condemned fees taken by priests for baptism, confirmation, Mass, marriage or burial; he accused some Prague clergy of selling holy oil; and he endorsed Wycliffe's view that a priest who commits simony cannot perform rites validly.
His treatise On the Church is at once his defense and the cause of his destruction. The heresies for which he was burned were drawn from its pages. Following Wycliffe, Hus believed in predestination and, like Wycliffe, Marsilius and William of Ockham, held that the Church should own no worldly property. Like Calvin, he held that the Church is neither the clergy alone nor all Christians, but the whole body of the saved, in heaven and on earth. Its head is Christ, not the Pope, and the guide of Christians is Scripture, not the Pope. The Pope, in faith or morals, is not immune from error; he too may be a stubborn sinner or heretic. A legend then current, believed by some (even Gerson), told of a false pope, John VIII, who gave birth to a child in the streets of Rome, and Hus seized on it in attacking the popes. In sum, Hus held that a pope is to be obeyed only when his orders accord with Christ's laws and words; otherwise "rebelling against the Pope is the right course, and rising against him is in truth obeying Christ."
The Journey to Constance
In 1414 a general council of the Church met at Constance to depose three rival popes and draw up a program of reform, and it seemed a good moment for reconciling the Hussites with the Church. Emperor Sigismund, who was the likely heir of the childless Wenceslaus IV, was anxious to establish religious unity and peace in Bohemia. He proposed that Hus go to Constance and try to reach a settlement with the Church. He promised him safe conduct on the dangerous journey, and, if the council's decision was not acceptable to him, safe return to Bohemia, and permission to state his views openly before the public at the council. Although friends warned him against the journey and feared for him, Hus set out for Constance (October 1414) with three Czech nobles and a number of friends. At the same time, Štěpán Páleč and other Bohemian opponents went to Constance with an indictment to accuse him before the council.
Imprisonment and Hearing
At first Hus was treated with courtesy and freedom. But when Páleč laid before the council a list of Hus's heresies, he was summoned and questioned, and his answers convinced them they were dealing with a major heretic. They ordered him imprisoned. Hus fell ill in prison and nearly died; Pope John XXIII sent his own physician. Sigismund complained that the council had violated the safe conduct he had given Hus, but was told that the council did not guarantee his pledge, that intervening in spiritual affairs was beyond his authority, and that the Church had the right to disregard the law of the land in trying enemies of the faith.
In April Hus was taken to the castle of Gottlieben on the Rhine, chained, and fed so little that he again fell ill. Meanwhile his heretical friend Jerome of Prague had hurried to Constance and posted on the city gates, the churches and the cardinals' houses a request that the emperor and council grant him a safe conduct and the right to speak in public. At the urging of Hus's friends he left for Bohemia, but along the way he stopped and preached against the council's treatment of Hus. He was seized, brought back to Constance and imprisoned.
On 5 July, and again on the seventh and eighth, after seven months of detention, Hus was brought in chains before the council. He was asked his view on forty-five propositions drawn from Wycliffe and condemned as erroneous; he rejected most and admitted a few. Then passages drawn from his own book on the Church were put before him. He declared himself ready to give up any opinion the council could refute from Scripture (exactly what Luther would do at Worms). The council replied that not everyone can interpret Scripture, that this is the task of the Church's leaders, and demanded that he retract, without evasion, everything drawn from his book. Hus refused, and when he declared that a ruler, secular or spiritual, who commits grave sin is no longer a lawful ruler, he lost even the goodwill the hesitant emperor had for him.
The Council's Dilemma
Sigismund now told Hus that if the council condemned him, his safe conduct would automatically lapse. After three days of interrogation, and fruitless efforts by the emperor and cardinals to make him recant, Hus was returned to prison. The council gave him and its own members four weeks to consider, since to decide the case was harder for the council than for Hus. How could it let a heretic live without branding as null all the policies carried out against heresy in the past, and calling them inhuman crimes? How could a council that had pulled popes from their seats accept that a simple Bohemian priest should refuse its orders?
Was the Church not, as the state was the body's weapon of society, society's spiritual weapon, responsible for the moral order, which needed an undisputed authority if the foundations of society were to hold? To attack that authority was in the council's eyes plain sin, as taking up arms against the king was plain treason. Another century was needed for ideas to mature before Luther could say the same words in his own defense and live.
The Fire
Further efforts were made to get Hus to retract, at least in appearance. The emperor secretly sent agents to talk with him. But he always gave the same first answer: he was ready to retract any of his views that were shown from Scripture to be wrong. On 6 July 1415, in Constance cathedral, the council condemned Wycliffe and Hus, ordered Hus's writings burned and handed him to the civil authorities for punishment. At once they stripped him of his clerical robes and led him outside the city, where logs were piled. For the last time he was offered the chance to recant and save his life. He refused. The flames closed around him as he sang.
Jerome of Prague
In a moment when fear had overcome him, and for which he deserves forgiveness, Jerome disavowed his friend's teachings before the council (10 September 1415). He was returned to prison, where his fear gradually passed and he recovered his courage. He asked to speak, and after a long delay was brought before the council (23 May 1416). But instead of letting him speak of his own situation, they first demanded he answer certain charges. With stirring eloquence, which moved Poggio Bracciolini, the skeptical but politic Italian humanist who attended the council as secretary to Pope John XXIII, he protested the council's conduct.
In substance he said: what injustice is this, that you deny me an hour to defend myself? I have been three hundred and forty days in a filthy prison without means of defense, while my enemies have always filled your ears. Your minds have taken on prejudice against me as a heretic. You condemned me before you knew what kind of man I am and what way I follow. Yet you are human, not God; you are mortal, not eternal; like all people you can err. The more you claim to be the lamp of mankind, the more careful you should be to show the world your justice. I have no family or backing here, and I do not speak for myself, for death ends the life of us all. But I believe that so many wise men gathered in this council must not commit an unjust act, since by setting a precedent of injustice you would do humanity more harm than the penalty you inflict on me.
The charges were read one by one and he answered all, without disavowing them. At last, allowed to speak, his sincerity and ardor moved all the members. Jerome reviewed historical cases in which men were put to death for their beliefs, noted how St. Stephen was condemned by the priests, and declared that there is no greater sin than priests staining their hands with the blood of another priest. The council hoped that by begging forgiveness he would save his life. But instead of seeking pardon, Jerome retracted his earlier retraction, affirmed his belief in Wycliffe and Hus and called the burning of Hus a crime for which the hand of God would soon come out of the sleeve of justice.
The council gave him four days to reconsider. When he did not repent of his words, he was condemned (30 May). At once he was led to the same place where Hus had been burned. When the executioners went behind him to light the piles of wood, Jerome ordered them: "Come and light them before my eyes; if I feared death, I would never have come here." He began to sing hymns until the smoke choked him.