A National Revolt
When couriers brought news of Hus's death to Bohemia, a national revolution broke out. An assembly of Bohemian and Moravian nobles sent the Council of Constance a letter bearing the signatures of five hundred Czech notables (2 September 1415). According to this attestation, Hus was a devout and upright Catholic whose killing was an insult to his country, and the signers declared that as long as they lived they would fight to defend the laws and teaching of Christ against doctrines of human invention. In another declaration the assembly announced that from now on they would obey only those papal rulings consistent with the text of Scripture, and that judgment of this agreement lay with the University of Prague.
The university itself saluted Hus as a martyr for truth and praised Jerome, then still in prison. The Council of Constance ordered the rebel nobles to appear before a court and answer the heresies attributed to them. No one paid any attention. The council ordered the university closed, but most professors and students went on with their work.
The Chalice and the Four Articles
About 1412 a follower of Hus, Jakoubek of Stříbro, proposed that Christians return to the practice of the early church, which celebrated the Eucharist in both kinds, with bread and with wine, throughout Christendom. Hus, as the idea gained support among his followers from top to bottom, endorsed it. The Council of Constance banned the custom and held that giving it up was necessary, on the pretext that it risked the spilling of Christ's blood. After Hus's death the University of Prague and the nobility, led by Queen Sophia, declared communion in both kinds permissible, according to Christ's own command, and the wine chalice became the symbol of the revolution of the "Utraquists."
In 1420 the Hussites presented the resolution known as the "Four Articles of Prague" as their basic demands. They were: celebration of the Eucharist in both kinds, with bread and with wine; prompt punishment of those who trade in church offices; unhindered preaching of the word of God as the only standard and source of religious truths and acts; and an end to the unlimited material possessions of priests and monks. A radical minority among the revolutionaries rejected veneration of relics, capital punishment, belief in purgatory and the saying of Masses for the dead. All the elements of the Lutheran Reformation were gathered in the Hussite revolution.
Defenestration and War
King Wenceslaus, who at first had favored the movement, probably because it transferred church property to the state, became alarmed when he saw both spiritual and civil authority endangered. In the "New Town" he had added to Prague, he appointed only anti-Hussites to the town council, and they issued harsh penal laws to suppress heretics. On 30 July 1419 a crowd of Hussites rushed into the New Town, forced their way to the council hall, threw the councilors out of the windows, and their comrades below finished the job. An assembly of townspeople elected a number of Hussites to the council. Wenceslaus accepted the new choice, and then died of a stroke (1419).
The Bohemian nobles proposed to elect Sigismund king if he would accept the Four Articles of Prague. Sigismund refused, called on all Czechs to submit fully to the Church, and burned a Bohemian who would not deny "the chalice." The new pope, Martin V, proclaimed a crusade against the Bohemian heretics, and Sigismund marched on Prague with a huge army (1420). The Hussites raised an army overnight. From every town of Bohemia and Moravia fervent new soldiers were sent, and Jan Žižka, a one-eyed knight of sixty, trained them and led them to incredible conquests. Twice they crushed Sigismund's armies. Sigismund prepared another army, but when news came that Žižka's men were advancing, the new army fled in total disorder without even seeing the enemy.
Revolution's Contradictions
Žižka's Puritans, drunk with victory, now took from their opponents the idea that religious differences should be settled by force. Like a devastating storm they swept across Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, plundering monasteries, massacring monks and forcing people to accept the Four Articles. The Germans living in Bohemia, who chose to remain Catholic, were fine game for the Hussite troops. For seventeen years (1419–1436) Bohemia was without a king.
Conflicting elements had come together to make the revolution. Native Bohemians resented the wealth and pride of the Germans living in their country and wanted them driven out. The nobles coveted the lands of church and clergy and thought the clergy deserved to be expelled. The proletariat hoped to free itself from the yoke of middle-class masters. The middle class hoped to increase its small power against that of the aristocrats in the diet that governed Prague and sometimes decided who governed Bohemia. Serfs, especially those on church estates, dreamed of dividing and taking those holy lands. Some lower clergy, who had been oppressed and plundered by high clerics, implicitly supported the revolutionaries and performed for them the religious rites the Church had forbidden.
When the Hussites, relying on their own power and army, controlled most of Bohemia, differences of aim split them into factions thirsting for one another's blood. The nobles, having taken most of the estates held by orthodox clerical bodies, felt they must put out the fires of revolution and exploit the situation. While the serfs who had plowed and sown these lands for the Church clamored to divide them among themselves and win freedom, the nobles who had become owners of church lands wanted the farmers to work for the new lords on the old terms. Žižka took the farmers' part and for a time besieged these conservative Utraquists in Prague. Tired of conflict, he agreed to a compromise, withdrew his army to eastern Bohemia, and founded a brotherhood called the "Orebite" union, whose business was to preach the Four Articles of Prague and to kill Germans. When he died in 1424, according to tradition he asked that a war drum be made from his skin.
Tábor: Christian Communism
In the town of Tábor another group of Hussites formed, holding that true Christianity requires a communist way of life. Long before Hus, small groups of Waldensians, Beghards and other untamable heretical sects had lived in Bohemia mixing religious ideals with communist ones. They lived quietly until Žižka's armies broke the Church's power in many Bohemian towns. Now they revealed their beliefs and took religious and ideological leadership of Tábor.
Most of them denied Christ's real presence in the Eucharist, rejected belief in purgatory, prayer for the dead and all the sacraments except baptism and communion, and condemned veneration of relics, images, statues and saints. They aimed to restore the simple worship of the apostolic church and opposed all rites and ceremonies that did not exist in early Christianity. They objected to chapels, organs and splendid church decoration and destroyed such ornaments wherever they could. Like the Protestants to come, they limited worship to communion, prayer, Bible reading, preaching and hymns. These rites were led by clergy who did not differ from the laity in dress.
Most Taborites drew their communism from belief in the millennium and the second coming: soon Christ would return to establish his kingdom on earth, in which there would be no property, no church or state, no class privilege or human law, no taxes and no marriage; and how glad Christ would be, on returning, to find his people had already built his heavenly utopia on earth. These principles were put into practice in Tábor and a few towns. A professor of the University of Prague of that time says: "Everything is held in common; no one owns anything alone; ownership is counted an unforgivable sin. They say that we should all be brothers and sisters alike."
Chelčický and the Collapse of the Experiment
A Bohemian farmer, Petr Chelčický, became a philosopher. He went beyond philosophy and wrote in Czech a series of treatises, like Tolstoy's, preaching and recommending a kind of peaceful anarchism. He attacked the strong and wealthy, held war and capital punishment to be crimes, and called for a society with no lords, serfs or law. He told his followers to accept Christianity to the letter, as found in the New Testament: baptize only adults; turn their backs on worldly goods and ways; avoid oaths, learning, class privilege, commerce and city life; live in voluntary poverty; prefer plowing and sowing over other work; and forget "civilization" and the state entirely.
The Taborites did not find this philosophy of peace suited to their temper. They split into moderates and radicals (the radicals preached extreme practices, among them nakedness and community of women), and eventually the dispute passed from argument to fighting. After some years, inequality of ability produced inequality of power, privilege and finally property, and the leaders of peace and freedom gave way to ruthless lawgivers who put their despotic power to good use.
The Compacts of Basel and the End of Tábor
The Christian world listened with fear to the music of this imaginary communist Christianity. The Hussite barons and townspeople in Bohemia slowly came to desire the Church of Rome as the only powerful organization that could prevent the imminent dissolution of the existing social order, and so when the Council of Basel invited them to compromise, they were glad. A delegation from the council, without the Pope's instruction or approval, came to Bohemia and signed a series of agreements worded so that moderate Hussites could accept them while Catholics could interpret them as rejecting or accepting the Four Articles (1433).
When the Taborites refused to endorse the agreements, the conservative Hussites allied with devout Bohemian Catholic groups, attacked the breakaway Taborites and crushed them, ending their communist experiment (1434). The Bohemian diet made peace with Sigismund and accepted him as king (1436). But Sigismund, who made a habit of crowning his victories with emptiness, died the next year.
George of Poděbrady
In the disorder after his death, the orthodox party of the Utraquists gained power in Prague. A powerful local captain, George of Poděbrady, raised an army of Hussites, took Prague, re-installed Jan Rokycana, an Utraquist, in the archbishop's seat, and took the rule of Bohemia himself (1451). When Pope Nicholas V refused to recognize Rokycana, the Utraquists decided to join the Greek Orthodox Church, but the fall of Constantinople to the Turks upset their plan. In 1458 the Bohemian diet, seeing that George's wise administration had established order, elected him king.
George now used his strength to establish religious peace. With the diet's consent he sent an envoy to Pope Pius II (1462) asking him to confirm the "Compacts of Prague." The Pope refused and forbade communion in both kinds anywhere. On the advice of a German jurist, Gregor Heimburg, George in 1464 invited all European kings to form a permanent federation of European states with a legislature, executive, army and strong judiciary, to settle all future international disputes. The kings did not respond, for the rejuvenated papal government was too strong for a league of nations to defy.
Pius II declared George a heretic, freed his subjects from their oath of allegiance and asked Christian forces to depose him (1466). Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, undertook the task and invaded Bohemia, and some Catholic nobles crowned him king (1469). George named Ladislas, son of Casimir IV of Poland, his successor, and died at fifty-one, worn by the miseries of war and by dropsy (1471). Czechoslovakia, as the book calls it, regards him as the greatest of its kings after Charles IV and remembers him with honor and respect.
The Aftermath and the Unity of the Brethren
The Bohemian diet accepted Ladislas II as king and Matthias returned to Hungary. The nobles used the weakness of the king, who was the child of his youth, to consolidate their political and economic power. They reduced the number of town and borough delegates in the diet and pushed the farmers who had dreamed of utopia ever deeper into serfdom. Thousands of Bohemians fled to other countries during the revolution and the reaction that followed. In 1485 Utraquists and Catholics signed the Treaty of Kutná Hora, committing themselves to a thirty-year peace.
Chelčický's followers in eastern Bohemia and Moravia formed a new Christian body called the "Unity of the Brethren," devoting themselves to simple peasant life on the basis of the New Testament. In 1467 the Brethren rejected the authority of the Catholic Church and appointed their own priests. By denying purgatory and rejecting saint worship, they anticipated Luther and his belief in justification by faith, and became the first new church to practice Christianity in its real sense. By 1500 a hundred thousand people had joined it.
These "Moravian Brethren" nearly disappeared during the Thirty Years' War but revived under the leadership of Jan Comenius, and still exist as scattered communities in Europe, Africa and America, whose tolerance, humble piety and peaceful loyalty to the principles they teach amaze our cynical and skeptical world.