Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans, episode 172, the Council of Constance part 2, which is also episode 9 of season 9. The Reformation before the Reformation in November 1414, 30,000 academics and aristocrats, bishops, blacksmiths and bakers, cardinals, counts and chefs, doctors, dancers and diplomats, princes, prelates and public girls, descended on a town in southern Germany built to house a maximum of 8,000. They had planned to stay for a few weeks, two to three months max.
But three and a half years later, most of them were still there. What did they get up to? The great tent pole events. The trial of John xxiii, the burning of Jan Husband, the election of Martin V. That is what the Council of Constance is remembered for. But what about all that time in between? When I began working on this episode, I had planned to move straight to the showstoppers. I think I said something to that effect at the end of the last episode.
But when I dug deeper, I realized that this world event was so much more than just a papal election and the trial of a dissenter. For three years, Constance was simultaneously a never ending G20 summit, the greatest academic conference of the Middle Ages, a permanent Imperial Diet and the center of the Catholic Church. Everybody who was anybody was there, either in the flesh or had at least sent a delegation. Issues and concerns were brought before the council that still plague people today.
Is it ever right to kill a tyrant? And if so, when can it be justified? What rights should be guaranteed for indigenous groups, in this case the pagans? And how should their dignity be protected? Other attendees sought justice for crimes committed against them in a world where political murder had become commonplace. Others still demanded their reward for years of service or simply wanted their rights recognized.
Living cheek by jowl in tiny Constance, the leading minds from across Europe, from the ancient universities of Paris, Oxford and Bologna, as well as from the newly founded seats of learning in Krakow, Prague, Heidelberg and Vienna shared their ideas, opinions, books and discoveries, paving the way for the intellectual shift we call the Renaissance. Enough, methinks, to provide 30 minutes of great historical and entertainment. But before we start, here are the customary 90 seconds of pleading.
Let me keep it short. No, I do not own a mattress from the Internet, nor do I have a Razer subscription. Or would I put my precious mental health into the non existent hands of a disembodied voice on zoom? And if I did, you would not hear about it, because the History of the Germans is advertising free.
And to keep it that way, many of you have already made a one time donation or have subscribed on historyofthegermans.com support and in particular we thank Thomas Barbeau, Robert k. James P. CC Mid S&Bow W for having signed up already. And with that, back to the show. The Council of Constance lasted from November 1414 to April 1418. All this time the participants had to live in incredibly cramped conditions.
The great cardinals and imperial princes stayed in the splendid mansions of the patricians, but the bishops and counts had to make do with the local inns or were living with the more prosperous members of the artisans guilds. And then the 5,000 prelates and hundreds of knights had to move into bed sits. Further down the food chain. We hear of simple folk moving into empty wine barrels. Now, much of their time was taken up with building consensus within and between the nations.
A process that was drawn out and laborious position papers were exchanged, academic essays, published sermons reported, letters sent back and forth between representatives and their principals. And much backroom work undertaken. Not dissimilar to modern day political gatherings, but that still left room for other pursuits. The city and the various princes and prelates called on the hundreds of buglers and pipers and dancers and acrobats to put on entertainments.
Tournaments were held and sometimes one had to breathe some fresh air. So many ventured out of the overcrowded city in their spare time, often to the spa town of Baden, near Zurich. There you could find hot springs that had been enjoyed since Roman times. And much like today, foreigners would write home in astonishment that the locals enjoyed their sauna in the buff, talking about the delights of disrobing.
There is one topic that comes up in the lore of the council again and again, and even made it into the symbol for the city of Constance. And that are the sex workers coming to service the counsellors. I think this needs to be seen in context. Prostitution in the Middle Ages was largely tolerated even by the Church. And for simple pragmatic reasons, it was better men went to prostitutes than ending up messing up marriages, or even worse, raping women.
Okay, The Church also thought that it was better than masturbation and homosexuality. But let's leave that one to one side. Thomas Aquinas put it best when he said that if you remove the latrines from the palace, well, the staterooms will start to smell. There's the well documented case that the Bishop of Winchester ran the brothels of Southwark in London. Clergy too used prostitutes. For instance, In Dijon, about 20% of the brothel customers were members of the clergy.
Attitudes to clergy using prostitutes are hard to gauge. We have preachers who railed against the hypocrisy of priests, demanding moral standards for their flock whilst building a special gate to facilitate their tete a tetes. But there are also reports of people believing that sex was a natural urge and that it was better the vicar went to the bathhouse than seducing the members of the congregation.
And we have to remember that a lot of men and women had taken vows of chastity who weren't necessarily that pious. Many a second son or daughter were sent to monasteries because there were simply not enough funds to provide a living or a dowry for ambitious men from humble backgrounds. The church provided the only route to wealth and status. And many an archbishop had been lifted into the post by his princely father purely for political reasons.
So none of these had signed up to the lifestyle that Bernard of Clairvaux or Saint Francis expected. That is why Rome had one of the per head largest populations of prostitutes. What made the story of the horse of Constance so famous was, for one, the sheer scale. 718 licensed sex workers in a town of 6 to 8,000. Well, they are pretty visible. It would be similar to the Las Vegas night entertainment crowd coming in force down to Bismarck, North Dakota, for, say, a national party conference.
Nothing at all against Bismarck. I have been there and loved it. Even got myself an UFTA hat. But if such a thing happened, we would talk about it for a century. And then the story of fornicating prelates made good copy in support of the Reformation and was further embellished by prudish 19th century writers. What, however, definitely did not happen was that there was a great courtesan called Imperia who steered council proceedings from her bedchamber.
As Balzac had imagined, the reality was more likely pretty grim. When I mentioned people living in upturned wine barrels for three years, that story referred to one of these prostitutes. Constance was more than a place for powerful lords and bishops to gather, sometimes naked. It was first and foremost a place for the leading intellectuals of the late Middle Ages to congregate. The university sent their most prominent professors.
The theologians and canonists of the papal courts were out there in force. And the chancellors and lawyers of the temporal princes joined in as well. And they did what intellectuals do to this day. They researched, they wrote, and they debated. But one thing was different. In a world before printing, intellectuals also came together to swap books, not just to read, but also to copy or to have copied by one of the hundreds of scribes who now lived in the city.
Smart entrepreneurs quickly realized that this was a great opportunity and brought in books from all across Europe. Council participants went to the local monasteries to sift through the ancient libraries. And two of the oldest and greatest were nearby Reichenau and Zangalen, centers of learning art and culture.
Since the 9th century, these works were read and copied over and over again, and so much so that the libraries of Europe filled up with manuscripts that bear the Postscript Compilatum Constanti Tempore Generalis Concili, compiled during the General Council at Constance. The Swedish prelate Thore Andersen copied theological works for his monastery at Watstene, as well as Sesoli's book on how to play chess. The city scribe of Brunswick copied legal documents.
The Bishop of Ermland in Prussia collected copies of the classics of Florus and Vitruvius that are now in the library of Krakow. The Cardinal Philastri, who we've already met before, developed a passion for cartography. He obtained a copy of Ptolemy's Geography from Manuel Chrysolorus, the envoy of the Byzantine emperor.
Later, Philastri would encourage the Dane Claudius Clavus to create his first map of the Nordics, the first map ever to show Iceland and Greenland places Clavus had actually visited. Leonardo Bruni, who had arrived with the now deposed Pope John xxiii, made a living from his translations of the works of Plato and Plutarch. But more than writing and copying, book hunting was the supreme discipline the early humanists engaged in.
What they sought was the wisdom of the ancients, the long lost Greek and Roman texts that would open up a new perspective on the world, a world that was to replace the medieval certainties that were gradually fading away. The reason so much of the ancient texts were lost was simply the materials that were written on Plato, Aristotle, Ovid and Virgil wrote on papyrus and parchment, organic materials subject to decay unless they are preserved in the dry soil of Egypt.
The only reason we can still read these works today is because for hundreds of years, monks in their scriptoria, or Islamic scholars in their libraries, had copied them not once, but four, five, six times over the millennia since the fall of Rome. Hence, for a 14th century humanist, the only place where he may hope to find, say, Catullus, poem 16, or over its metamorphosis, was an ancient monastery or cathedral library.
One can only wonder what these pious scribes must have thought when faithfully copying some lurid tale or materialist philosophy. But we must be grateful that they did revere these ancient works enough to not let them disappear forever. That being said, they did not put them on eye level in their libraries, forcing the book hunters to bend down in the search for these intellectual treasures.
Book hunters have been uncovering these works since Charlemagne seeded the idea that ancient civilizations could hold the key to knowledge. And much has already been recovered. You may remember Einhard, who used Suetonius Lives of the Caesars as a model for his life of Carolus Magnus in the 9th century. Wiederkind, who drew on the wide range of Roman sources when he produced his chronicles in the 10th. The Scholastics dug up Aristotle and took inspiration from Muslim scholars in the 12th.
By the late 13th and early 14th century, hounding Italian monasteries in search of relics from the Roman and Greek past had become a preoccupation of the likes of Petrarch and Dante. The aforementioned poem of Catullus, for instance, came to light in 1305 at the cathedral library of Verona. One of the most prolific book hunters was Poggio Bracciolini. He had come to Constance in the service of John xxiii. But once his master was convicted and deposed, he found himself at a bit of a lost end.
He was a notary and had worked in the Papal Chancery for 11 years. So his career was tied up to the Church. And while the Church had pretty much in its entirety, decamped to Constance, where he had to find a new job. And in between job hunting and networking, he visited monasteries all across the German speaking lands. And my God, did he bring in a great hall.
Lost speeches by Cicero, Quintilian's 12 volumes on rhetoric, poems by Statius Silve, the histories of Amiens, handbooks on civil architecture, grammar and early theology. Two finds made him famous across Europe. The first was Lucretius De rerum Natura, a didactic poem explaining the main tenets of Epicurean philosophy. Lucretius wanted to release humanity from the fear of the wrath of the gods.
And he postulated that the world was made of atoms that veer randomly through time and space, leaving it up to us humans to use free will to determine how we wanted to live our lives. As I said, not very much in line with the faith of the copiers who might have spent months writing these 7,400 hexameters down and thereby preserving a whole school of Greek philosophy. The other find was a complete copy of Vitruvius, the Roman architectural writer and theorist.
One of Bracciolini's copies ended up in the hands of Leon Battista Alberti. Alberti then used Vitruvius as a basis to write his De Re Edificatoria that became the textbook of Italian renaissance architecture. In 1459 he was commissioned to build the first planned city in Europe since the city of Pienza for Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the pope Pius ii. The circle was closed by the personal physician of this same pope, Pius ii, a man called Andreas Reichlin von Meldeck.
Meldeck picked up his patients architectural ideas and when he returned to his hometown of just across the lake from Constance, he built his family palace, arguably Germany's first Renaissance building. Talking about palaces, what made life in Constance during the council so uncomfortable for even the most eminent cardinals and bishops was they had to compete for suitable accommodation with the imperial princes, the dukes, counts and even lesser nobles.
What brought them there was in part the Church council. Since there was no acting pope for almost two years, it was the council that decided whether their younger son would get into an attractive benefice, how to resolve a long running conflict with a neighbouring bishop, or whether to place the local monastery under their direct control. But it wasn't just matters of the church that brought them there. Constance had also become the seat of the imperial court.
Sigismund stayed in Constance from December 1414 to July 1415, and then again from January 1417 to the end of the council in April 1418. The Holy Roman Empire famously never had a formal capital. A ruler was perennially on the road and would occasionally call the princes to an imperial diet that would last a few weeks and would take place at different locations. But when Sigismund was in Constance, he had most of the participants for an imperial diet right on hand.
As we mentioned last week, all of the prince electors, not only the three archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier, but also the Duke of Saxony, the King of Bohemia and the Count Palatinate were in the city, either in person or represented by an envoy. On top of that, we have various dukes of Bavaria, Austria, Schleswig, Mecklenburg, Lothringia and Tack, as well as hundreds of lesser nobles who had taken up residence in the city.
So whenever an issue relating to the empire came up that would normally require a full assembly, well, one could be called immediately. For instance, as we heard last week, Sigismund was able to place Duke Fridich of Austria under the imperial ban and raise an imperial army within just 10 days, not within months as would normally have been the case. These few years were by far the most proactive of Sigismund's reign.
As an emperor, one of the main roles for an imperial administration to perform was to enfeive vassals and to receive their oath of allegiance. These were splendid events that celebrated the power of the empire and of the emperor and were all lavishly depicted in Richenthal's illustrated chronicle. Now, one of these elevations and enfevements would have implications far out into the future.
Smart observers may have noticed that there was someone missing in my list of Prince the Margraf of Brandenburg. That was not an oversight, because the Magrav of Brandenburg was Sigismund himself. You may remember that he had received the electorate in his inheritance and had then pawned it to his cousin Jobst to fund his fight for the crown of Hungary. When Jobst died in 1411, Sigismund took a small graveyard back, but he did not keep it.
Instead he enfeived it to a certain Frederick Burgraf of Nurnberg. Why give it away? His father had paid the astronomic sum of 500,000 silver marks for this precious principality that came with one of the seven votes in the election of an emperor and was to become the second center of Luxembourg power alongside Bohemia. And then why give it to Friedrich the Burgraf of Nurnberg? Friedrich's family name was Hohenzollern. I guess you've heard that name before.
And just a recap on who the Hohenzollern were. They were originally from Swabia, where there were first mentioned as Counts of zollern in the 11th century. Their ancestral castles at Hohenzollern and Sigmaringen still stand. The Hohenzollern had a knack of staying close to the imperial family, whichever it happened to be. Emperor Frederick Barbarossa rewarded their loyalty by making them Bographs of Nurnberg, the city they had so actively sponsored.
You heard that another Frederick of Hohenzollern had been instrumental in the election of Rudolf of Habsburg as King of the Romans in 1272. That brought rich reward in Franconia, the area surrounding Nuremberg. In 1331 they acquired Ansbach, and in 1340, Kulmbach gradually building up a sizable landholding in Franconia. That brought them on the radar of Emperor Karl iv, who was keen to build a land bridge from Bohemia to Nurnberg and from there to Frankfurt and Luxembourg.
The land of the Hohenzollern was right on this corridor. Hence, Karl IV regularly offered marriage alliances to the Bograf. And even though these never materialized, the two houses remained closely associated. This alliance survived the death of Karl IV and was inherited by both Wenceslas and Sigismund.
Therefore, it was not a surprise that when Sigismund regained the margraveyard of Brandenburg after his cousin Jorbstadt died, he turned to Frederick of Hohenzollern to be his governor in these lands. At the time, Brandenburg was still an absolute mess. Though in Luxembourg hands for nearly 40 years, the owners had rarely visited and left the place to its own devices.
Local families had taken over the countryside without being able to suppress the rubber barons, or had become robber barons themselves. The cities had thrown off any semblance of princely overlordship, and bishops and abbots hardly took notice of the mark. Frederick of Hohenzollern embarked on a campaign of reconquest that would take his family a good 50 years to complete. From Sigismund's perspective, Brandenburg was a money sink.
Whatever revenues these lands generated, all was ploughed back into Frederick's military campaigns. And as long as the Hohenzollern was just a governor, Sigismund was the ultimate bill payer. And paying bills was not his strong suit. So in April 1417, Sigismund could no longer prolong the inevitable. He enfeived his friend and governor with the margrave yard, making him not just an imperial prince, but a prince elector.
In one fell swoop, the Hohenzollern had now arrived in the top flight of imperial society. From here they would build out their lands, become archbishops and grand masters of the Teutonic order. And the latter was most important, since Albrecht of Brandenburg ended up being the last of the grand masters. He turned Prussia into a secular state in 1525 that would later be inherited by the margraves of Brandenburg. And the rest is a history we will spend a lot of time with in the future.
If you want to double check on the transition of Prussia from the Teutonic knights to the house of Brandenburg, go to episode 137. Having all these imperial princes to hand meant that Sigismund could also convene the imperial law court, the Hofgericht much more often. And the court went through more cases in this period than it did during the remainder of Sigismund's long reign. One case became notorious.
The duke Heinrich of Bavaria Landshut had fallen out with his cousin Ludwig of Bavaria Ingolstadt, over what else but the inheritance of another cousin, the Duke of Bavaria Straubing. If there was one tradition amongst the Wittelsbachs, it was to constantly squabble amongst themselves. These two took family feuding to new heights, even by Wittelsbas standards.
Heinrich, who everybody called the rich, tried to put together an alliance of interested parties against his cousin Ludwig, who everybody called the Bearded. This creation of a league against him irritated Beardi, and he went before the entire imperial died in Constance and said something exceedingly rude about his rich cousin's mother that cast serious doubt about him being his cousin in the first place, you can imagine how that went down.
The rich Duke hired 15 henchmen to attack the bearded one on his way home from a council meeting. Ludwig the Bearded was severely injured, but he survived. The imperial court was ready and on hand and was willing to convict Heinrich the Rich of attempted murder. Only by paying a fine of 6,000 guilders to King Sigismund and the intervention of his son in law, Friedrich of Hohenzollern, could he retain his freedom. Heinrich and Ludwig did get their war in the end.
A war that devastated their lands and destroyed any future hopes of putting a Wittelsbach on the throne for the next 400 years. Heinrich the Rich's attempt to murder his opponent wasn't an isolated incident. As the 14th century gave way to the 15th, political violence had become a fact of life. Hungary had always been a particularly rough place, where the killing even of anointed kings had happened on regular intervals. But not only there.
We have encountered attempts at poisoning several times in these last few episodes. Do you remember King Albrecht of Habsburg, who was saved from poisoning by hanging upside down for days until his eye had popped off? Our friend Sigismund had to undergo a similar treatment for a similar reason, but luckily kept his eye. Then there was the last of the premis lit kings of Bohemia, Wenceslas iii, who was stabbed to death by an unknown assassin.
And Sigismund's half brother, Wenceslas IV of Bohemia, who was also poisoned but also survived. Political murder was even more common in Italy, where the local lords had taken power in military coups that made them vulnerable to both internal rivals vying for their position. Idealists who wanted to revive the institutions of their ancient communes and outside forces trying to dislodge them. This is the world that bred Cesare Borgia and his admirer Niccolo Machiavelli.
In England, we even had a genuine regicide when Richard II ran into a red hot poker. Backwards, allegedly. But it was a political murder in France that became the case that triggered a debate over tyrannicide. A question under which circumstances it was acceptable to murder the ruler of a country. The murder in question was the killing of Louis of Orleans, the brother of King Charles VI, on November 23, 1407, by henchmen of the Duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless.
You remember John the Fearless, famous for a feckless foray into the fierce fire of the Janissaries at Nikopol. And you may remember Louis of Orleans, one of the many rivals of Sigismund for the inheritance of Hungary. The disagreement between these two men had, however, Nothing to do with Hungarians or Ottomans. It was over control of France itself. The reigning king, Charles vi, had experienced ever more severe bouts of mental illness. He once attacked his own men.
He forgot who he was or who his wife or his children were. And towards the end, he famously believed he was made of glass, terrified to shatter at the lightest touch. Due to his incapacity, France was ruled by a regency council made up of the royal uncles of Berry, Anjou and Burgundy, the Queen the Gorgeous, Isabeau of Bavaria and Louis of Orleans, the brother of the king. To say the members of the regency council struggled for consensus does not quite cover it.
They constantly tried to outmaneuver each other, used the hapless king, the royal children, the administration of France, the schismatic Church, even the English enemies, anything they could get hold on to get one over their opponents. And on one fateful November night in the Rue Vieille du Temple in Paris, backstabbing became front stabbing. The Duke Louis of Orleans lay dead in a ditch, courtesy of his cousin John the Fearless, the Duke of Burgundy.
John's plan did, however, not work out, and the party of Louis of Orleans, the Armagnacs, regained supremacy in the council. But the infighting had weakened the French side so much that King Henry V, Bolingbroke of England, saw his opportunity and attacked. The result was the Battle of Agincourt that took place in 1415, right in the middle of the council.
And that was followed by the Burgundians allying with the English against the King, and then the Dauphin of France, who were saved by Jeanne D'Arc, etc. Etc. It's the Hundred Years War, Shakespeare and all that. What brought this case before the Council of Constance was that immediately after the attack on Louis of Orleans, a Dominican friar, Jean Petit, had publicly proclaimed that murder was justified because it was a tyrannicide.
In consequence, the court granted an amnesty to John the Fearless for the killing that was then later withdrawn. When the Burgundians had lost influence and a synod of the French Church condemned Jean Petit's defense of the murder, the Burgundians then appealed to Pope John xxiii, which is how the Council in Constance found itself discussing one of the most famous political murders of the Middle Ages. One of the great voices at the Council, Jean Garcon, took a strong interest in this question.
He believed the Church had to take a stance against this proliferation of political murder, and in particular, against those who defended it. He asserted that the killing of a ruler, in particular a legitimate ruler, was always prohibited, even if the ruler may have acted as a tyrant. This thesis was opposed, for obvious reasons by the Burgundians, but made many other delegates feel queasy too. After all, the son of the man who had Richard II killed was now the King of England.
Equally, many Italians had supported the murder of Duke Gianmaria Visconti of Milan just a few years earlier. So the Council of Constance was too divided to make a clear decision. It refuted the statement of Jean Petit that tyrannicide was not only allowed, but demanded by faith. But even that decision was later withdrawn. So the Church failed to weigh in on political murder, as Jean Guerson had hoped.
It is doubtful whether they would actually have been able to rein in on the brutality that was ever faster spiraling out of control. But it would have been nice if they had at least made an effort in particular, because the topic came back before the council concluded. The reason the council had to look at tyrannicite again had to do with the teutonic Order. In 1410, four years before the council opened, the knight brothers had experienced the utterly devastating defeat at Tannenberg Grunewald.
Being defeated by the Poles was bad enough, but what turned it into a life threatening calamity was that the chivalric brothers had also lost their raison dce the moment Jugaila, the Grand Prince of Lithuania, had converted to Christianity in order to become King of Poland. The now Christian ruler of Lithuania made it his job to convert those of his subjects who were still pagans.
And reports were reaching Constans that his peaceful approach had been a lot more successful than the conversion by fire and sword propagated by the Teutonic knights. That meant there's nothing left of their mission to defend Christendom in the Baltics. Moreover, the Reisen the chivalric adventure trips they had organized for the European aristocracy to play at crusading, well, they had to stop. And with it, the warm reign of cash and free soldiers the order had enjoyed simply disappeared.
Now Sigismund had offered them to relocate to the Hungarian Ottoman border and and defend Christianity there. But the brothers declined. Instead they went all out on Jogaila and his cousin Witold. They argued these Lithuanians were fake Christians, that their conversions had just been a show and their souls were still black with pagan beliefs. And that they had made alliances with heretics, AKA the Orthodox rulers of Moscow.
And then the usual rundown of depravity and cruelty that was the stock in trade when talking about people of a different faith. Sigismund was trying to find a compromise between the Poles and the Teutonic Order, both of which had sent large delegations to Constans. But the discussions led nowhere. There was no real possible compromise. If the Order admitted that Lithuania was now being converted peacefully by the Jagiellons, well, then they had to either find a new job or call it a day.
If the Jagielloans admitted that they had only converted to gain the crown of Poland, well then they would have to give it all back again. And even a negotiation genius like Sigismund could not build a bridge between these positions. There was another, a second leg to this case. Another Dominican, a somewhat deranged man called Johannes Falkenberg, had fully embraced the Teutonic Knight's position, even though he was neither a brother nor did he have a close relation with the order.
Before 1412, for some reason, he published a treatise where he called Jogaila a worshipper of false idols, that all Poles, he declared, were idolaters, shameless dogs who had returned to their ancestral pagan religion. Hence it was an obligation for all good Christians to oppose these vile stains on the mantle of the faith. And all the princes were called upon to raise armies to wipe them from the face of the earth. Now that was plain silly.
It did not need the extraordinary skills of the rector of the recently founded University of Krakow, Paulus Vladimir, to refute this pile of false accusations. In February 1417, the council formed a commission investigating Falkenberg's claims and easily dismissed them as heretic. Falkenberg was captured and put in prison. Meanwhile, his opponent, the Polish envoy Paulus Vladimiri, made an impressive speech to the Council where he argued that pagans and Christians shared the same humanity.
Their beliefs, he argued, were no justification to kill, herd or destroy their lands, as long as they lived peacefully alongside their Christian neighbours. And then he cited multiple cases where the Teutonic Knights had killed, hurt or destroyed the lands of the Lithuanians and Samogichians without provocation.
If that had become Church law and the atrocities could have been proven, the Order of the House of St. Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem would have had to be dissolved, which is why that did not happen. If you want to get deeper into the Teutonic Knights and the issue of their behavior in Prussia and Lithuania, we've produced a whole series on their story. Check out episodes 128 to 137.
A hundred years later, the Spanish conquistadors arrived in South America and destroyed the Mayan and Aztec civilizations. Paulus Vladimir's idea of peaceful coexistence had by then been comprehensively forgotten outside Poland. Another Dominican, Bartolomeo de Las Casas, pointed out the horrific crimes committed against the indigenous population, but he did not reference Paulus Vladimiri's attempt at getting the church to do the right thing. And that is all we have got time for today.
Next week we'll go on to the two events that have made the Council of Constance famous the election of Pope Martin V that ended the Western Schism for good, and the crucial moment in Czech history that is commemorated in the dead center of their capital, the Tyne Square in Prague's Old Town. I speak of course, of the condemnation and execution of Jan Hus and Jeronimus of Prague, which triggered the Hussite uprising and paved the way for for a very different approach to organized religion.
I hope you will join us again. And before I go, just a last reminder that if you want to support the show, go to historyofthegermans.com support where you can make a one time donation or link to the Patreon website where you can make a longer term commitment. Just make sure do not do it on the Patreon iPhone app.