Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans. Episode 175, Death and Defenestration. The Hussite Revolt. Also episode 12 of season 8, the Reformation before the Reformation. Then, on September 2nd of that same year, marquesses, barons, nobles and other high ranking persons of the Kingdom of Bohemia and the Margraviad of Moravia wrote letters under their own seal to the Council of Constance for the unjust and unlawful sentencing to death of Master Jan Hus.
They claimed that the Council had condemned him as an unrepentant heretic at the accusations, slanders and instigations of the mortal enemies of the Bohemian kingdom, despite not having proven against him any errors or heresies, and that having condemned him, they punished him with a most harsh and shameful death to the undying infamy and disgrace of the most Christian Czech Kingdom.
Whoever, no matter what status, eminence or title, no matter his condition, position or professed religiosity, had said or claimed that the alleged errors and heresies had evolved in the Kingdom of Bohemia, was lying and was a scoundrel, a villain and a most perfidious traitor. And such a man was himself a most pernicious heretic and son of all malice and depravity, and even of the devil, who is a liar and the father of lies. End quote.
That letter, compared with 425 seals of many of the great nobles of Bohemia, arrived in Constance in the autumn of 1415. And did it change the attitude of the great princes of the Church? Was there room for reconciliation between the reformers in Prague and those in Constance? Well, let's find out. But before we start, just some Christmas related things.
Yes, I did get some lovely presents and my family was most grateful for me being in for Yuletide rather than out there in the early 15th century. And even happier that I did not sing. I hope I left you in good hands. If you have missed David Crother's episode on John Wycliffe, have a quick listen. I very much enjoyed it, but I've also not been completely idle. I've given the website some much needed tlc. It should be quicker and better organized than before.
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I will however try to do some membership events in the New year which all members, those on Patreon and those on the website will be invited to. So I hope you will join us at historyofthegermans.com support as Alexander M. Klaus Morton P. Justin B. Dr. Norvad Kahr and Thomas V have already done to resume our story, let's just recap what happened in June, July 1415 in Constance.
The great gathering of tens of thousands, from magnificent bishops to modest buglers, had heard the arguments of Jan Hus, master of the University of Prague and and preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel, and had dismissed them.
His ideas about who was and who wasn't a member of the Church, the role of the Pope and the superiority of Scripture over canon law had been declared heretic, and he himself was condemned to be burned at the stake, and his remains, even his clothes, were all turned to ash and thrown into the Rhine River. The Bohemians had already protested against the treatment of Jan Hus when he was arrested, and anger was brewing throughout his trial. Hus hadn't come to Constance on his own.
Several noblemen, including the brave knight John of Klum, had come along to support him. One of these men, Petr Mladonovich, returned to Prague shortly after the trial and recounted the proceedings in every little detail, complete with copies of letters and other documents, and from that the Bohemians concluded that there had been foul play.
Lawrence of Brezova summarized the view in Prague as then on Saturday 6th July, Master Jan Hus, the scholarly bachelor of Holy Scripture, a man of shining virtue in life and morality, and a faithful preacher of the Gospel, was sentenced to death and unjustly vilified by the Council of Constance.
This was based upon the false testimony of the witnesses and the relentless instigations of Master Stepan Pals, doctor of Holy Scripture, and Michael de Causis, parish priest of St. Wojtek in Prague, representing the Czech clergy and the influence of King Sigismund. This was done despite the fact that he was not given a proper hearing in which to prove his innocence.
The villains were hence the despicable clergy of Bohemia, the Emperor Sigismund and the Council as a whole that, as he wrote further down, had had accepted bribes to bring about the conviction of this saintly man. So on September 2, 1415, the nobles of Bohemia wrote this letter of protest to the Council of Constance. I quoted at the top of the episode. A copy of this Bohemian protest is now preserved at the University of Edinburgh.
I put a link in the show notes so you can take a look, because it's quite an unusual object. The manuscript has attached over a hundred wax seals of every conceivable major Bohemian family, making the whole thing look like a bibliography geographic Medusa. And its content was equally unusual. Those noblemen did not only blame dark forces from within Bohemia for the unjustful and unlawful sentencing, but accused the Council of a miscarriage of justice.
Such an accusation was again within the context of the medieval Church heretic. It implied the council had erred when convicting Jan Hus and the General Council of the Church was supposed to be infallible. Such an act of defiance was dangerous. The Church had already been concerned that Bohemia had become a center of dissent, or to say it in their terms, a nest of heretics.
By openly siding with a convicted heretic, Jan Hus, the Bohemian elites only confirmed the suspicion that Hus was not acting alone, but was part of a wider movement. This assessment was, as we know, not wrong. Bohemia had indeed become a place where controversial ideas about the role of the Pope and the clergy were circulating, where the king, his wife and many of the senior nobles, even members of the senior clergy, were sympathetic to a fundamental reform of the ecclesiastical organization.
So the Council was not unaware of the situation in Bohemia when it decided its next steps. It was just not very capable at deciding what these next steps were were supposed to be. On September 8th, that's six days after the Bohemian protest, the Council began the trial of Jerome of Prague, another master of the university and follower of Jan Hus. Jerome was less sure of his convictions and had tried to flee after Hus had been arrested, and he even recanted.
But when it became clear that he would never be released from prison, the despite his recantation, his resolve stiffened and he too was burned at the stake. This created a second martyr for the cause of Bohemian reform, then and now. Martyrs, witnesses for the faith, are great rallying points. They turn from actual human beings with their own thoughts, ideas and contradictions into symbols. Banners that can be raised on barricades and can be flown before armies.
The image of Jan Hus burning at the stake was replicated over and over in manuscripts and leaflets distributed all across Bohemia. If you go to the great square in the Old Town, you see the enormous Jan Hus memorial, erected in 1915 as a message of defiance against the Habsburg regime. And it remained a symbol of resistance, most recently when sitting at the feet of Jan Hus was a way to express opposition to the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.
In 1985, I seem to have inadvertently joined the protest when I sat down below Jan Hus to smoke a cigarette and was chased away by police. So, just for you kids out there, do not smoke. It's dangerous. But Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague weren't the only emblems of what was to unfold completely separately from Hus ideas about church reform. The theologians in Prague, led by a man the Germans called Jacob of Mies and the Czech called Jacobek si stibro. And apologies for my atrocious pronunciation.
I'm doing my best here, finding pronunciation guides on the Internet, but I seemingly get that wrong at times. So forgive me, this is not meant as a sign of disrespect, just a sign of a very difficult language. Anyway, so Jakubek of Stibrum was a fellow master at the University of Prague and a preacher at the Church of St. Michael. He too had been heavily influenced by Wycliffe, but even more by the previous generation of Bohemian reformers, by Jan Millich and Matthew of Yanov.
These previous generations had emphasized the values of the early Christian church, when preachers had been poor and solely dedicated to the spiritual side of things. For them, and for Jacob of Stibro, the downfall of the church began with Gregory VII and his ambition to create a politically powerful and imperial church that meddled in worldview affairs.
And whilst Jan Hus and the other reformers focused on the role of the clergy and the ostentatious wealth of the popes and the cardinals, Stibro zoomed in on something that had been a marginal topic. So the offer of the Eucharist in both forms as bread and winebro went back to Scripture and read that Jesus offered both bread and wine to his disciples and then said, do this in remembrance of me.
He could not find a passage where it give the congregation only the bread and reserve the wine for the priests who really can appreciate it. For Stibro, taking the Eucharist in both firms, sub utraque speci was the most important sacrament. He stated that it was not just a right of the laity to receive it, but an obligation to do so. So this became known as Utrachuism. U t R a Q U I S M a word we will hear a lot more of.
Jakubek's proposal was rapidly picked up by the other reformers in Prague, who already believed the common people should take communion more often as a way to bring more spiritual goodness into the world. And claiming the corrupt and money grabbing clergy had deprived the people of the Sacrament of the Eucharist just hit the spot. Generally speaking, people do not tend to take up pitchforks to defend complex points of ecclesiology.
But if you tell them that they had a right to the wine when St. Peter was in charge, and that nowadays the crooked priests withhold it from them on the orders of popes dripping in gold, well, that is a good enough reason to get up onto the barricades.
In 1414, there had not yet been a need to turn ploughshares into swords in order to partake in the bread and wine, since the Reformed preachers in Prague's New Town, in the Bethlehem Chapel and elsewhere, were liberally offering the Eucharist sub utraque spici. And that could have easily continued without creating much unrest had it not been for the debate it sparked at the Council of Constans. The offer of bread and wine had so far not really been a major theological issue.
In fact, until the 12th century, the Catholic Church did habitually offer it at Mass, and Pope Gelasius I in the 5th century had prescribed it as part of the standard liturgy. It had been mainly for practical reasons that the Catholic Church changed tack on the matter and reserved the chalice, the wine, to the priests. So the Council could easily have decided that, yeah, if the churches in Prague want to offer the wine to the laity, well, you guys just go ahead.
And that would have dramatically reduced tensions. But they did not. Instead, on 15 June, a week after the hearings of Jan Hus, but before he was burned at the stake, the Council of Constance decided that although this sacrament was received by the faithful under both kinds in the early Church, nevertheless later it was received under both kinds only by those confecting it and by the laity only under the form of bread.
And since this custom was introduced for good reasons by the Church and the Holy Fathers, and has been observed for a very long time, it should be held as a law which nobody may repudiate or alter at will without the Church's permission. And those who stubbornly assert the opposite of the aforesaid are to be confined as heretics and severely punished by the local bishops or their Officials, end quote.
That was not exactly the smartest available move stating that yes, originally there was bread and wine, but now we have been cutting you guys off the drink for so long. Well, that's now the law. That was a brilliant way of saying we the Church know better than Jesus himself. It was oil on the fire. Even Jan Hus, who had been quite sceptical about utracrism, switched over to Jacobac's position just before he was burned.
So we now have a Bohemian population that was enraged by what they saw as the unlawful burning of Jan Hus in Jerome of Prague and had just received confirmation that the Council of Constance was indeed rating cannon law, even just established practice above scripture and their desires. So whatever these guys were doing, they were not helping to pave the way into the afterlife.
Hence, in Prague, more and more parishioners moved across to those churches where the priests were offering both bread and wine. The chalice became the instantly visible demarcation line between the old school followers of the papal and consilia doctrine and the group of reformers who were demanding change. Now if you were the Archbishop of Prague in 1415, you would probably consider a change in approach. Playing hardball with these reformer guys is clearly not working.
You would write to the cardinals at bishops and Constans and suggest that they tone it down a little. Ah, no. For the senior clergy assembled in southern Germany, Prague was just, well, a nest of heretics and that needed to be exterminated. They ordered the archbishop to enforce an interdict on the city of Prague. All church services had to cease.
No more sacraments were to be dispensed, the dying weren't given the last rites, couples weren't able to get married and nobody heard their confessions. That is what the church overlords wanted to happen and that's what the Archbishop ordered. But that is not what did happen.
The reform oriented priests in Prague, who were already branded heretics for dispensing the bread and wine, for saying out loud that Jan Hus had been a God fearing man, and for reading and sharing the books of John Wycliffe, they did not care if breaking the interdict was added to the charge sheet. They kept their churches and chapels open.
And since the Catholic priests kept their places of worship closed, more and more citizens of Prague went to what we now can call the Hussite churches to get married, to baptize their children and to receive the Eucharist. There was little the Archbishop was prepared to do to stop it. Konrad von Fechter, the prelate in question, had not bought the post in order to end his days dangling from a lamppost. So he just pretended that none of these things were happening.
And as for the king, well, that king was Wenceslas IV, the lazy. All throughout the 56 years of his life, Wenceslas had never been decisive or even moderately competent. Part of that was personality. But a 35 year career as a full blown alcoholic hadn't helped. He was going round in a perennial hate loop between his brother Sigismund, his overbearing barons, the corrupt clergy and his rebellious subjects.
The chances that he would do anything other than having wild tantrums followed by heavy drinking sessions were slim. His wife, Sophia of Bavaria, was a much more capable monarch. She understood the mood in Bohemia and sympathized with the Hussites all along. And so did the majority of the king's advisors and the barons who held the great offices of state.
Many of these had signed the Bohemian protest letter from September 1415 and provided the military cover for the reforms that were now underway. So nobody did anything to stop the Hussites from building up a full scale new church organization in Bohemia. To cover their tracks, the king and the archbishop sent reassuring messages to Constans saying, yeah, yeah, odds gone swimmingly, there's nothing to see here, we're all good.
So for the following three years, from 1416 to 1419, Bohemia shifted further and further towards the Hussite church. Though the interdict was lifted after a while, most parishioners had gotten used to the Utrachrist communion. They also enjoyed hearing the sermon in Czech, even hearing some of the gospel being translated, so that for the first time they could actually understand what their religion was really about.
They also found that many of the Hussite priests took their job seriously, cared about their parishioners, and were less preoccupied with money, clothes and a company of loose women. I'm not sure whether you have ever listened to Mike Duncan's Revolution podcast, but if you have, the next step in the process will sound somewhat familiar to you now.
Jan Hus, as we discussed at some length, had gone to Constans because he believed that there was at least a tiny chance that he could convince the council of his interpretation of the Holy Scripture. To him, this was all a theological question, whether a corrupt pope had power over the faithful, not a political one. Hence, for him, there was a path to reform that was based on a corporation and compromise with the papacy.
But the cardinals, the bishops and the doctors of Constance literally burned that bridge down and by condemning Utrachist communion, had deepened the chasm even further, at which point the Prague Reformers no longer saw a reason to take the Catholic view into account at all. There were heretics, whatever they did, so they may as well go the whole hog.
They went looking for guidance in the Bible itself, and in doing so, they found that there was a whole lot of stuff in the Church that wasn't in the Bible, such as confession, penance, monks, bishops, popes, indulgences, etc. Etc. Pp. Meanwhile, there was a lot of stuff in the Bible that was not a priority in the Avignon Church.
Like blessed are the poor, turn the other cheek, love thy neighbour, thou shalt not covet thy neighbors, house, wife, manservant, maidservant, ox, as not anything that is thy neighbour's, and so forth, and so forth. The downside of this freeing of the spirits was that it led to the inevitable splintering of the movement into moderates and radicals, and last week's radicals becoming tomorrow's moderates.
One of the more radical demands was the Eucharist in both forms, for children, that is giving not just the adults, but children, even babies, the sacramental wine. It makes sense if you believe it is a prerequisite to salvation, but not so much if you want your children to grow up without brain damage. And not only did the movement develop ever more radical ideas, it also spread outside Prague.
And there is a genuine oddity about the Hussite revolt that makes it quite fundamentally different from most revolutions I can think of. It is usually the epicenter of the most radical thought is in the big cities, whilst the countryside tends to be more conservative. Think of the Vendee during the French Revolution, or the Russian peasants, initial response to the October Revolution. Even in the American Revolution, the picture was mixed.
In Bohemia, the rural population embraced these new ideas enthusiastically and even went far beyond where the masters of Prague University were prepared to go. There is a huge debate about why that was the case. In part, it may have to do with the Bohemian barons, many of whom had embraced the Hussite movement and provided some air cover for dissenters. The Marxist Leninists pointed to the exploitation of the peasant population as a driver of radicalization.
One of the more intriguing ideas is that the Bohemian countryside might have been a refuge of the Valdensians. The Waldensians were the followers of Peter Waldo, a former merchant from Lyon who had turned preacher in around 1100. What exactly the Waldensians believed we'll probably never know, since, like in the case of the Cathars, all documentary evidence is from the Catholic Church, who were determined to exterminate them.
But given the complaints of heretic movements since time immemorial go along similar lines, we can assume that they too believed that one should return to the text of the Bible, that the church organization was profoundly corrupt and that much of its teachings, rituals and requirements were made up.
The theory goes that some Waldensians had fled to Bohemia to escape persecution, where their ideas spread in secret amongst the rural population until developments in Prague made them come out of hiding. Maybe that was true, or maybe they were just simply better educated or more open minded in matters of religion than peasants had been elsewhere.
So out in the provinces, farmers, serfs, farmhands and their wives and daughters, but also nobles and artisans, came together to pray not inside a church, but in private houses, barns, or even under the open sky. Their priests went around wearing the same clothes as their flock. They rejected all those plush vestments and sacramental objects, the silver chalices and gold reliquaries, as vain. Heavily decorated altars were necessary.
A priest could say Mass on a table, on top of a cask, or even just on the ground. Bishops, they call locust and coxcombs, the stone churches a den of thieves and concubines, and that it was better to gamble their money away on dice than offer it to the evil prelates. As the congregations grew, the ceremonies could no longer be held in private houses or barns.
So the faithful gathered on the top of hills and mountains to hear the sermon and celebrate Mass and receive Eucharist in both forms, everyone from babies to grandmas. And they weren't shy to let actions follow their words. They refused to buy the indulgences, to pay the tithes and dozens of ecclesiastical fees and charges. Things then tipped over into violence.
Prelates, houses were looted, the vicars and members of the household thrown out into the streets, often naked and then pelted with manure. The same happened in Prague, where we hear of mobs breaking into churches, pushing out the Catholic preachers and destroying the images. Yes, iconoclasm was also on the rise. Whilst all this is happening, the city is shaken by raids on prelates and the hills are alive with the sound of sermons.
The political arm of the movement, led by the progressive Bohemian barons and many of the great officeholders of state, organized into the Hussite League. The Hussite League swore to protect the rights of preachers to perform services freely, only supervised by their local bishops. In particular, they are not to be made subject to foreign jurisdiction, namely papal or imperial interdicts, and other punishments were only permitted when based on Scripture determined by the University of Prague.
So Bohemia is about to shake off even the semblance of papal and imperial oversight. In the meantime, the Council of Constance had run its course and put an end to the schism with the election of Pope Martin V. Church reform, both as the Hussites would have understood it, as well as the distributional flavor the council itself preferred, was postponed until the next council, which would not really get going for another 15 years.
The Pope was back in charge of church affairs as if nothing had happened. And the one thing that Aetun V thought needed to happen was to stamp out this nest of heretics on the eastern border of the empire. He tasked two men with this Sigismund, the king of the Romans and heir to the Bohemian kingdom, and John Selesne, the bishop of Leitmisl, known as the Iron. Sigismund and the ironman did get to work, unencumbered by even the slightest understanding of the situation in Bohemia.
They leant super hard on Sigismund's brother Wenceslas, who was still at least formally the king of Bohemia, though in actual fact he did whatever the last person he met had just told him to do. Sigismund and the Ironman told him to implement 22 specific measures intended to bring everything back to where it stood before even the first whiff of reform had been in the air.
The churches were to be returned to its former priests, church discipline re established, tithes and other ecclesiastical taxes to be paid again, and naturally an end to the heretic practice of offering the Eucharist in both forms. To round it up, every preacher was asked to publicly declare Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague pernicious heretics who got what they deserved, and Bethlehem Chapel obviously was to be torn down.
Now Wenceslas, even in his drunken haze, realized that this would be disastrous. He pleaded with his brother to take a more conciliatory approach, to which Sigismund responded with an open letter threatening him with excommunication and the imperial ban, which would have meant Wenceslas would lose his crown. So Wenceslas caved, and he issued the edicts as ordered. Sigismund and the iron bishop Skelesny were not completely insane, though they did have some allies in Prague.
A number of the Bohemian barons had either remained good Catholics throughout or found themselves shifted to the right, not by moving themselves, but by the Hussite movement shifting left at a pace. The other group that sided with the Catholics were the class of German speaking merchants and bankers, though many of them believed church reform was overdue, and they had listened to the sermons of Jan Millich and Jan Hus. They could not afford to be branded heretics.
Their business was long distance trade. And as long as their counterparts in Nuremberg, Augsburg, Vienna, Krakow and the Hanse cities remained Catholic, they would risk their valuable networks by joining the Hussites. These allies were still a minority, but a powerful one, which the Papacy believed could, together with the might of an imperial army, turn the clock back. And initially, things were alright.
Wenceslas removed the Hussite advisors and officials from his court and the city councils replaced them with Catholic leaning ones. He expelled Hussite priests from churches, restoring them to their previous occupants. The Inquisition moved in and hunted down heretics in Prague as well as in the countryside, until in the summer of 1419, events unfolded that would change the course of Bohemian and German history for good.
The first of these was a gathering of allegedly 40,000 worshippers near the castle of Bechnye, halfway between Prague and Vienna. These people had come from all over Bohemia, fleeing the Inquisition and willing to resist. They held a huge open air mass with sermons in check and the Eucharist in the utruquvist manner. The priests were split into three groups, one preaching all day from morning to nightfall. Another third was hearing auricular confession again all day long.
And the last third gave out communion in both forms again all day, all night. And those worshippers had moved on ideologically even further. The chronicler reports that they called each other brother and sister, and the rich divided the food that they had prepared for themselves with the poor and the multitude of them believed were of one heart and one soul. They had all things in common, and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need. End quote.
This was a deliberate refashioning of the communal spirit, or communism of the primitive Church of the Apostles, a million miles away from the reality of the late medieval church. The sincerity and determination of these men and women on this hillside was becoming very disconcerting for the conservatives in Prague and even for relative moderates.
But they weren't given much time to ponder this, because eight days later, on July 30, one of the most radical Hussite preachers, Jan Zielewski, led a procession through the streets of Prague. He had preached a sermon outside The Church of St. Stephen's based on Ezekiel 6, 3, 5. Behold, I, even I, will bring down the sword upon you and will destroy your high places, and your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken, and I will cast down your slain men before your idols.
And then he talked about Jeremiah 14:13. And the people shall be cast down into the street, and so forth, and so forth. He would later say that he never intended what happened afterwards, nor that he had called on the crowd to do what they later did. These were, well, just randomly chosen sections of the Bible. After the crowd had heard this sermon, they entered and ransacked the Church of St. Stephen. And then they moved down the enormous Charles Square to the town hall of Prague's New Town.
At the time, Prague was comprised of four separate independent cities. The Old Town, the Lesser Town, on the other side of the Vltava, the Royal Castle District and the New Town. Each had their own town hall. That of the New Town stood and stands at the north east corner of Charles Square. The reason they went to the town hall was to demand the release of some Hussites who had been apprehended during street violence the day before.
It was a Sunday and under normal circumstances the town hall would have been empty. But that day it wasn't. The new burgomaster and 12 of his council members, all recently appointed Catholics, had gathered at the hall to plan how they would prevent the procession to turn into a massive street fight. It seems they had not come up with a good idea, because by 9:45 they were surrounded by Hussites loudly demanding the release of the prisoners.
Messages were sent to the Royal Castle asking for soldiers to come down to the New Town. In reliance of such reinforcements, the city magistrates felt confident. They refused the release of the prisoners and according to some accounts, mocked the Hussites and even threw stones at the monstrance that the preacher Zilwski was holding up. The crowd first became restless, and then, as time went by and no prisoners were forthcoming, they became angry. Very angry.
Meanwhile, the soldiers from the castle were slow in showing up. The burgomaster and his counselors grew anxious as the pounding on the doors became louder and louder. Then it became suddenly quiet as the attackers applied levers, followed by a crashing sound of the door breaking out of its hinges. Dozens, then hundreds of violently angry citizens of Prague, as well as refugees from persecution across Bohemia, stormed the council chamber.
Not even giving the royal councilors the chance to speak, they opened the window and threw them down onto the street. The council chamber was on the second floor, so most of them were dead or unconscious when they landed. These were the lucky ones. They did not get to notice as the crowd tore them limb from limb, undoubtedly shouting something about God's will, while Zelivski held the monstrance above their heads. When the 300 soldiers from the castle finally got to the new town.
It was occupied by the followers of Jean Zuliwski. A militia had been formed. All citizens had been asked to come to the town hall and commit to the Utrechvist cause. Those who refused had fled. A new city council was established and the town hall itself and the houses nearby were fortified. The soldiers returned to their king to report that the revolution had begun and had taken half of the capital of Bohemia. One man was amongst the crowd, had probably led the man into the town hall.
A man called Jan Schischke. A man who will make sure that this medieval storm of the Bastille did not become just another urban revolt, as they were taking place around the same time in dozens of cities across the empire. In Flanders, in Paris and England. But that is a story for another time. Next time, to be precise. I hope you will join us again. And in the meantime, if you want to check out my brand new membership website, go to historyofthegermans.com support.