The most immediate threat to Pope John came, as usual, from Naples. If the new Pope could establish himself in the Holy City and reactivate the administration he could face down Ladislas of Naples, helped by the threat of a Crusade. Negotiations with his rivals could then begin from a secure base, and an eventual agreement might be possible. Raising funds for the war, John took the customary course of proclaiming it to be a Crusade, entitling anyone who took part, either personally or by raising cash, to plenary indulgences. This could be said to be one of the greatest mistakes ever made by a Pope, since indirectly it led to the first successful Protestant revolution, and even in the short term, Pope John’s Crusade was no success.
It was not John’s obvious deficiencies as a churchman, but the failure of his acknowledged skill as a diplomat and soldier, that led to his downfall. The papal army, led by John in person, left Bologna on 1 April 1411 and by the 11th they were installed in Rome, welcomed by the population, with a secure base from which to deal with Ladislas. After a brisk but indecisive campaign the King and the Pope negotiated an agreement, which at least guaranteed that Naples would abandon Gregory. A synod in Naples decided that the old Pope had been a heretic all along, and once again on 31 October 1412 the unhappy Gregory was sent on his travels, this time ending in Rimini.
John, however, was still not secure. The College of Cardinals was rapidly dying off, some of the younger members were so much dead wood, and new appointments were urgently needed. Unlike almost all other popes of the time, John chose his cardinals on merit alone, and not because of any family connections. His selection, made in June, was also geographically diversified: seven Italians, three French, two English, a German and a Portuguese, certainly the most representative and talented college that had been seen for a very long time indeed. Five were especially notable. The Italian Zabarella, and the Frenchmen Fillastre and d’Ailly were to be prominent at the Council of Constance, as were the two English bishops, Robert Hallam of Salisbury and Thomas Langley of Durham. Since Hallam and Langley were never installed at Rome, their status as cardinals was questioned: the issue did not worry Hallam, and to be both Chancellor of England and Prince-Bishop of Durham were distinctions that even cardinals might envy. The wisdom of Pope John’s selections proved that Baldassare Cossa was much more than a randy trooper, and had the qualities of a true statesman; at least occasionally.
As agreed at Pisa, the Pope announced a Synod to discuss Church reform, which was held in the Lateran in February 1413. John did not intend it to be successful, nor was it; few prelates turned up – it was rumoured that the Pope had arranged for the roads to be blocked. The French delegation obtained some promises of reform in the preliminary sessions, but there was only one formal General Assembly, on 10 February, when the main business was to denounce Wycliff’s works and to burn his books on the steps of St Peter’s. Significantly, the decree was entitled Synodale decretum contra Hussitas, a clear indication that the danger was seen to lie among Master Jan Hus’s followers in Prague. In view of the modest attendance, Pope John prorogued the Council to meet again, in some other city on 1 December.
Finance was, as always, a pressing problem. No more Jubilees could be hoped for in the near future, and the cash flow from the Papal States had not yet revived. Some new taxes on the Romans – that on wine was the most unpopular, raising the price ninefold – had been unproductive and the proceeds of the Naples Crusade indulgence had been disappointing. Pope John was not given time to look elsewhere. Impossibly ambitious – his banners bore the motto ‘Aut Caesar, aut nihil’, Ladislas had no intention of sticking to the terms of his treaty, and on 8 June marched on Rome. The King moved so quickly that the Pope only just escaped, pursued by Ladislas’s cavalry in a panic flight: old men running for their lives, many dropping by the wayside. Rome was treated like a captured city; Ladislas had a medal struck proclaiming himself as King of Hungary, Sicily, Dalmatia, Croatia, Rome, Serbia and Lord of numerous other states; he also awarded himself the curious title of ‘illustrious illuminator of the City’.
Pope John’s reputation as a warrior evaporated. Frantic appeals for help were sent to all potential allies, but there was only one other trans-national power that could be considered to command all Christendom, the Holy Roman Emperor; for a century, however, the Emperor had been little more than the German King, and besides, the current Empire was just recovering from its own divisions. Rupert had never been accepted as King by the eastern electors, Saxony, Brandenburg and Bohemia, and attempted to bolster his authority by the traditional expedition to Italy, where he could receive the Imperial Crown from Pope Boniface, and displace Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan, Václav’s ally. It proved a miserable failure: Rupert’s forces got no further than Brescia before being forced to retreat, with his reputation further diminished. Back in Germany he was opposed by some of his former supporters, who were able to hamper any of Rupert’s attempts to assert himself. Rupert’s death in May 1410 cleared the way forward.
The imperial election that followed was entirely a family affair, since all the competitors were Luxembourgs. Václav, who still claimed to be king, had only one supporter, Sigismund had two, the Archbishop of Trier and Rupert’s son Ludwig of Bavaria, the new Count Palatine. He also claimed a vote for himself as the Brandenburg elector, but his cousin Jost asserted his right to this vote, as Sigismund had mortgaged Brandenburg to him. A flurry of electoral activity in September and October 1410 resulted in both Sigismund and Jost claiming to have been elected, but Jost obligingly died on 18 January 1411, at which point Václav switched his allegiance to his brother. At a formal meeting in July Sigismund was unanimously elected as King of the Romans; although Václav still continued to give himself the title everyone acknowledged that Sigismund was the man in charge.
In spite of his defeat at Nicopolis, Sigismund was the most experienced warrior in Europe; his people formed the first line of defence against the Turks and he both looked and behaved imperially. Western Europe knew very little of the new German King. His career had been entirely on the eastern borders; he had not been in Germany since his boyhood. Apart from Henry IV of England, encountered when the exiled future King was adventuring in 1391, Sigismund was personally unacquainted with any other Western sovereign. On his election in 1411 Sigismund, at forty-three, was tall, handsome, with a commanding presence and a full golden beard, not yet greying. His portrait shows an impressive eagle beak of a nose, but his imperial temper was matched by a devastating charm; women were overwhelmed, a fact of which he took full advantage, but he had also the politician’s gift of appearing to devote himself to other people’s problems – and frequently did so. He could unaffectedly chat with tradesmen, and flirt with their wives or visit guests in their rooms for an early-morning talk, but it was foolish to take advantage of Sigismund’s affability. His physical strength and endurance, inherited from his mother, had brought him through thirty years of wars and tournaments, but his most formidable characteristic was his single-minded ability to concentrate his energies, disregarding whatever other problems pestered him. One such was the permanent shortage of funds. Even if Sigismund had been so cautious a monarch as King Henry IV, he never possessed a solid financial base; and Sigismund was quite remarkably extravagant, always travelling with an expensive and extensive following, always self-indulgent and therefore perpetually forced to borrow and scrounge.
Sigismund faced a hard fight to regain the prestige and authority lost after the defeat at Nicopolis. A rebellion had to be suppressed – the Lackfi family, prominent supporters of the Angevins, had plotted with Ladislas of Naples, but were arrested, killed, and their enormous estates confiscated. That threat quickly dealt with, Sigismund convoked a Diet, to be held at Timisoara in October 1397, its object being to organize the kingdom’s defence against the Turks. Hungarian nobles were obliged to serve personally in the army, or to provide funds, and also to raise troops, the militia portalis from their tenants, which became the nucleus of the later army. After Timişoara the next challenge came from his Bohemian relations, where Václav needed help against his own rebellious barons, and Jost’s successor Prokop was attacking the Hungarian border. For almost all of the year 1400 Sigismund was absent in Moravia, and on his return to Buda he found another conspiracy developing, this time from the old nobility and the Church, objecting to the promotion of newcomers and foreigners. For five months Sigismund was actually imprisoned, before his faithful ally Nicolas Garai arranged a compromise from which Sigismund emerged ‘more powerful than ever before’ in his brother Václav’s judgement. Within weeks of obtaining his freedom Sigismund had recovered Václav’s kingdom, after an invasion by the Meissen Germans supporting more rebellious barons, and had been appointed as his brother’s deputy in Bohemia, where he spent most of the next eighteen months.
While dealing with Bohemia in 1403 a more serious revolt erupted, when Ladislas of Naples, seizing any opportunity to extend his power, followed his father’s example in making an attempt on the Hungarian crown. Pope Boniface used his authority to declare Ladislas’s invasion a crusade, meriting full indulgences; Sigismund retaliated by seizing the estates of the rebellious prelates and arrogating the papal rights to fill future vacancies, a very profitable operation for the crown. With the help of Albert, the Habsburg Duke of Austria, and the loyal nobles, who included the commanders of the strongest castles and the population of the towns, the rebels were finally crushed, Sigismund himself seizing and killing their leader. During the campaign both the King and the Duke were poisoned; Albert died, and Sigismund survived only after being hung upside down for twenty-four hours. Thereafter Albert’s family became Sigismund’s wards, with the Duke’s son marrying Sigismund’s daughter Elizabeth.
By October 1403 Sigismund was back in charge, and for the next thirty-four years he was undisputed master of Hungary. Having put potentially rebellious barons in their place the King recruited an able team of loyal advisers. Prominent among these were Count Hermann of Cilli (Celje), Slavonia’s largest landowner, and the former Florentine banker, the multi-talented Filippo Scolari, better known as Pipo of Ozora or Pipo Span (Ispan, a Hungarian title). As Charles IV had done with Bohemia, Sigismund forced Hungary into the mainstream of European political life. Buda, which Sigismund made his capital, formed the model for the forty or so other ‘royal towns’ whose inhabitants were free burghers with rights akin to those in Western European cities. In 1405 Sigismund called an assembly of the town ‘delegates’, the first in Hungarian history, and townsmen were, along with nobles, appointed to high office: the most senior judge, the Arch-Chancellor, in office for over thirty years (1395–1428) was a burgher, ‘Master James’.
Finances remained a serious and lasting problem. Sigismund was at war during almost the whole of his reign, facing his neighbours, rivals, Turks or – in self-inflicted and highly damaging wars – the Bohemian Hussites. Wars were quite extraordinarily expensive. A lance, the basic unit of four mounted men, three of whom were armoured, and a servant, was twenty-five florins a month, a crossbowman, six. The 12,000 men needed for a campaign (Pipo of Ozora caused astonishment by doing the calculation immediately during a meeting of the Royal Council) might therefore have a salary bill, including a proportion of servants and transport staff, of some 300,000 florins in a six-month period: taking into account the additional cost of siege equipment, artillery, powder and shot, this approximated to the whole annual royal income of some 400,000 florins. Wars were intermittent, but static defence was a constant expense. Pipo, succeeded by the Talovac brothers, was charged with building a line of defences stretching three hundred miles east from the Adriatic, centred on the great fort of Belgrade, when that was acquired in 1427. Fortresses were echeloned behind the frontier, supported by permanent cavalry patrols – very much the same principle adopted by the Emperor Hadrian on the northern borders of Britannia, 1,300 years previously.
A methodical system of tax collection was begun by carrying out the first general census to ensure the accurate assessment of feudal dues. This needed time to implement and Sigismund was driven to resort to extraordinary methods of raising money, especially by mortgaging estates, castles and whole countries. Such radical actions provoked angry opposition, but the King’s position was greatly strengthened by his marriage in 1408 (Queen Mary had died in 1395) to Count Hermann’s daughter, Barbara, a vigorous and talented woman, who acquired, probably with good reason, a highly coloured reputation, but who could be a formidable ally – when, at least, it pleased her.
German kingship brought new and pressing problems to King Sigismund and left him with no time for the Church’s troubles. In July 1410 the Polish-Lithuanian army had crushingly defeated the Teutonic Knights at the battle of Tannenberg-Grunwald (which was hardly the Slav versus Teuton conflict of popular history: the Polish-Lithuanian army was reinforced by Tatars, led by the future Khan of the Golden Horde and Czechs who included the future Hussite leader Jan ?i?ka). Sigismund, as King of Hungary, was nominally an ally of the Germans, but took no part in the battle, yet as the new King of the Germans had the task of negotiating a settlement, which continued for some years. His responsibilities as King of Hungary were also pressing.
Venice was encroaching on both imperial and Hungarian rights by purchasing from Ladislas the region around the Adriatic town of Zadar, which provoked a war with the Republic. As well as fighting in Dalmatia Sigismund started a campaign in Friuli, hoping thereby to open the way south for his coronation. The war, however, went badly for the Hungarians, and by April 1413 a five-year armistice was signed. The next tasks were to reach an accommodation with the Visconti of Milan, who had rejected imperial suzerainty, to negotiate an agreement between the rival Dukes of Austria and to confirm the peace between the Swiss and Austrians, which had been concluded in 1412.
In October 1413 Sigismund was therefore in Como, en route between Switzerland and Milan, and able for the first time to concentrate on the gravest of his imperial responsibilities, ending the schism that had divided Europe for a generation. The absence of any imperial representation at Pisa had gravely weakened the Council: lacking a quarter of even the Latin Church no Council could properly be called ecumenical. Sigismund could bring Germany, Hungary and Poland to a new Council, and add at least the glorious shadow of Charlemagne’s Empire and his own inherited prestige as the descendant of both Alto Arrigo and Charles IV. The dividends of success would include Sigismund’s election as Holy Roman Emperor, perhaps of little practical importance, but bringing also the very real possibility of a newly united Christendom launching a final Crusade against the Turks.
Negotiations between King and Pope began in June 1413, when it was clear that the Council John had already convened for December that year was unlikely to materialize. On 30 August the Pope instructed Cardinals Challant and Zabarella, accompanied by the Greek scholar Manoel Chrysolaras, to meet Sigismund. John’s representatives were authorized to agree a date and place for a truly ecumenical Council, summoned jointly by Pope and King, whose conclusions would be accepted by all Christendom. It would be very much to John’s advantage if this could be held in Italy, as he had explained to his secretary, Leonardo Bruni. ‘The chief consideration is the place at which the Council is held; and I do not want to go anywhere where the Emperor is more powerful than I am. I will therefore give my ambassadors the fullest powers and authority for them to display openly, but secretly I shall restrict their competence to the choice of certain fixed places.’ But John’s good intentions sometimes overcame his scheming. Bruni reported his meeting with the cardinals, when the Pope confessed his original plans but finished: ‘I had intended to name certain localities for selection, excluding all others, but now I have changed my mind and trust entirely to your prudence and judgement.’
When the Pope’s delegation arrived in Como on 13 October they faced two weeks of hard bargaining, as Sigismund insisted that the Council should meet in a city under his control: Constance, on the Bodensee, accessible and centrally situated, would seem ideal. Much to the Pope’s horror, his ambassadors agreed, and decided that the Council would open there in November next year, 1414. Sigismund immediately stamped his imperial authority on the proceedings, publishing an edict on 30 October announcing that as Emperor – which strictly speaking he was not – Defender and Advocate of the Church, he guaranteed safe conduct to all who would come to Constance. Losing no time in staking his own claim, on the next day Pope John published a much longer Apostolic Brief relating the story of the negotiations and making it clear that the Council at Constance was to be in all respects, except for the venue, that meeting he had already pledged to convene. This was to be the mainstay of John’s case for his continued acceptance as the one true Pope, but King Sigismund insisted that all three contenders should be considered, and in a separate letter invited Popes Gregory and Benedict to attend. Both agreed to send envoys, though it was common knowledge that Benedict, still supported by Spain and Scotland, would not compromise. Sigismund also sent personal invitations to Charles VI of France and young King Henry V of England; since the perennial war between the two kingdoms was once again smouldering neither would appear in person, but both the French and English delegations to the Council were to be authoritative. All European rulers were similarly invited, including the Greek Emperor, ensuring that, unlike previous councils, Constance was truly to be a gathering of all Christendom.
At the beginning of December Emperor and Pope met for the first time at Lodi. Two months of discussions followed, at Piacenza and Cremona, during which John attempted to change the venue back to Italy. Having failed, he issued on 12 December another carefully phrased document convoking a General Council, to be held at Constance, beginning on All Saints’ Day 1414 ‘so that a vast multitude of Christ’s faithful may gather together and the matters that it is incumbent on us to transact in Council be happily ordered’. While sticking to their respective positions, the two men got on well together. Both of an age, resourceful and experienced fighters and diplomats, neither cared overmuch for public opinion, and enjoyed the luxuries and prerogatives of power. Neither man was more than conventionally religious but both – John much the more rarely – were conscious of the responsibilities of their high offices.
In the year that remained, preparations for what was hoped to be the definitive Council were busily begun. John relied on the horde of Italian prelates, bishops and mitred abbots, who outnumbered all those in the other Catholic countries put together: he also hoped for the backing of those cardinals he had appointed. Sigismund had undertaken that John would be welcomed at Constance as the rightful Pope, free to exercise all papal powers, and to depart when he chose. On the subject of reform John was probably neutral: Church affairs never much interested him; if his own position was secured he would not perhaps have objected to seeing the powers of his successors restricted.
Overcoming his disappointment at the choice of venue, and confident in his own ability to charm and bully the Council, Pope John set out from his base at Bologna on 1 October 1414, travelling through Trento and Merano, where he secured a useful ally in Duke Frederick of Austria. Duke Frederick was an ideal partner, controlling as he did not only the Tyrol, but an extensive block of land running along the south bank of the Rhine from Constance westwards, providing an escape corridor should a speedy exit be needed. Six thousand florins a year and the Captain Generalship of the papal armies secured Frederick’s loyalty to Pope John.
Sigismund could not move quite so rapidly. Although by then it was two years since his election as German King he had not been able to attend a formal coronation, an absolute necessity if he was to exercise real authority at Constance. Crossing the Alps as soon as the passes were free, pausing to dissuade the Swiss from reopening their war with Count Amadeus of Savoy at least for the moment, he arrived at Charlemagne’s old capital Aachen in November 1414. There he was crowned as King of the Romans, exercising all the rights of German Emperor, although it was to be another twenty two years before he was able to make his way to Rome. With the title came great prestige, but limited power and very little money, the whole imperial revenue being estimated at some 16,000 florins, not enough even to finance the very considerable expense of maintaining suitable imperial splendour. He was therefore going to be a little late in arriving at Constance.
The Agenda
The absolute priority at Constance had to be ending the schism. Although he was invited to the Council there was no question of restoring Pope Gregory, who under canon law had the best case, but was abandoned by everyone except Carlo di Malatesta at Rimini. Benedict at Perpignan was personally the most able of the contenders but remained so rigidly inflexible that no compromise was possible. Never accused of the grosser and more pleasurable vices, Benedict’s was the worst of sins: a pride that never permitted him to acknowledge any flaws in himself. Quite the opposite, John, who had, if only a tenth of the accusations were true, tested the limits of depravity, was in the end capable of accepting the responsibility of defeat and resignation. Two popes had been embarrassing, but three were an impossibility: there must be a clean sweep, and only an acknowledged General Council of the whole Catholic Church was capable of this.
Then, after clearing the stage, a complete reconstruction of the administration would be essential. The beautifully efficient machine perfected at Avignon had been destroyed. Central control was exercised only intermittently by the handful of officials who accompanied the Popes. John’s failure to hold Rome had ruined any hopes of reconstruction, which given his own character, were not great, although he had proved his willingness to appoint competent subordinates. The fact that a drastic solution was to be forced on the Church by a Council implied that papal government would never revert entirely to its previous form. The new model papacy that would emerge from a Council must be purged of at least the grosser abuses that had crept in during the previous century, and that would be possible only if lay princes took the lead.
And with reconstruction went reform. Avignon’s excellent performance had been financed by unacceptable methods, perfected by Pope Boniface, but no lay ruler would permit these to continue. Almost all conceded that some reforms were essential. Even such an orthodox cleric as the scholar and papal secretary Nicolas de Clémanges was moved to write:
Papal collectors devastate the land and excommunicate or suspend those who do not justify their demands. Judgement is given in favour of those who pay most. The loss of ten thousand souls is easier borne than the loss of ten thousand shillings. The study of Holy Writ and theological professors are openly turned into ridicule. Bishops do not hesitate to sell licences to priests to keep concubines. Priests blaspheme the name of God and the Saints, and from the embraces of prostitutes hurry to the altar.
Dietrich Vrie, an Augustinian canon present at the Constance Council, wrote a dialogue between Christ and his Church, in elegant Latin prose and verse: this is the Church lamenting: ‘The papal curia from a golden age, passed first to silver, thence to hard iron. From iron it degenerated to an age of mud. Could it sink lower? Oh yes! To shit, and it is in shit that the curia is now immersed.’ Many, perhaps most of what might be termed the politically active laity were equally disillusioned. Dante had begun the fourteenth century with Boniface rotting in hell and St Peter lamenting the fate of his legacy:
He who on earth usurps my see,
My see, my see, which now stands vacant
Before the Son of God
Has made a sewer from my sepulchre
Full of blood and pus – at which the Perverse One,
Who fell from here, takes pleasure down below
In Shepherd’s guise, rapacious wolves
Are seen among the pastures. Oh, why
Do God’s defenders lie so low?
Chaucer ended the century with his piercingly accurate portraits of friars, pardoners and church police, all dedicated to growing rich on the credulity of the simple folk.
Heresy
Attempting to fill the spiritual vacuum, popular sects and associations had flourished: the Spiritual Franciscans, Fraticelli, Michaelists, Pseudo-Apostolici, Waldenses, Flagellants, Dancers and Joachites all competed for support. Most ended with the Inquisition’s trials, condemnations and burnings, but individual mystics, Thomas à Kempis in Flanders, Meister Eckhart in Germany, Dame Julian in England, although often frowned upon were perhaps more lastingly influential. Even those saints who remained within the boundaries of the Church were critical: in their very different ways both Catherine of Siena and Vincent Ferrer reflected a general despair at the state of the Church.
What was common to all these sects was that their members’ spiritual needs had not been met by the established Church order, varied although this was, and that they sought for a new and personal pathway to God. Whether or not they were ‘heretical’, as established by the Inquisition, was irrelevant: they became dangerous when the Church was defied. In the twelfth century serious thinkers such as Bishop Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln could test beliefs against the authority of the scripture, but with the establishment of papal autocracy in the fourteenth century this was no longer permitted. If the Spiritual Francisans ended up being burned alive, it was not that their beliefs were not endorsed by the New Testament, but that they persisted in them after authority had pronounced them to be wrong. They were punished for their defiance – ‘contumacy’ in legal terms – rather than their original deviance. Many heretics would, sensibly enough, decide to agree with authority and resume their normal life; a few, whose intellectual integrity (or arrogance, their opponents claimed) would simply not allow it, persisted and were burned. Many more – Joan of Arc is a good example – whose religious experience had been too searingly redemptive, preferred death rather than risk losing that precious gift. Such questions did not trouble most reformers, who were concerned with practical structural alterations and the restoration of common decency to a very grubby Catholic Church. There was, however, one particular group of dissidents that was to engage the Council’s attention.
The Council was to include hundreds of cardinals, bishops, patriarchs, dukes, earls and knights but its most famous participant was Master Jan Hus, Chancellor of Prague University, brought before the Council as a suspected heretic, forced to justify or excuse his work.
Heresy is deviation: it cannot exist in the absence of a fixed standard of orthodoxy; the more complex the standard, the greater the possibility of heresy, and the whole Church in the fourteenth century embraced an extremely complicated theology. On to the basic scriptures of the New Testament had been grafted a series of later writings, including not a few forgeries, and an accumulated mass of traditions. Nor were the requirements of faith stable: traditions evolved into dogma; today’s heresy might – sometimes very quickly – become tomorrow’s orthodoxy. Pope John XXII’s views on the Beatific Vision were condemned by his successor, Benedict XII; obedient to King Philip, Clement V countermanded all the pronouncements of his predecessor, Boniface. During the schism every pope – eight in all – accused his rivals of being schismatic, and therefore heretical. That, however, was almost the only clear and unequivocal heresy; all others were subject to complicated investigations; mere criticism, however vigorous, was not necessarily heretical.
The Church claimed a monopoly on spiritual affairs (and much authority in secular matters) and did not allow any infringements. Rival products, such as those offered by the Cathars, who flourished in south-western France in the thirteenth century, were ruthlessly suppressed. Departments which no longer served a purpose were disposed of and their assets seized. Dangerous ideas such as those of the Spiritual Franciscans insisting that since Christ and his Apostles lived in poverty, so should their successor and representatives, were mercilessly quashed. Auditing the balance sheet was the task of the Inquisition, established by Gregory IX (1227–41) and staffed by zealous Dominicans.
The Church saw two dangers in heresy, the most serious being that it imperilled the immortal souls of the heretics, who must be convinced, if at all possible, of their errors and led to repentant orthodoxy. Even worse was the possibility their infection might spread to others: heretics who did not repent had to be punished in a satisfactorily dramatic fashion, by being burned alive. The second peril was the harm that heresy could inflict on ecclesiastic authority. All the majestic structure of the Church, its magnificent buildings, great estates, its administration and hierarchy, rested essentially on the magical power of the priest to administer the sacraments, especially the central one of the Eucharist, and thereby to cleanse people of their sins. Any challenge to or restriction on this power was a threat to the whole Church, and in the fourteenth century there seemed real grounds for such challenges.
It had always been advisable for original thinkers to tread warily, but the new universities were now encouraging discussion and pushing forward the boundaries of academic freedom. There was, in addition, a widespread feeling that the bad behaviour, loose living and greed of clergymen, so vigorously expressed by Chaucer and Dante, had to be restrained. While not being itself heretical, such criticism damaged the prestige of the whole Church structure. Both these trends were united in the person of the Yorkshire cleric John Wycliff (c. 1330–84), who spent the first fifty years of his life as an Oxford scholar, Master of Balliol, amassing benefices, and occupied only in domestic university disputes, until in 1374 he was appointed as one of the commissioners sent to discuss financial affairs with papal representatives at Bruges.
The debate at Bruges centred on the old question of whether pope or king had final authority over Church finances, at that time particularly acerbic since old King Edward III, having given up any attempt at sustained rule, had delegated government to his second son, the Duke of Lancaster – John of Gaunt. An energetic and devious politician, John was determined to gain control of the Church’s wealth, preferably by partial disendowment. Wycliff’s ideas (perhaps stimulated by the twenty shillings a day he was paid for the Bruges trip, and with a view to future patronage) coincided with the Duke’s wishes. His next two books, De Dominio Divino and De Civili Dominio, insisted on the supremacy of civil over ecclesiastical authority, very much as Ockham and Marsiglio had previously done.
Papal indignation inevitably followed, and Bulls were discharged demanding that Wycliff should be investigated by an inquisitor, but to remarkably little effect. A respectable Oxford Master, supported by the highest power in the land, was not easily persecuted; but then relatively few Englishmen were influenced by the Latin publications of an Oxford don. Disputations remained confined to intellectuals, and had little impact on the masses; after all, the pardoners would not have prospered had they not been able to rely on the credulity of the ‘poore persone’ and his flocks. In 1377 Pope Gregory censured eighteen of Wycliff’s propositions on civil and ecclesiastic authority in a series of Bulls and ordered his arrest. The Oxford authorities examined the charge, and concluded that Wycliff was right, although his words ‘sounded badly to the ear’.
Wycliff then increased the pressure by moving from politics to theology. Here the sensitive point was his theory of the Eucharist, in which he contended that the words of the consecration did not cause the change of the bread and wine to Christ’s mystical body, but merely signified it: God, not the priest, was the magician. This was indeed unorthodox and heretical and offered an opportunity to destroy Wycliff, but more even more deplorable was his contention that no priest, not even a pope, could rightly exercise his function if he was living in mortal sin. Since so many, even of the highest rank, were well known to be guilty of breaking most of the commandments this idea could, if generally adopted, bring down the whole fabric of the Church. It was quickly taken up, starting in Oxford, as his followers – derisively called Lollards – donned white robes and journeyed about preaching these revolutionary doctrines, armed with tracts and sermons written by Wycliff. Even more influential than sermons were translations of the Bible into English. Wycliff insisted that the Bible must be the ultimate authority, ranking ahead of all later writings, traditions or teachings of the Church. The Church was therefore rightly suspicious of scriptures in the vernacular; laymen were allowed to possess Psalters, but the rest of the Bible was regarded as too dangerous. By putting Bibles into the hands of the common folk Wycliff and his followers had been transformed from cloistered intellectuals to proto-revolutionaries.
Wycliff was banished to a retirement in the country rectory of Lutterworth, where he wrote many more vituperative and indignant works, before dying peacefully in 1384. His ideas, however, continued to excite great attention. Extracts were condemned in Canterbury in 1411 and again at the Lateran Council of 1413. After this it was enough to be a follower of Wycliff to be stigmatized as heretical, and followers of Wycliff were particularly numerous in the Kingdom of Bohemia.
Bohemian Reformers
Relations between England and Bohemia were stimulated by the marriage of King Richard with Princess Anne, and Prague scholars began to attend courses at Oxford; one Master Rankuv funded a scholarship there for Bohemian students in 1380, but developments in Bohemia paralleled rather than followed those in England. Charles IV had been personally orthodox, an enthusiastic patron of the arts – witness that incomparable medieval jewel, the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Karlstejn Castle – and a dedicated collector of relics. At the time of his death these included two of the thorns from Christ’s crown, the bones of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the tablecloth used at the Last Supper, a few drops of milk from the Virgin Mary’s bosom and one of Mary Magdalene’s breasts.
Nevertheless the Emperor was prepared to tolerate critical voices when these began to be heard in the 1360s. Among the first was that of Konrad Waldhauser, preaching against extravagance and selfishness, followed by a Czech canon, Milič of Kroměři?, preaching in both German and Czech to congregations which sometimes included the Emperor and his wife Elizabeth, and Matěj (Matthew) of Janov. Although different in character – Matthew was a quiet scholar, Milič a combative enthusiast, given to fasting and refusing to bathe (his friends were forced occasionally to strip him and duck him in the nearest river) – they both insisted on the Bible as the final authority, where ‘all the most divine truths by which we can clearly and patently confirm all our opinions’, could be found. The dangerous corollary was that the Bible should be open to all, freed from its unintelligible Latin. Not quite heretical, the idea of peasants and townsmen judging the conduct of the Church hierarchy by the standards of the New Testament was viewed with great suspicion: the Spiritual Franciscans had been burned for doing no more.
Equally dangerous was the Prague reformers’ view of the Mass. The precious privilege of receiving the sacrament had been jealously guarded, made available to the laity only on special occasions and holy days – and often only on cash payment. Moreover, the Eucharist was administered only in part to lay folk, who were given merely the bread, the wine being reserved for the priest. Whatever the reasons advanced for this comparatively recent practice, one objective was clearly to reinforce the prestige and power of the Church. By demanding frequent – even daily – administration of the sacraments as a central feature of Christian life, the Czech reformers were also threatening the established order. Possibly even worse was their encouraging women to participate in the Eucharist.
It might have been expected that government would join with the Church in fighting off such attacks: the English Act De Heretico Comburendo of 1401 formalized the procedure for burning heretics, but in Bohemia Charles and his successor Václav continued to show some sympathy for the reformers. Again, the two countries had different histories. By the end of the fourteenth century England had regulated its relations with the papacy to the satisfaction of successive monarchs, who had established effective financial control over their own Church. In Bohemia the Church was extraordinarily rich and powerful, owning nearly half the country’s lands: with another sixth held by the throne, Czech feudal society had evolved with some great lay landowners but with many minor nobles and gentry. Influenced by the German immigration, feudal services had largely been replaced by cash rents, producing an often independent-minded rural population. All levels of Czech society were resentful of the Church’s conspicuous wealth. Monasteries, which appeared to offer little of either spiritual or practical service, were particularly resented; their custom of brewing weak beer for visitors and strong ale for their own consumption was a special affront to Czech sensibilities.
Unlike London, where ecclesiastic and civil government were separated, between Canterbury and London with Oxford as the centre of intellectual and academic life, all Bohemian activity concentrated on the great city of Prague. By that time not much smaller than London – two miles between the north shore of the Old Town and the royal castle of Vy?ehrad plus a square mile for the other royal castle of Hradčany, and with perhaps 50,000 inhabitants – Prague was already a major European capital, with a prosperous bourgeoisie accustomed to self-government. There were in fact five administrative centres in Prague. The Hradčany Castle and St Vitus Cathedral housed the royal government and the Archbishop’s court. The Small or Minor Town on the slopes below, accommodating those who served the Hradčany, was joined by a twelfth-century stone bridge to the Old Town on the right bank. By the fourteenth century the Old Town had become a prosperous centre of a largely German bourgeoisie, with its own government established in the Town Hall, still present on Old Town Square, and a staff which included tax collectors, supervisors of foreign merchants, guards, judges, constables, a torturer and a hangman. On the northern end of the Old Town the Jewish Town was another self-governing community, with two synagogues and a cemetery.
The Emperor Charles took the whole complex in hand, and created a New Town, more than three times as large as the Old Town, again with its Town Hall and government, but now accommodating extensive open spaces, rebuilt the bridge, and enclosed everything in an impressive set of fortifications. Among Charles’s innovations was the creation of a University in 1347, to ensure that those ‘who continue to thirst for scholarship, should not be forced to go begging, but should find the tables of plenty ready’.
In 1394 a site was cleared near the southern boundary of the Old Town, where the prosperous burgher Václav Kří? founded the Bethlehem Chapel, not as a place of worship, but as a preaching-house, plain, four-square, vast, accommodating a congregation of 3,000 and dedicated to reforming sermons which were to be given twice daily in the vernacular. Indicating official support for the reformers, the foundation stone was laid by Archbishop Jan of Jaňsteyn and the bones of a child killed by King Herod, donated by the proud merchant Kří?, interred. In spite of this official blessing, any rector of Bethlehem was likely to become an object of suspicion, and in 1402 Master Jan Hus, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, was appointed.
Hus was to be accused of propagating John Wycliff’s doctrines, but in reality the two men were very different. Coming after two generations of outspoken Prague reformers Hus had no need to import English ideas, and in philosophical issues Hus and Wycliff took different sides. Certainly both vigorously attacked corruption and worldliness in the Church, but so did countless others, never accused of deviation. Personally also there were few similarities other than that of their common background as university professors. The fiery and extravagant Wycliff, who never betrayed a lighter side to his character, contrasts with the humorous Hus, fond of little jokes and writing verse, producing tender admonitions rather than thunderous denunciations – and also responsible for organizing the still current system of written Czech.
In short, Hus was an unlikely martyr. Thirty years younger than Wycliff, probably born in 1369 into a peasant Bohemian family, even Hus’s name had a slightly comic flavour, ‘Hus’ being the Czech for ‘goose’ and the root of constant puns. When he entered Prague University in 1391, he became a member of the Bohemian ‘natio’, inevitably but misleadingly translated as ‘nation’. A university nation had little relation either to ethnicity or politics: Glasgow, for example, was divided into Clydesdale, Teviotdale, Albany and Rothesay; Padua had eight ‘nations’: English, French, Normans, Italians, Provençals, Catalans, Spaniards and Germans. Oxford began with only two – Australes and Boreales – but they had disappeared by 1274, a symptom either of true national unity or simple provincialism. Prague’s four nations were Bavarians (southern Germany and Burgundy), Saxons (north Germany and Scandinavia), Polish (Eastern Europe but dominated by Silesian Germans) and Bohemia, which included Hungary and Austria. Even when Czechs formed the numerical majority, the three German nations could control the University. The Prague burghers were similarly divided; most townsmen were Czech, but the more prosperous burghers were often German.
Hus was an immediate success at Bethlehem, preaching in German as well as Czech. The Bavarian Queen Sophie, Václav’s second wife, was a frequent attender and particular admirer of her ‘beloved, faithful and godly chaplain’. Her husband, not much given to religious matters, was at least sympathetic, particularly after a violent quarrel with Archbishop Jeňsteyn in 1393. This resulted in a strange episode when an infuriated Václav arrested four of the Archbishop’s officials and had them tortured. One, Vicar General Jan of Pomuk, died, and was secretly thrown into the river; he later, in a highly coloured version, formed a convenient Counter-Reformation martyr under the name of St John Nepomuk. For some time subsequently Václav trod warily in ecclesiastical matters, but remained a supporter of Hus. Being at heart always an academic, not without a streak of the pedant, Hus wrote out his sermons in Latin, a considerable number of which have been preserved, before delivering them in the vernacular. Recent Catholic theologians who have examined this work find in it nothing heretical, or even exceptional, at least prior to 1409.
University disputes began to quicken in May 1403, when a German teacher, Jan Hubner, submitted a selection of forty-five of Wycliff’s arguments to the Archbishop, now the young Zbyněk Zajíc, at that time a supporter of Hus’s. Zajíc passed these to the University Congregation to consider, which they did in a very stormy meeting, with the Czechs defending Wycliff against German attacks; but the German majority prevailed, and the articles were duly, but not formally, condemned. Along with the other Czech masters, Hus objected, and accused Hubner of not having read the texts carefully enough. ‘You have not read it correctly, or having scanned it, you did not remember it well.’
Without attempting to describe the controversy in detail, it is perhaps enough to say that Hus’s analysis, published in 1406, De Corpore Christi, is considered by the most eminent of Catholic Hussite scholars, Dom Paul de Vooght, as the clearest exposition of Catholic doctrine, which should be used as a textbook. The forty-five articles, however, became a test case of heresy or orthodoxy. Two Czech reformers, Stanislas of Znojmo, Hus’s teacher, and Stephen Páleč, a close friend, were summoned to explain themselves at Rome for their support of Wycliff in 1407. A brief imprisonment convinced them of their errors, and on their return to Prague they began a vehement campaign against their former friends.
Hus had continued to attack the clergy who neglected their duties, taking money for their services and spending it on expensive presents for their mistresses. Spies in the congregation reported to the authorities: Jan Protiva was so blatant that Hus once called out to him to make sure he reported the last statement back to his masters; Michael of Německ? Brod, a parish priest, was another industrious informer. Archbishop Zbyněk, an inexperienced and malleable young nobleman, referred the charges to the Inquisitor, but that expert official expressed himself satisfied with Hus’s arguments. The next complaint came from another German master, Ludolf Meisterman, with the support of Heidelberg University accusing two Czechs of Wycliffism. King Václav became perturbed that these accusations of heresy were bringing the country into bad repute, and demanded that Archbishop Zybněk rebut them. Obligingly enough – Václav was a difficult man to counter – Zybněk did so, in July 1408, declaring that ‘after diligent and assiduous investigation he had found no heresy in his diocese’ – particularly, he added, in the delicate matter of the Mass. But the subject of Wycliffism, however defined, was now going to be in the forefront of all debates.
At this delicate point the University became involved in the politics of the schism, caught between a French demand to join in denouncing both popes, to be followed by a Council, and their previous loyalty to Gregory. Called upon to arbitrate, Václav, then at his country residence at Kutná Hora, consulted the four nations of the University. His own inclination was to adopt the French suggestion, which had the advantage of gaining French support for his own reinstatement as Roman King, and when he learned that this was supported only by the Czechs, and opposed by the foreign, mainly German, nations, Václav flew into one of his famous rages, and ended the German domination of Prague University. By the Kutná Hora decree of 18 January 1409 the Czechs were given three votes to every one of the Germans: and in October Jan Hus was elected as Rector of the newly constituted University. The Germans voted with their feet, 1,500 of them leaving, primarily to set up a new school at Leipzig, but also to join existing universities at Erfurt and Cologne. The Kutná Hora decree may be regarded as an early statement of Czech independence. The King’s subjects, the ‘natio Bohemica’, were confronted by a united ‘natio Theutonica’, foreigners and immigrants, making drastic action essential to preserve Czech identity. Since most ‘Teutons’ were conservatives, and the most active Czechs reformers – the decree was probably drafted by Jan of Jesenice, Hus’s own legal adviser – the wider significance was clearly implicit: the University of Prague was to become dedicated to radical reform, to conservatives nothing better than a nest of heretics.
Henceforward Hus was an internationally controversial figure. Archbishop Zybněk was confused. Without any formal theological education – shoe-horned into his post as a reward to his influential family at the age of twenty-five – he had probably never read a single work of Wycliff’s right through, but was assured by the cardinals that the English writer was a bad thing. At their command he ordered all Wycliff’s books to be surrendered. Hus obliged, but attempted to point out that these contained philosophical treatises and technical exercises in logic, that could have no heretical implications. He was very ready to condemn any heresy that might lurk therein, but these allegations had to be properly proved, in a disciplined academic manner. In March 1410 a papal Bull was received condemning Wycliff’s works, banning all preaching outside authorized churches and demanding action against heresy. On 16 June the Archbishop decreed seventeen of Wycliff’s works heretical, and to be burned, and enforced the ban on preaching.
The University erupted in protest, while Hus continued to preach at Bethlehem; on 16 July he was excommunicated, and Wycliff’s books publicly burned. Again there was tumult in the streets: a marathon defence of Wycliff, lasting for a week, was mounted: children sang rude songs about the Archbishop and Hus went on preaching. The ban on all preaching outside recognized churches was defied not only by Hus, but by a number of Prague citizens, with the support of Queen Sophie, who wrote to Pope John XXIII in September and October 1410, and to the College of Cardinals, demanding that the sermons continued ‘so that the glory of the Lord, and the welfare of the people, and the honour of our realm, shine forth more gloriously’ and that such an attack ‘cannot be allowed’. At the same time another learned treatise was sent to the Archbishop and the University of Bologna, appealed to by the cardinals, agreed that the Archbishop’s actions were unjustified.
Hus was now summoned to Rome to explain himself, and declined to go, whereupon Zbyněk sent Michael of Německ? Brod to Rome with a list of charges against Hus, the most significant of which was his attack on papal indulgences. Michael was welcomed at Rome, promoted to be a procurator, known henceforward as Michael de Causis. Hus was again excommunicated, but despite Prague being placed under an interdict Hus continued to preach, with both royal and university support. Václav was so incensed at the Archbishop that he had the property of Zybněk and his supporters confiscated: after a short defiance Zybněk capitulated, lifted the interdict and promised to write to the Pope asking for proceedings against Hus to be dropped and declaring Bohemia to be free of heresy. Without fulfilling his promise, the by now exhausted Archbishop left Prague to find a refuge with Sigismund in Hungary, where he soon died.
The war of words escalated into violence in 1412: the occasion was, as it was to be a century later, the issue of indulgences. Pursuing his war against Ladislas of Naples, Pope John had issued two Bulls, the first in September 1411, stigmatizing Ladislas as perjurer, schismatic, blasphemer and heretic, and declaring a crusade against him: all who took part would be granted total remission of sins; those who did not go in person would receive the same benefit for a cash sum. The mechanisms of selling indulgences were by now well established. One official, responsible for marketing and collection, franchised others, who were paid on commission: a cut also went to King Václav. The campaign began with large iron-bound chests being placed in the principal churches to secure the takings: the clear road to heaven was then declared open. Such a combination of blatant money-making, which degraded the whole sacrament of the Eucharist, and the ostensible destination of the profits – Czechs had nothing against the people of Naples – infuriated Prague. When the papal commissioners arrived in Prague in May 1412 to organize the sales campaign Praguers began to show their anger, burning the Bulls and harassing the indulgence-vendors. Streets were crowded with demonstrators: a prostitute riding on a cart with exposed breasts covered in tinkling silver bells, sounded in a parody of the Mass. With an imitation bull sitting next to her she bestowed gracious blessings on an appreciative crowd.
On the issue of indulgences Hus parted from his old friend Stephen Páleč, who refused to condemn the campaign, which Hus vehemently opposed. On 10 July, in what must have been a concerted effort, three young men protested against the indulgences at three principal churches; they were promptly arrested and imprisoned in the Old Town Hall. Hus attempted to intervene, and led a mass protest, offering to take responsibility and punishment on himself; the magistrates promised that no harm would be done, but as soon as the crowd had dispersed, the young men were taken out and beheaded in the Town Square. The bodies were taken in state to the Bethlehem Chapel, proclaimed as martyrs. For weeks on end the crowds returned to the Town Hall, offering themselves for imprisonment and death; some were taken in and tortured, but the volunteers continued to press around the doors until the embarrassed magistrates refused to admit any more, and expelled – sometimes forcibly – the persons they had already imprisoned.
The indulgence dispute crystallized many issues. Few Prague artisans would be likely to interest themselves overmuch in the metaphysics of the Eucharist; they could, however, contrast the quality of monastic beer and priestly comforts with their own, view the hawking of indulgences as a confidence trick, and be furiously angry when their comrades were judicially murdered – and that by the detested Germans. Street protests were reinforced by the University. At a meeting on 16 July, five days after the killing of the young men, the Rector, Mark of Hradec, declared that Wycliff’s arguments could indeed be understood as non-heretical. In the debates that followed Hus took the lead in defending Wycliff, with Stephen Páleč active in the opposition. Reports quickly reached Rome, where it was determined that something must be done about Prague, where things seemed to have got out of control, with the University being run by supporters of Master Jan Hus.
King Václav, although furious with the rioters, shared with them an indignation that Rome was now equating the terms ‘Bohemian’ and ‘heretic’. In Rome the case was much clearer: too many Bohemians, lay and clerical, led by Hus, sympathized with Wycliffism and Wycliffism, however it may be defined, was heresy, about which there should be no argument. Bohemia was, to paraphrase a later politician, ‘a far-off country of which we know little’, but it would serve as an example of the Curia’s determination to remain strictly orthodox. On 29 July Hus was therefore formally excommunicated again, and in the most formal fashion.
Hus was no longer only a popular preacher and masterly debater: he had become the symbol of resistance to an unacceptable papacy. It was not a challenge that could be ignored, and Rome deployed its heaviest artillery. Hus was to be cut off absolutely from all Christians: the ban was to be read in all churches in a terrific ceremony which ended with the priest sweeping the lighted candles from the altar and hurling three stones in the general direction of where Hus was thought to be. And the root of the evil, the Bethlehem Chapel, was to be destroyed. The excommunication was published in Prague at the end of September 1412 and, to avoid causing more disturbances, Hus exiled himself to the country. The chapel remained, and stands, much restored, today, with Hus’s own texts still on the walls.
To many in the ‘Bohemica natio’ these were intolerable affronts. Václav tried once more, calling for a new synod to argue the question between the ‘Doctors’, the conservatives, and the ‘Masters’, the reformers. Again, it ended in failure in April 1413, the Doctors so exasperating the King that he expelled their leaders.
Hus’s two years of exile were amazingly productive. He produced his major Latin work De Ecclesia, in which he claimed that, although the Pope and cardinals formed the most ‘dignified’ part of the Latin Church, their posts were of purely human origin, to be honoured only when their holders were worthy. In particular he attacked simony, the institutionalization of greed, exemplified by the commercialism of indulgences and the open extravagance and corruption of many cardinals and prelates – none of which differed much from the very general condemnations which had poured in from all quarters over the last century. More distinctive were his Czech works and sermons. Frequent and widely attended, these attracted in the countryside the same crowd of disciples that had been gathered in Prague. When therefore the summons came to Constance, presenting the opportunity to clear himself before the Christian world, protected by the Emperor’s safe conduct, Hus was ready. Knowing the peril, he saw only the opportunity to explain, with magisterial clarity, exactly how the multifarious aspects of Wycliff’s thoughts, and his own glosses thereon, were to be interpreted. He was still a political innocent.