Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City

by Peter Demetz

  Legally and administratively the affairs of the Bethlehem chapel were far from simple; it was built within the parish district of St. Philip and St. James, and the resident priest, Nicholas Zeiselmeister (later to reappear among the ardent enemies of Jan Hus), had to be compensated for possible loss of fees by a yearly payment; there were to be no festive masses celebrated in the chapel. Two preachers were appointed, one paid by Mühlheim’s endowment and the other one by Kíž; these two priests actually received a comfortable living, and if they accrued or earned additional monies, they had to account strictly for the funds and use them solely for the upkeep of the chapel. The number of (frequent) sermons was precisely specified, and to guard against the easy absenteeism so rampant elsewhere, the rules insisted that preachers be in residence and that the archbishop himself approve even a temporary absence.

  The Bethlehem chapel was founded by people trying to push Christian reform, and they clearly had the full collaboration of the archbishop, who laid the foundation stone himself. It is also clear that they had close links to the university masters of the Bohemian “nation” (possibly, at that time, a label for Czech intellectuals), for the patrons of the chapel agreed that the masters would recommend clerics for appointment. Jan Protiva, the first preacher at Bethlehem (later to turn against reform), was appointed by the noble patron Johannes of Mühlheim, but the university masters recommended, as Protiva’s successor, Štpán of Kolín, a dean of the faculty of arts. The Kíž appointee, a Cistercian named Jan Štêkna, was also a master and, besides, court chaplain to Queen Jadwiga of Poland ; he must have been an effective preacher, for Jan Hus called him a “fiery trumpet” (trouba zvuná) or, in another reading, a rather noisy fool.

  The middle-class patrons of the chapel took great care to strengthen the institution in the Miliian way: Kíž endowed twelve places for poor students of the Bohemian “nation,” probably all Czech, to live and eat at Bethlehem (another adjacent building, called Nazareth, was opened for them), and, through the good offices of Jan Štkna and Kíž, the Polish queen made plans to endow a college of Lithuanians to study in Prague. She died before the first of them arrived, but fortunately, the legal documents had made provisions for admitting other young men, and now Czech students were invited. Bethlehem and Nazareth became overcrowded, and the Cistercians agreed to house the overflow in a nearby building that had once actually belonged to Mili’s New Jerusalem. On March 14, 1402, another master of the university, thirty-year-old Jan Hus, was appointed preacher and administrator of the Bethlehem chapel. From that moment, the chapel was to be at the heart of Czech history for many years to come.

  Jan Hus at Bethlehem

  Very little is known about the childhood and the early years of Jan Hus, and all the chroniclers usually repeat the same anecdotes, invented a hundred years later—about the piety of his mother and the goose (husa) which she wanted to present to his schoolteacher. Hus was born around 1372 at Husinec, a small village in southern Bohemia; his father was a farmer or village artisan, and his mother wanted Jan to study and to become a priest. Hus received his first education, mostly in reading Latin, in the elementary school in nearby Prachatice, a lively if not rich town run by well-to-do German merchants involved in the transport of goods from Austria and Bavaria to Prague. In 1390, the budding scholar and choirboy arrived in Prague, matriculated at the university as Jan of Husinec, and busied himself with the prescribed philosophical courses, receiving his B.A. (as sixth among twenty-two) in 1393 and his M.A. three years later; by 1400, or shortly thereafter, he was ordained a deacon and a priest. He was serious, averse to wasting time, unlike many of his more relaxed fellow students, and often went hungry and was in ill health (he once made himself a spoon of bread to eat peas, he wrote later, and came to eat the spoon as well). He was happy to be appointed servant at the Carolinum, tidying the rooms of the resident professors and helping in the kitchen in return for a bed and free meals; he must have enjoyed being so close to the famous professors of the Bohemian “nation.”

  His academic career, at least in the beginning, proceeded with nearly clockwork precision: after the B.A. and M.A., he taught a watered-down version of Aristotle’s natural science, then after some time the Liber Sententiarum by Petrus Lombardus, required reading in the study of theology; ultimately, he entered the long and difficult course for a doctorate in theology (doctors of theology were the only ones paid for their teaching, their income being derived from the profits earned on a farm in the countryside owned by the university). Word must have spread easily that Hus was eager, loyal, efficient if somewhat plodding as a teacher, not a firebrand in any way. He had good contacts at court (he may have been in the king’s retinue on a trip to Germany, where he marveled at the women wearing wigs) and in the Czech business community and among friends of Mili and Matj; and the young archbishop, Zbynk, later his enemy, looked upon him with noticeable favor.

  Hus never hesitated to engage himself, together with his Czech colleagues, in the discussions and conflicts troubling the Prague faculty at the time. He refrained from challenging authority directly and moved with innate and deliberate caution, but after being appointed to the Bethlehem chapel, he found himself with the leaders of a movement in which the older ideas of Mili and Matj were more and more combined with the radical new teachings of John Wyclif of Oxford University. The situation was complicated by the diversity of philosophical orientations and nascent national feeling at Prague University. The German masters of the Polish, Saxon, and Bavarian “nations” and a few of their conservative Czech allies were nominalists, believing that things preceded ideas, thus allowing a pragmatic opening to the advances of science and reserving to faith a central role in religious life. This way of thinking had been much domesticated, though, since the time when William of Ockham, its fountainhead, had lived and worked in Munich. Most of the Bohemian (or, rather, Czech) masters, Jan Hus among them, preferred the older traditions of philosophical realism in the tradition of Plato and St. Augustine, which presumed that ideas preceded things, and, above all, John Wyclif’s philosophical writings, imported to Prague by Czech students studying in Oxford. (Hus busily copied out Wyclif for himself, and in the margins expressed wonder and astonishment at the new thought.) The German masters and their allies recognized the inherent danger when the older way of thought came newly to life in the minds of their restive Czech contemporaries, and they counteracted it by invoking Wyclif’s theology, which an English synod had declared heretical in 1382, against the defenders of his philosophy. The Silesian master Johann Hübner compiled a catalogue of Wyclif’s forty-five doctrinal errors and submitted it to the offices of the archbishop, who promptly returned it to the university for an expert opinion. The university meeting of May 28, 1403, the nominalists in the overwhelming majority, easily declared the forty-five articles to be erroneous, false, and heretical; the Czech masters had little choice left but dramatic gestures and the claim that the compilation was partial or incomplete or both.

  It was certainly not a matter of mere academic disputation to be accused of Wyclifism or of doctrinal alliance with the famous master of Balliol College at Oxford; though Wyclif had long been protected by Parliament and the powerful duke of Lancaster, the situation in England had changed when the peasants revolted in 1381 and he was forced to retire to his parish of Lutterworth, where he died three years later. (He may have died peacefully, but in 1427 his bones were disinterred and burned, and the ashes thrown into the river Swist.) Wyclif was far more politically minded than Jan Hus; for many years he had been engaged in England’s resistance against the French and against the Avignon Curia, he greatly admired the secular power of Kings Edward I and Edward III, and he provided much of the theoretical arguments against the English crown’s making payments to the pope. He was a learned theologian in the Augustinian tradition and, through Augustine, closer to Plato than to Aristotle, but his first religious, doctrinal, and social law was the Bible, part of which he rendered into English so that it could be understood by
the unlettered; he declared in no uncertain terms that whatever ecclesiastical hierarchies, rites, orders, institutions, and sacraments were not found in Scripture were alien to Christian life. Christ, not the pope (at least not the historical pope, of his time), was the head of the invisible church, and there should be no difference between bishops and priests, who were to roam the countryside in pairs, preaching everywhere. Few of the sacraments were justified by the Bible, he thought, least of all extreme unction, and even in the Eucharist, bread and wine remained mere bread and wine, even after being consecrated, and Christ was received not bodily but “spiritually” by the faithful. Defining his idea of “remanence,” Wyclif opposed the orthodox belief in the act of transubstantiation by which the bread and wine, though retaining their accidental forms, were believed to become the true body and true blood of Christ. With increasing fervor, Wyclif demanded that the true church—those predestined for salvation—return to the poverty and pristine virtues of the early days: if the church misused ecclesiastical property, it was the task of the secular powers to right the situation, and the king neglected his duties if he did not intervene.

  It has always been difficult to show precisely when and how Jan Hus emerged in the religious life of Prague, where many had long favored him as a loyal if reform-minded son of the church, to defend heresy, as his adversaries insisted on calling it, to claim the essential privilege of all Christians to appeal for ultimate justification to Christ himself, the true head of the church. He was surely a man of quiet decisions, and he was far from being a belligerent radical, even though he looked like one to many. He grew with the events, in which schismatic popes, legitimate and illegitimate kings, comfortable prelates enjoying many benefices and ascetic theologians, the church’s legal establishment and the resolution to live in the truth of Jesus Christ, conservative Bohemian patriots and early defenders of the idea of a nation based on language rather than territory—all these were chaotically pitted against each other. Jan Hus had been distinctly reticent at the university discussion about the theological errors of Wyclif in 1403, and Zbynk of Hasenburk, the archbishop of Prague, wanted earnest Hus to speak to the Bohemian clergy at Prague synods.

  Jan Hus may have become aware of his life’s truth not in a sudden thrust of inspiration but step by step, feeling after feeling and thought after thought; by 1408, at the latest, he was emerging as a figure of European stature, investigated by papal councils, jeered at and admired at home, and forced to a deeper understanding of himself in his confrontation with the power of the church and the world. The decisions that shaped his life and death were all made within a few years, roughly between 1408 and 1412; when the archbishop, fully supported by the pope, in 1409 appointed a commission to examine Wyclif’s teachings and demanded that all copies of his writings be delivered to his office, Hus immediately wrote a short treatise about the study of texts that readers might consider heretical (they do not have to share the author’s opinions, after all) and protested to the Curia in a document formulated by his legal adviser, Jan of Jesenice; when, on July 16, 1414, Archbishop Zbynk, nervous and ill advised, gave the order to burn the collected books, and demonstrating students roamed through the Prague streets singing a ditty about “Bishop Zbynk ABC / burns books though he / knew not what they contained,” Hus, together with five other university masters, organized a learned conference about Wyclif’s writing, and coolly ignored the excommunication decreed against him by Zbynk, who had escaped to his castle at Roudnice, fearing the worst. King Václav IV, however, wrote to the pope to defend Hus, his “faithfully devoted chaplain,” and Wyclif’s English disciples collected books to send to Prague.

  The Prague Wyclifites, Jan Hus among them, were well aware that, in challenging the book-burning archbishop, they were able to rely on the protection of court and King, who had his own ax to grind as far as the archbishop was concerned. The Wyclifites and King Václav IV banded together against the Bohemian church hierarchy and the university enemies of the Wyclifites. It was not clear whether, in this temporary and highly unstable alliance, the Wyclifite masters were skillfully manipulating the king against their university enemies, or whether it was the king who used the Prague Wyclifites and their high moral seriousness to serve his international political aims.

  The Decree of Kutná Hora

  King Václav IV (definitely not resembling the English king Edward I, whom Wyclif so admired) had been deposed as Holy Roman Emperor by decision of the prince-electors in 1400, and he was not averse to using the conflicts of the schism between Rome and Avignon to undo his humiliation and to strengthen his dignity and international power by recommending himself as a ruler eager to help restore order to the church. The new Roman pope, Boniface IX, had approved Ruprecht of the Palatinate, Václav’s German adversary, as emperor (and, after Boniface’s death, so did his successors Innocent VII and Gregory XII), and Václav IV had good reason to express sympathy to those cardinals who, weary of the schismatic disorder, wanted to organize a grand council to solve these questions once and for all. His idea was that the council would depose Gregory XII and Benedict XIII of Avignon and elect a single new pope. His problem was that conservatives in the Bohemian church and in the German lands remained loyal to Ruprecht and Gregory XII; in Prague itself, Archbishop Zbynk, together with his hierarchy, professed the same ecclesiastical obedience and abhorred the idea that the king of Bohemia should move away from it.

  Toward the end of 1408, a French delegation of august church dignitaries, committed to plans for a general council at Pisa, appeared in Prague and at Kutná Hora, a rich and proud silver-mining town west of Prague, where the king then resided, and began discussions about Václav’s neutrality. The king was eager to seize his chance to enhance his international visibility and, perhaps, to be Holy Roman Emperor again, if Gregory XII’s support of Ruprecht would cease to be legitimate. Václav could not hope to be helped by Archbishop Zbynk, but, needing political support, he intended to enlist the university’s many learned masters and doctors, and he shrewdly asked for legal advice from them. It was a diplomatic way to find out how much institutional support he could expect; he could not have been entirely surprised to discover that the Bavarian, Saxon, and Polish “nations” were unshaken in their loyalty to Ruprecht and Pope Gregory XII, and that only the Wyclifites, mostly Czechs of the Bohemian “nation,” were willing to support neutrality and the convening of a general council (the less pope, the better).

  In turning to Prague University, the king had the international situation in mind, not the squabbles of the local professors, yet it cannot be said that the Wyclifite masters supported him to further the Czech nation in the modern sense. They were passionately engaged in religious reform, ever more radical as the years went by, and first of all they wanted to change the university’s power structure, which threatened the advance of their dissenting thought; they also believed—and here the problem of nationality does enter—that this power structure did not entirely correspond to the actual composition of the student body and faculty. King Charles IV had established the university for “loyal inhabitants” (regnicole fideles) of the kingdom of Bohemia and for others who wanted to partake of the rich symposia of scholarship in Prague; from the beginning, however, the regnicole fideles of whatever language were in a distinct minority while the other three “nations” dominated the examination boards and the most influential university positions. The Saxons (north) comprised students from Saxony, Brandenburg, Frisia, Pomerania, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and England. The “natio Polonica” (east) comprised Poles, Lithuanians, Prussians, Silesians, and Lusatians, whatever their native language. The Bavarian “nation” (south) included not only Bavarians but also Tyroleans, Austrians, Hessians, Swiss, and Lombards. The “natio Bohemica ,” a rather diverse bunch, included, of course, students from Bohemia and Moravia (both Czech and German speakers), as well as Hungarians, some of whom may have been Slovaks, from the Carpathian countries and the Balkans. At the beginning, the natio Bohemica—that
is, the regnicole fideles addressed by King Charles IV—constituted one-sixth of the total university population, and by the turn of the century, after many students had left for the new universities of Cracow, Vienna, and Heidelberg, the Bohemians increased to at least one-fifth of the academic population. The reformers of the Bohemian “nation” had few chances if the system remained unchanged.

  The university’s “nations” had quarreled before, but matters had been patched up by administrative compromises, because most of the scholars disliked outside interference in their affairs. The earlier disputes had, of course, concerned appointments, stipends, and benefits—there was not enough money for everybody. Usually, conflicts would erupt about appointments; if the candidate was born in Silesia, for instance, the Bohemians would punctiliously argue that he was not a Bohemian native, but would agree to his appointment provided that any future candidate for the position would be selected from their ranks. In the later 1380s and 1390s, language began to take precedence over territorial place of origin—some scholars may have belonged to the natio Bohemica but not all of them were natione Bohemi (that is, Czech speakers)—and slowly the principle of national inclusion and exclusion, long opposed by the universalism of the medieval church, began to raise its ugly head. During the reign of King Charles IV, Archbishop Arnestus had immediately intervened when an Augustinian monastery wanted to restrict its admission of applicants who were Czech speakers, but hardly a generation later, the learned and irritable Adalbertus Ranconis de Ericinio established two fellowships for students in Paris and Oxford but stipulated that they be natione Bohemi (that is, Czechs) on their fathers’ and mothers’ sides.

  When the French delegation appeared at Kutná Hora in late 1408, King Václav IV also invited a delegation of distinguished scholars from Prague University to explore the justification for and support of neutrality in the papal schism. He could not have expected a unified vote from the professors, but he must have been quickly disappointed by the differences among them. This university group comprised, among others, the German rector, two conservative Czechs, and, from the Wyclifite faction, Jan Hus’s friend the lively Master Jeroným, well known internationally. Václav, who hoped for a majority decision in his favor, first assured the Germans that he would never interfere with their privileges but angrily turned (an anti-Wyclifite writer later attested) on the Wyclifites, whom he held responsible for creating problems and threatened to have them burned. Yet his only hope was in these restless Bohemian Wyclifites, for the other three “nations” were totally unwilling to give up their obedience to the Roman pope. For some days, there was considerable lobbying behind the scenes, but on January 18, 1409, the king issued his decree of Kutná Hora, which radically changed the traditional legal structure of Prague University, giving three votes to the Bohemian “nation” and only one to all the other “nations”—disenfranchising the masters of three “nations” with one stroke and elevating the Bohemians to a dominance that enabled him to claim that a majority at the university fully supported his neutrality and the preparations for the Pisa council.