by Peter Demetz
The council’s final judgment declared Hus to be “a veritable and manifest heretic,” to be degraded and delivered up for inevitable punishment to the secular authorities; all his writings, in Latin and in Czech, which few members of the council could have read or understood, were to be burned. After the judgment was passed, the cardinals and bishops prepared for the theatrical scene of degrading the heretic. Hus was first clothed in ceremonial vestments, as if he were to celebrate mass, and then, after another exhortation to submit, the vestments were taken from him one by one while the prescribed curses were uttered. Next, his tonsure was obliterated (there was a short discussion whether to use a razor or scissors, and the scissors won), and a paper hat, eighteen inches high, with images drawn on it of three devils seizing an unfortunate’s soul, was put on his head. He was handed over to the secular power, represented by Duke Ludwig of the Palatinate, who in turn formally entrusted him to the executioner and the guards, who marched him off to the place of execution, passing by the cemetery where his books were being burned.
Intent upon finishing the investigation, begun in 1410, the council members had been more eager to demonstrate that their prisoner was a Wyclifite than to listen to his responses, counterarguments, and thoughtful statements. In many theological respects, Hus was not a Wyclifite at all, or an extremely conservative, if not circumspect, one. Unlike many of his more radical Prague friends, he never accepted Wyclif’s idea of remanence, and he also did not accept Wyclif’s radical idea that bishops and priests “in mortal sin” could not consecrate or baptize; he clung, long before and during the investigations of the council, to the distinctly softer view that sinful bishops and priests might not act “worthily” but what they did was spiritually valid because God was acting through them and they were merely his instruments. The theologians at Constance were possibly more deeply shocked by the full meaning of his largely Wyclifite concept of the church, and his moral opposition to the absolute claims made upon Christian believers by church powers which, he thought, were long alienated from Christ’s truth, an opposition strongly nourished by the Czech reform movement of Mili and Matj. His distinction between the universal church, composed of those predestined by the inscrutable will of God and headed by Christ, and the church militant, made up of the good and the bad ruled by cardinals and the pope, hardly veiled his idea of who was the true head of the church. Ecclesiastical traditionalists and learned theologians had reasons to be disturbed by his insistence that “obedience should be rendered to pope and cardinals as long as they taught the truth according to God’s law,” and his unshakable belief that all claims and decisions of the church were to be measured against what the Scriptures had to say. When it came to the ultimate choice, Hus sincerely wanted to obey Christ rather than the church, and he calmly held his ground, hoping against hope that the noble assembly would come to understand the veracity of his beliefs.
The place of execution was on the road to Gottlieben (today close to the municipal gasworks) and stank execrably because the burghers used it as a dump for the carcasses of dead animals. Hus prayed, the crowd gawked, the executioner put a rusty chain around his neck and fastened him to an upright pole, put two bundles of wood under his feet and placed other bundles, interspersed with straw, around his body up to his chin. An imperial delegate once again asked Hus to recant; Hus refused, the delegate clapped his hand, and the wood was lit. Hus began to sing aloud, but when the flames blew in his face, he only prayed silently and, after a while, died. The executioners broke his bones and his skull with clubs, received payment from the imperial delegate for his vestments and shoes (usually theirs to sell but thrown into the flames too in order to deprive loyal Bohemians of relics), and carefully searched for his heart, which they put on a sharpened club to “roast” in the flames. Finally, they swept up the ashes, carried them to the Rhine, flowing nearby, and threw them into its waters. It was July 6, 1415.
The Beginnings of Hussite Resistance
When the news from Constance reached Prague and within a few weeks spread through Bohemia and Moravia, friends and foes of Jan Hus gathered to protest the council’s sentence or to uphold its legitimacy. Fifty-eight Hussite barons converged on Prague to hold a protest meeting and on September 2 ceremoniously signed and sealed a forceful document that defended Hus and declared that the accusation of heresy had dishonored the entire land; whoever, of whatever station in life, held that there was heresy in Bohemia was “a son of the devil and the father of lies.” (Eight copies of the document were sent to Constance with 452 seals affixed.) Three days later, on September 5, fifty-five barons (three had evidently changed their minds) agreed to form a league to defend “the law of Christ,” as theologically defined by the masters of Prague University, and a week later the masters, for their part, issued a public statement praising the innocence of Jan Hus. King Vaclav IV was irresolute, as usual, but it was well known in town that important persons at court favored Hussite ideas and demands, including some of the king’s councillors, Queen Sophia (his second wife, another Bavarian princess), and a group of pious women of considerable political influence who had gathered around her, among others, Anna of Frimburg, wife of the master of the mint, Eliška of Krava, and Anna of Mochov, whose husband had once offered Hus asylum at his castle of Kozí Hrádek.
The Constance council, continuing in session, called the protest of the Hussite League a sorry and grotesque spectacle and demanded that everybody who had signed appear before the cardinals to be investigated. Orthodox opposition against the Hussites stiffened when the council sent Jan Železný, bishop of Litomyšl and an ardent defender of the church, to Prague (he felt unsafe there, for good reason) to make sure that King Václav’s court declare itself unmistakably in its support and that the heretics submit more speedily. A group of fourteen Catholic nobles gathered on October 1, in response to the Hussite League, to declare its loyalty to king, church, and hierarchy, and the archbishop, under pressure from Constance, a month later renewed a strict interdict on Prague—citing, of all reasons, the continued presence there of Jan of Jesenice, Hus’s onetime legal adviser and, possibly, organizer of the Hussite League. The archbishop’s decree inevitably backfired and, instead of strengthening the Catholic cause, played into the hands of the Hussite clergy. Since masses were not to be celebrated in Prague or sacraments administered, the Hussite clergymen, supported by demonstrative townspeople, immediately moved into the churches and took over the parishes, freely preaching and offering communion sub utraque specie—that is, giving both bread and wine to the communicants. The Catholic clergy was forced to seek refuge in the suburbs and orthodox Christians walking there were called “Mohammedans” by the Prague Hussites because, it was said, they were going from Mecca to Medina. The conflict was not made less corrosive by reports from Constance that the council had arrested Master Jeroným of Prague, a flamboyant and tremendously gifted ally and friend of Hus, and tried him for heresy too. Jeroným first recanted, then, in his own melodramatic way, recanted his recantation, and died in Constance at the stake on May 30, 1416.
Among the close friends of Hus and the masters of the university, Jakoubek of Stbro emerged as the most energetic adversary of the Constance council and for some time the undisputed leader of the Hussite reform movement. He was a saintly and often stubborn man of wide-ranging ideas on divinity and politics and faced the uneasy task of keeping together the many factions of the movement, from the conservatives who hoped for an ultimate conciliation with church and emperor to the radicals impatient to break with pope and emperor as soon as possible. Howard Kaminsky, an American historian, believes that the Hussites would not have survived the onslaught of their many enemies had Jakoubek not tried to define a middle course, often against himself. His personal views were radical, yet he felt the necessity not to alienate the more traditional Hussites in the baronial league and among his university colleagues. The chronology of his training runs almost parallel to that of Hus, who was fond of calling him “Kuba,” but he differ
ed intellectually from his friend by his early commitment to the native ideas of Matj of Janov. Returning to the Ur-church, as Matj and Wyclif had done, Jakoubek had rediscovered, or was prompted to rediscover, the tradition of the Eucharist sub utraque specie and first began, against Hus’s hesitations, to offer the parishioners communion in the shape of simple bread and wine at the Church of St. Martin in the Wall; Hussite priests at the churches of St. Michael, of the Old Town, and of St. Vojtch followed his example. The Constance council declared this to be heretical in 1415, and the Hussite movement made a chalice its first symbol, proudly showing it on its standards.
Jakoubek was not a tribune of the people, and he increasingly disliked those of his clerical brethren willing or even eager to exercise worldly power more legitimately represented by the king, town, university, or Hussite gentry. He was a scholar who had to speak and act politically; he seems to have lacked the popular appeal of Jan Hus, whom he also succeeded at the pulpit at the Bethlehem chapel, and only later in life he shifted to writing in Czech rather than in his accustomed and scholarly Latin. Though Jakoubek was resolute in defending the most radical demands of Matj of Janov and Wyclif, in practice he disliked the sectarian and outlandish beliefs often adopted on the Hussite left; when the radicals did away with most of the mass and elected their own bishop, irrevocably breaking with the church, Jakoubek openly resisted the move for both theological and pragmatic reasons. At one time, the radicals dominant in Prague forced him to leave town to repent under the supervision of radical priests, and a few revolutionaries may have even conspired to kill him, but he died peacefully on August 10, 1429, back in Prague and among his friends and disciples, still unwavering in his willingness to bring together the diverse followers of his friend Jan Hus. He did not want to see Bohemia totally alienated from shared Christian traditions.
Prague Attracts the European Dissidents
The stories about the life and death of Jan Hus and his friend Jeroným, as well as the strongly organized Bohemian opposition against the Constance council and the Roman church, made Prague a wondrous haven for European dissidents, seekers of truth, itinerant prophets, and religious visionaries. The Holy Inquisition had closed its Prague office in 1415 (it was reopened two centuries later), and while the university had long attracted dissident theologians from Saxony and elsewhere in Germany (never mind the decree of Kutná Hora) there were also other newcomers, individuals from England and an entire group from France, seeking asylum, an opportunity to join the good fight, or simply wanting to live in peace in a new Christian world. In the Bohemian provinces, radicals often combined Hussite ideas with much older habits of protest against the church and social authority. Long-submerged ideas of a Christian fundamentalism, originally ascribed to the Lyon merchant Peter Waldes, appeared among the Hussites of southern Bohemia, and recent scholarship assumes that the Czechs learned about Waldensian attitudes and ideas (for instance, the denial of purgatory and the unwillingness to take any oath) from German-speaking peasants living along the Austrian-Bohemian border and long persecuted, for their heresies, by the flying courts of the Inquisition. In the southern Bohemian forests, little communities of Adamites were established but quickly destroyed—the men, women, and children killed—by radical Hussites who were revolutionaries but also deeply puritan. Their legendary military leader Jan Žižka reported to Prague that these bestial people believed that God resided in each and every one of them, went about naked or nearly so, danced orgiastically around their fires, and made love when and with whom they wanted. The women tore off the men’s loincloths and screamed, “Let out your prisoner, give me your soul, and accept mine!”
Peter of Dresden and Friedrich Eppinge, the first German or rather Saxon dissidents from the Dresden school of the Holy Spirit, came or returned to Prague in 1411, even before Hus had broken with King Václav IV, and were given refuge at the house of the Black Rose on Pkopy, the center of the Bohemian “nation” at Prague University. (Ultranationalist interpreters of the Hussite movement have yet to deal with the ready welcome the Czech masters extended to their German colleagues.) Of Peter of Dresden not much can be said for certain; he was among the early defenders of communion “in both kinds” with communicants being offered the chalice as well as the bread; when he later went on a missionary voyage to Germany, as did so many of his brethren, he was arrested by the Inquisition and put to death. Friedrich Eppinge, who was personally close to Hus, publicly defended Hus’s ideas about the need to study Wyclifite writings in depth before judging his ideas, but he died in 1412 and was not alive to support his friend in the difficult times thereafter. After Eppinge’s death, Master Nicholas of Dresden emerged as the most important and active theologian of the Black Rose school; he was possibly better qualified than any of his friends to grasp fully the complexities of the Prague situation. He was first trained in Dresden but had studied at Prague University since 1400 and may have heard Hus’s sermons at the Bethlehem chapel in 1402; as Amadeo Molnár suggests in his story of the Waldensian movement, Nicholas had independently studied the history of the church and at Wildungen, in Germany, had offered communion sub utraque specie on his own because he believed that it was essential to accept what Christ had done at the Last Supper.
Czech, German, and American scholars of Nicholas and his unusual fate must confront the question whether he was actually a Hussite or a Waldensian, or both. He certainly was a highly gifted theologian and Latin writer and, after the death of Hus, the only person in Prague to compete intellectually with Jakoubek; it is not surprising that for a few years Jakoubek and Nicholas, the Czech and the German, closely collaborated in defining the shared heritage of Hus. Jakoubek, who had to keep in mind his allies among the nobles, the masters, and the patriciate, was eager to temper his radical leanings with appropriate qualifications and pragmatic recommendations, but Nicholas was not burdened by second thoughts about the local political situation or by a need to soften his views. The parting of the ways came, as has been suggested, after the Hussite League was formed in the early fall of 1415—Jakoubek fully aware of the inevitable and practical boundaries of his radical theory, Nicholas now going far beyond Hussite ideas to involve himself in a new belligerence, more than once tinged by a Waldensian fundamentalism which he may have learned earlier in Germany; his total aversion to the idea of purgatory, to the taking of any oath, and to making any distinctions between priests and bishops was unacceptable to the university masters. Jakoubek and his allies wanted a constitutional structure of religion and political life in Bohemia, but Nicholas, not bound by loyalty to the king of Bohemia, lived and was to die for a permanent Christian revolution beyond the confines of any one country. The masters, and Jakoubek, must have felt relieved when he went to Germany in 1416, possibly to work for a union of Hussites and Waldensians. He fell into the hands of the Inquisition, and was burned at the stake in Meissen in 1417.
By that time, the increasing tension between moderates and radicals weighed heavily on the minds of the Prague University masters, and the Prague burgrave, enk of Wartenberk, believed it was necessary to ordain young and older priests to strengthen the cause and to integrate those with Waldensian leanings more fully. The archbishop, loyal to the Roman church, could not be approached in the matter, so enk, being a man of action, simply kidnapped one of the archbishop’s assistants, brought him to the castle of Lipnice, and told him to ordain the candidates gathered there, including a few German Hussites from the Black Rose. Among them was Bartholomäus Rautenstock, who first preached to a group of Prague German Hussites but later lived in a little town near the Bohemian border under the protection of the Hussites, and traveled through Germany in the manner of itinerant Waldensian preachers. His friend Johannes Drändorf, of a rich family but choosing voluntary poverty in the name of Christ, was first trained in Saxony and left with the dissidents in 1411 to study at the Black Rose for ten years. He too was ordained at Lipnice, preached in Prague, and was sent to southern Bohemia to work among the German peasants ther
e; long of Waldensian persuasion, he went on missionary trips to Germany like many of his brethren. Peter Turnow, another dissident theologian at the Black Rose, originally came from East Prussia and Saxony, but he left Prague in 1414 for Bologna, where he studied for a while before going on to Greece, then returning via Venice to Prague, much changed by 1423. He wrote a treatise on the rites and teachings of the Greek Orthodox Church, of great interest to his Prague Hussite brethren, and went to teach in Germany too. The Inquisition had been watching these German Hussites closely and, unable to lay hands on them while they worked in Bohemia, caught up with them when they came to preach in Germany. Rautenstock, Drändorf, and Turnow were executed in 1425, but in different German towns. In spite of its medieval bureaucracy, the Holy Inquisition worked quite efficiently.