by Peter Demetz
It cannot be said that King Václav IV, of a Luxembourg family and married to a Bavarian princess, was an ardent Czech patriot, but he needed the support of the natio Bohemica as much as the Wyclifites needed his backing, and for a time they banded together. The king was not interested in the quarrels between the masters, and the Wyclifites were not chiefly concerned with French cardinals or the election of a new pope. The decree moved between old and new ideas and implications. It may be true that all human beings must love all other beings, the initial sentences say, but necessary love should proceed from well-ordered care, ex ordinata caritate, inspiring the king to favor his own before extending his love to others. His own was the natio Bohemica, the true heir of the kingdom (regni iusta heres), or the legal inhabitants of his kingdom, but these Bohemians were confronted in new ways not with the three traditional “nations” but with one unified “natio Theutonica” consisting of “foreigners and immigrants” (externi et adveni). In later Czech history natio Bohemica was translated as eský národ (Czech nation), reminiscent of if not coinciding with nineteenth-century terminology, but in the historical context of 1409, a double reading of the term was still possible, I believe—the old legal way, relating it to the incolae (inhabitants of the kingdom of Bohemia), not excluding speakers of German who had been born and bred in the country; and a new linguistic way, meaning Czech speakers whose parents on both sides were Czech. The text of the decree leaves the interpretation wide open; if it is true that the writer was Jan of Jesenice, the Wyclifites’ legal expert and legal adviser to Jan Hus, it is possible to assume that he deftly addressed the legal and territorial meaning to the ears of the king and the new linguistic interpretation to his own friends in the reform group.
On January 26, the decree was read out at the university, but the Bavarians, Poles, and Saxons were unwilling to give up without a fight. In subsequent negotiations, they suggested that the natio Bohemica secede and establish a university of its own (something like this happened in a different situation, when Prague University was divided into two institutions, German and Czech, in 1882), and both sides seriously entertained the possibility that the university could be run by alternating teams of different “nations,” half the year by the Bohemians and the other half by representatives of the others. Pressed for time and suspicious of professors, King Václav IV was not really interested in continuing the debate; his delegates and a few town officials forced the rector to hand over the insignia of the university and, by the king’s order, Zdenk of Laboun and Simon of Tišnov, a friend of Hus, were appointed rector and dean of the faculty of arts. The German-speaking masters and students in the other “nations” had vowed not to submit, and after May 9 in solemn exodus left the university, town, and country. The Prague merchants complained about the loss of so many customers, whatever their language or country of origin. Historians have long discussed the number of those who left Prague; and the old suggestion of thousands of masters and students may be more hyperbolic than precise. Heinrich Denifle, researching the matriculation books of Erfurt and the then newly founded university at Leipzig, where most of the German masters and students were said to have gone, came up with statistical evidence not exactly demonstrating an exodus en masse; recent calculations speak of six hundred or six hundred and fifty people. Yet it is also true that by the exodus Prague University lost much of its international function and, like many other European universities at the time, became local and national, though not entirely and not in the simple nineteenth-century sense.
Later German and Czech nationalists constantly looked back at the decree of Kutná Hora to nourish their belligerent feelings with melodramatic images of Czech and German villains and heroes. The question always hinges on the changing meaning of the term natio Bohemica; in later Hussite documents, the term jazyk (linguagium, or language) is frequently used to denote nationality. But to speak of a total and radical break between Czechs and Germans in 1409 is to be distinctly premature, if not demagogic; in any case the students and masters of jurisprudence in Prague, who since 1372 had been independent of the university, went on in their accustomed ways, untouched by the king’s decree, and there is strong evidence that even among the German professors not everybody joined the exodus (e.g., Johannes Hildesen of Hildesheim); new German masters, inclined to religious reform, returned to or newly joined the Prague faculty, as did Friedrich Eppinge from Dresden, a scholar particularly dear to Hus. Nor did all the masters interpret natio Bohemica in the new linguistic manner but preferred its traditional territorial meaning. This complexity helps to explain why, after Hus served as rector for half a year in 1409-10, he was followed, as the historian Ferdinand Seibt has shown, by Andreas Schindel, a Bohemian German from Duchcov (Dux).
Czech and German historians, for different reasons, were rather fond of the idea that Jan Hus himself had played a dominant role, heroic or villainous, in the issuance of King Václav IV’s decree and the exodus of the Germans, an early “ethnic cleansing,” but recent scholarship tends to stress that his concerns were religious rather than national. He certainly participated in presenting the necessity of change to the royal court, together with his Wyclifite friends, but he became ill at the most decisive moments of the negotiations; it is more probable that his friend Jeroným, who in the best humanist way praised the Slavs as descendants of the ancient Greeks, and his legal adviser, Jan of Jesenice (who also provided the court with a legal brief), were the most active in pushing the change. At any rate, the German students, shortly after leaving Prague, were singing a political ditty in which they named Jeroným and Jan of Jesenice as responsible for their migrations but did not mention Hus at all. At the Bethlehem chapel, Hus, in turn, praised Nicholas Augustin, often called “the Rich,” as an influential court counselor who had been instrumental in the king’s decision; the possibility that Nicholas was of German origin only complicates the situation even more. He was not the only Prague German who, in restless times, felt closer to his fellow Czech citizens than to the Germans coming from abroad.
Jan Hus at Constance
The alliance of the Wyclifites and the king that produced the decree of Kutná Hora was in danger of breaking asunder three years later. It was the issue of indulgences sold in the streets that now increasingly isolated Jan Hus from many of his fellow masters, including some of his oldest friends, who were willing to support the hierarchy and the king, eager to rid Bohemia of all dangerous aspersions of heresy. The occasion was the war of the pontiffs: the Avignon pope deposed by the Council of Pisa, together with King Ladislas of Naples and Hungary, occupied Rome and drove Pope John XXIII to exile in Bologna. From there, Pope John XXIII exhorted all faithful Christians to come to the defense of his church and promised everybody who would take up arms or equip a soldier for one month “remission of such of their sins of which they were heartily contrite and which they had confessed.” In practice, people believed that if they simply paid, their sins would be forgiven.
In May 1412, the pope’s special envoy and commissioner, Wenzel Tiem, actually a southern Moravian German from Mikulov (Nikolsburg), arrived in Bohemia, ingeniously set up a network of subagents to sell indulgences, organized festive Prague propaganda processions with fifes and drums, and placed huge coffers at the churches of St. Vitus, the Týn, and St. Jakob to protect the incoming monies. In Prague, where the practice of indulgences had been opposed as early as 1393 by the German Dominican Heinrich of Bitterfeld, nearly everybody was appalled, but in private rather than in public; after all, the sale of indulgences had been fully approved by the king, who was expecting his appropriate cut. But Jan Hus condemned the sale of indulgences, saying they were “not in harmony with the apostolic mandate,” challenged the authorities of church and kingdom, and once again strongly articulated the conflict between Wyclifites and church loyalists, mostly doctors of theology on the faculty of arts. The university resolved to bring the problem to the attention of the king, who in turn, after meeting a few dignitaries, officially confirmed that th
e earlier condemnation of Wyclif was legitimate and that all public demonstrations against the sale of indulgences were forbidden.
The council of the Old Town, once again dominated by a German majority, was set to follow the king’s wishes loyally and strictly when, during mass on Sunday, July 10, 1412, three young men by the names of Jan, Martin, and Stašek, all Czechs and artisans, demonstratively raised their voices at St. Vitus, the Týn, and St. Jakob against the sale of indulgences ; they all were quickly arrested and dragged to the Old Town prison. Early next morning, a restive crowd gathered at the Old Town Square to demonstrate in favor of the prisoners. Jan Hus, together with a few masters and students, appeared at the town hall to put in a good word for the young men, proclaiming that it was actually he who was responsible for their deeds. The cunning town councillor assured him that the prisoners would be treated gently, but as soon as he had left, the three young men were marched out of the prison and beheaded. It was the first blood shed in the Hussite revolution.
The townspeople in the square put the corpses on white linen (later adversaries of the Hussites suggested that pious “begutae” licked blood from the cobblestones) and carried them in solemn procession through the Old Town to the Bethlehem chapel, where a fiery young preacher intoned the “Isti sunt martyres” (“These are martyrs”). Soon, a militant squad of armed church loyalists attacked the Bethlehem chapel but was repulsed by the virtually bare-handed followers of Hus; King Václav IV, who wanted peace, told Hus to leave town. A royal commission convened to negotiate between the factions failed miserably, and the king, in a curious decision, then exiled four of Hus’s most bitter enemies, doctors of theology, ordering them to leave Prague and Bohemia and to cease disturbing the peace at once (most of them went to Moravia). But Prague did not quiet down, and the exiled Hus, living under the protection of Czech nobles at the castles of Kozí and Krakovec, used the opportunity to preach to the country people and to write his most important theological and moral essays in Latin and Czech.
The accusations leveled against Hus by Archbishop Zbynk, his onetime friend and ally, in a document presented to the Roman Curia in 1410, triggered investigations and proceedings that continued, as it were, on their own, independent of the incumbent pontiffs and cardinals entrusted with the matter, in this respect strongly resembling Kafka’s court, ever awake even if apparently dormant, and always watching the Prague lawyer K. The Curia worked with all possible speed (a papal order signed in December arrived in Prague only in March, due to snows on the Alpine passes); the commissions were able to rely on denunciatory information submitted from Prague by the Czech priest Jan Protiva, the local inquisitor, Maurice Rvaka, and the odious Michal, a Prague parish priest who made it his true vocation to denounce Hus in the most strident terms (he was called “de Causis” because of his zeal for legal procedures). Considering the vulnerability of the Roman hierarchy in the years of the schism, the Curia was surprisingly successful and violent in fighting Hus’s allies when they began arriving in Italy for various reasons; Jan of Jesenice was imprisoned and barely escaped; Štpán Pále, once the fellow student closest to Jan Hus and shortly to be one of his main accusers, was arrested and robbed of his belongings by Cardinal Baldassarre Cossa (soon to be Pope John XXIII). By the time of the indulgences controversy, the Prague “heresy” had become an international problem: the famous Paris theologian Jean Gerson admonished Archbishop Zbynk to proceed against the sinners, and the pope wrote to King Václav IV in similar terms. Something had to be done. When Sigismund—Václav’s half brother and heir presumptive, king of Hungary and, since 1411, Roman king as well, a man of large ambitions—prevailed on John XXIII to call a grand council at Constance, on the border of southern Germany and Switzerland, to reform the church, Jan Hus and his ideas were high on the agenda, though not the most pressing business.
Jan Hus went to Constance with hopes and fears, yet strangely, if not naively, believing that he would be able to convince the council by rational discourse that he was not a heretic in light of the Bible. He seems to have assumed that the council would be, essentially, another Bethlehem gathering, more adversarial perhaps but open to argument, and before leaving he prepared two personal statements which he, the excommunicated B.A. from the Bohemian provinces, proposed to present to the world’s most famous experts on canon law, trained in Bologna and Paris. He left the castle of Krakovec on October 11, 1414, with a group of friends and escorts in wagons and on horseback, wended his way to Nuremberg and, stared at by friendly crowds, through southern Germany. He reached Constance on November 3 and, together with his friends, took lodging at the house of Fida, a pious widow living on St. Paul’s Street. Much has been made of the safe-conduct promised him, in earlier negotiations, by Emperor Sigismund, but the document, delivered to him considerably later, turned out to be a laissez-passer rather than a letter of protection; it is possible that, in the exhilaration of the journey, Hus did not want to concern himself with its exact wording, since the document would have been worthless anyway if the traveler were condemned as a heretic. Sigismund was far more concerned with his political ambitions than with Hus, and when the council asked him to allow Hus to be formally arrested he consented (sending a letter by special messenger). On a pretext, Hus was prompted to leave the widow Fida’s house and shifted under guard to the local Dominican monastery (now a luxury hotel), where he was put in a narrow cell close to the cesspool; he promptly came down with a high fever and other ailments. The council did not procrastinate; the pope named a special commission to continue and conclude the investigation of Hus; work began immediately, relying on the documents earlier prepared by Hus’s Prague enemies, above all his former buddy Štpán Pále and Michal de Causis.
In Constance, Hus’s noble Czech and Moravian friends were unwilling to take his arrest idly. Jan of Chlum put up public notices against the flagrant violation of his friend’s safe-conduct, Italian guards were bribed to allow letters to pass from Prague to Hus and back (his friend Jakoubek of Stbro had begun to offer the chalice of wine as well as bread in communion, though Hus advised delay on this practice); and Moravian noblemen, led by Krava of Lacek, pressured Sigismund to remember his promise that Hus would have a public hearing. At the Dominican monastery, in the meantime, the investigative commission, demanding in vain that Hus submit, confronted him once again with Wyclif’s forty-five articles, long condemned, and paraded before him a procession of star witnesses, including Štpán Pále and none other than Nicholas Zeiselmeister, the German priest of St. Philip and St. James, who had long felt shortchanged by the proximity to his parish of the Bethlehem chapel and the success of its preacher.
Still, at moments in the late winter of 1415 Hus may have held high hopes of becoming free again. Pope John XXIII, after festively resigning to make way for a new election, tried to escape to his friends in France (he never made it across the Rhine), Hus’s Italian guards left to join the fugitive pope, now again merely the fat Neapolitan Baldassarre Cossa, the council was in danger of falling apart, and the Czech and Moravian nobles would have had an easy time of organizing a commando raid to save their man. Yet the council’s bureaucratic machinery went on functioning; after an evening without guards, Hus was taken by local soldiers to Gottlieben, the castle of the bishop of Constance, where he could move more freely by day but was chained to the wall by night (Baldassarre Cossa was imprisoned there too in early June). The council and Christianity were without a pope for the time being, the investigating commission had to be changed to include a number of theological and legal experts, and they all continued to insist that Hus give up the idea of a public hearing, but he persisted Sigismund, under increasing pressure from the Czech and Moravian nobles, was unable to ignore the demand, and it was decided to shift Hus from the castle of Gottlieben to the Franciscan monastery at Constance, where the public hearings were to be held.
Unfortunately, the hearings were not what Hus had hoped for, but we are lucky that a young Moravian, Peter of Mladenovice (who rode with
Hus from Bohemia to Constance and stayed with him to the bitter end), reported about them in a trustworthy account, long and rightly cherished as a unique document in Hussite history. Peter was excluded from the first hearing, but the noise of the chaotic shouting could be heard outside the hall, and it seemed that, once again, Wyclif was on the agenda; only the dean of Cracow University raised his voice to encourage the accused. Peter was present at the second and third hearings, however, chaired by King Sigismund himself on June 7 and 8, 1415. He clearly heard the questions asked by the haughty French Dominican Pierre d’Ailly, who headed the Inquisition at Lille and Tournai, and heard the cries of the prelates unwilling to listen to what Hus wanted to say about the testimony of witnesses and his treatise De ecclesia (About the Church), passages of which had been torn out of context by his Czech enemies. The procedure was so disorderly that a master from Oxford, otherwise quite reticent, felt it necessary to intervene to guarantee at least a modicum of procedural fairness. The result was predictable, but it cannot be said that the council did not try, for many days, to convince Hus to recant and to abjure his ideas (as interpreted by the learned doctores) or at least to accept a prudent face-saving formula. Delegates and older friends came and went, legal statements were tested, but Hus steadfastly refused all offers and suggestions, insisting that he would betray God and “fall into perjury” if he recanted; he knew that submission would be rewarded by lifelong imprisonment in a far-off monastery and would be used by the ecclesiastical and secular hierarchies to destroy the faithful trust of his friends in Bohemia and elsewhere.
