Jan Hus and the Seeds of Reformation: A Tale of Faith and Revolt

Jan Hus emerges as a pivotal figure in the early Reformation, representing the clash between the burgeoning calls for reform and the entrenched power of the Catholic Church. Born around 1372 in what is now the Czech Republic, Hus began his journey as a humble student at the University of Prague, eventually becoming a prominent preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel. His growing influence was fueled by his criticisms of clerical corruption, particularly the practice of simony and the Church’s exploitation through indulgences. As tensions escalated between the Czech reformers and the German-speaking clergy, Hus found himself increasingly at odds with both the Church and the monarchy, leading to his eventual excommunication. The episode delves into how Hus’s teachings and the socio-political climate of Bohemia set the stage for a rebellion that would reverberate through the subsequent centuries, culminating in his fateful summons to the Council of Constance.

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TRANSCRIPT

Quote “Master Jan Hus, preacher of the Holy Scriptures from the chapel of Bethlehem, was also present at this council, who in his preaching continuously criticized and exposed the hypocrisy, pride, miserliness, fornication, simony, and other sins of the clergy, in order to bring the priesthood back to the apostolic life. He was immensely hated by these pestiferous clerics.”

This is how Laurence of Brezova introduced the great reformer and Czech national hero Jan Hus in his 15^th century chronicle of the Hussite uprising.

Why should we care about the trials and tribulations of another holy man railing against corrupt prelates and the subsequent “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing”.

Well, that quote itself should be reason enough. It is from Neville Chamberlain speech of September 27, 1938 weighing the importance of protecting Czechoslovakia against an expansionist Nazi Germany.

But Jan Hus is interesting beyond his status as a towering figure in Czech history. When he came to Prague in 1390 he was just another ambitious young man from a modest background who wanted to rise up in the world on the back of intelligence and hard work. But by the time he leaves for his fate at the Council of Constance in 1414 he has been excommunicated, exiled and unwillingly or willingly become he face of a brewing revolt against king and clergy. This is a story about collapsing certainties and emerging truths, about individual beliefs and institutional order. About what the community of the faithful is supposed to be and who is in and who is out.  And its tentacles reach deep into the next centuries…

Before you can meet master Jan Hus and his fellow Bohemian reformers I will now subject you to a brief treatise on history podcasting. There are now 3.5 million podcasts, though only 380,000 are classed as active. That means if you were inclined to give every one of these active shows a 5 minute listen you would be listening all day all night for 3 years and 7 months, 11 days and 8 hours and 42 minutes. And that is why so many great shows give up, they simply cannot find anyone willing to invest five minutes to find out whether it is any good. So how do people find podcasts? Simple, 30% of podcast listeners come to a show on a personal recommendation from friends and family. So, if you know anyone in your wider circle who may enjoy the History of the Germans, tell them about the show. It makes a huge difference. As does the generous support of our patrons who have signed up on historyofthegermans.com/support. This week we thank Ryan B., Mick, fan of my singing voice, Mark G., Tim T of knightly crusader stock, Tiia Reinvald and CS.

And then we have a few corrections. Last episode I said that Wenceslaus IV was Sigismunds stepbrother. That was obviously wrong, they were half brothers. An even more significant error was picked up by listener Raluca and some others. Vlad the impaler, aka Dracula was Mircea the elder’s illegitimate grandson, not his son as I stupidly claimed. And it was also not Mircea’s honor but Vlad’s father’s membership of the order of the dragon that brought about the nickname “little dragon”. I should just stop trying to pointlessly spice things up with random facts I picked up from secondary literature. Again I promise to do better next time and will fail again.

And with that – back to the show

Jan Hus was born probably around the year 1372. His father was called Michael, but we do not know what he did as an occupation. Of his mother we do not even know her name. Even his own name is an invention, he called himself after his home village of Husice, Goosetown which is why his surname is actually goose, uncomfortably prophetic.

In 1390 he started his studies at the university of Prague. He would later say that he spent far too much time playing chess and that he occasionally participated in carnival processions. That is the medieval equivalent of running through a field of wheat – a reference for our British listeners. For the rest of you, Jan Hus was a bit of a swot. Not that much of a surprise given he was a poor boy from the provinces trying to get a job in the church. An ambition he was certainly not alone in. After all, the church was one of, if not the largest employer in a city like Prague and many coveted a comfortable vicarage or – even better – just the income from a parish without doing anything. And he had come to the right place.

Prague in 1390 was a city on the move.

Thanks to emperor Karl IV’s grand plans his capital of Prague had grown from about 10-15,000 inhabitants to one of northern Europe’s largest cities with a population of nearly 40,000. Building work on the New Town had begun in 1347 but was still ongoing in 1390.

The emperor had endowed the new city’s churches with some of the greatest pieces of his immense collection of relics. These included such items of reverence like a fragment of the staff of Moses, a finger of St. Nicholas, the head of St. Wenceslaus, half of St. Sigismund and the most venerated of them all, the breastmilk of the Virgin Mary. That was on top of the imperial regalia that included the holy lance and purse of St. Stephen to name just two.

These holy objects attracted pilgrims by the thousands, even tens of thousands. Praying before a holy relic was one of the few ways one could cut down the thousands and thousands of years in purgatory the average sinner had to endure. But it also attracted a lot of permanent residents who sought not just work and advancement but also spiritual nourishment from the presence of so many objects of veneration. Prague had become a holy city, a second Rome, just as Karl IV had intended.

The other major draw of the city and the reason Jan Hus had come to the shores of the Vltava was its university, the first to be founded in central Europe. Thanks to the sponsorship of Karl IV and then even more significantly, his son Wenceslaus IV, it had become one of the great centers of learning in Europe. Students from the lands of the crown of Bohemia as well as Germans and Poles came to train with some of the great doctors of theology and law.

The purpose of the university had been two-fold. One was simply to elevate the status of the city of Prague. If Paris, the capital of the French monarchs had a university then the home of the emperor needed one too. The other, more prosaic objective was to produce a class of well-educated bureaucrats and clergymen that could be deployed in the increasingly sophisticated management of the Bohemian state. As for Jan Hus, he was very much in this latter category.

Organizationally, the university of Prague, like all medieval universities, was split into different nations. These nations were usually established along linguistic and cultural lines. In Prague there were four of them, Bohemians, Bavarians, Poles and Saxons. Since the Polish nation was mainly staffed with German speaking Silesians, three out of the four nations were actually German speaking, giving them dominance over the Czech speaking members of the university.

The situation at the university was replicated across much of Prague. German-speaking immigrants had come on the invitation of king Ottokar II in the 1250s and had gradually obtained leadership positions in civil society. They dominated trading and manufacturing, as they did across much of central europe. The German speaking merchants had developed efficient trading networks based on trust and cultural affinity, if not intermarriage. Goods and money moved across these networks comparatively efficiently based on a system of mutual trust and social control. We did a couple of episodes about that in the season on the Hanseatic league, particularly Episode 119 if you want more detail on how these networks functioned. Access to the network was extremely difficult for anyone not speaking German and not being immersed in the culture. And competing against these networks as a sole trader was even more difficult.

Beyond just trading, these German merchants also provided loans to the government and the church. These loans were secured by pawns, often estates, mines and other money generating assets, which then gradually shifted into the hands of this German-speaking upper class. Being the source of finance, the bankers also had ready access to the king who would bend the state to their will.

Bottom line, many Czechs outside the nobility, felt as second class citizens in their homeland and language was an important marker of this division. That occurred despite both Karl IV and Wenceslaus IV making a point of speaking Czech as well as German and French at court.

If you combine these three things, a religiously motivated citizenship, a university that churns out progressive ideas and a population chafing up against a linguistically and socially superior group and you have a medieval powder keg.

The long fuse that will ultimately explode the device was lit a long time before Jan Hus first set foot into the golden city. It all began in a notorious brothel on a street called Venus street. That is where John Milic, a canon of St. Veits cathedral who had an epiphany, began dissuading the prostitutes from their illicit lifestyle and offered them shelter. Milic became a very popular paster, much admired for relentlessly laying out the hypocrisy of the official church. Having good contacts amongst the ladies of the night, he exposed their clerical customers, one of whom had even built a separate entrance to his house to facilitate his partying. But where he really hurt the clergy was when he exposed the rampant simony in its ranks, the purchase of spiritual appointments for money. That was something the population hated even more than the lack of sexual probity.

Despite or maybe because of his relentless criticism and demands for reform, Milic was popular with the highest ranks of society, even with the emperor himself, so popular indeed that Karl overlooked that Milic had once called him the antichrist.

Under imperial protection, Milic built up a community of preachers, often laymen rather than trained clergy who spread his ideas. This community moved into the brothel where Milic had started preaching and that had now become a home for rescued women. He called this community his new Jerusalem and acquired more and more of the surrounding buildings.

Milic preached not just in Latin as was commonplace at the time. He firmly believed that the faithful should understand the word of god and should hence be preached to in their own language, namely Czech and German, the two main languages used in Prague. Milic also demanded that the bible should be translated into Czech, though he never got round to doing it. Another of his ideas was that everyone should receive the sacraments as often as possible, in particular the eucharist, to be closer to the spiritual body of Christ. This focus on the spiritual body then led him to question whether all these dusty relics had any real relevance, and even the veneration of saints was in his eyes a distraction from the true faith.

His community of the new Jerusalem did however not survive its founder’s death in 1374. But his ideas continued to circulate. One of his disciples, a certain Matthew of Janov pushed Milic’s ideas even further. Matthew was another one of those ambitious men who had studied at university, in his case, even at the famed university of Paris, and had returned to Prague in the hope of a plumb job with the church. But that did not work out and instead he became a radical critic of the holders of such offices.

He embraced Milic’s criticism of the worldly clergy, the focus on regular prayer, the eucharist and the use of the colloquial language. But by now the schism had happened and many of the ideas we discussed in our episode about the impact of the schism on European thought had begun circulating. When he was in Paris he witnessed the debates at the university about whether a church council was superior to the pope and by 1390 he had heard that the French church had subtracted itself completely from papal obedience.

This terrified him and he was looking for reasons why the church had ended up in such a calamitous place. He zoomed in on the year 1200 when the church abounded in the greatest riches and glory and when “magna Mulier formicaria” the whore of Babylon took her seat upon the scarlet beast, and antichrist extended his swollen body throughout the church. What he meant was the pontificate of Innocent III , the most powerful of the medieval pope and convener of the fourth Lateran council – and initial sponsor of emperor Frederick II – Episode 75 if you are interested.  

According to Matthew of Jenov the primitive church of the apostles who had been poor and dedicated to the people had been distorted by “Greek rules, Aristotelic justice and Platonic sanctity”. What he meant by that were the rules and regulations of canon law and scholastic theology that obfuscated the true faith and in the process made its practitioners rich and powerful. His opposition was against the lawyers who had taken hold of not just the papal administration but the papal throne itself.

Into this already febrile climate of anticlerical, anti-papalist sentiment dropped the teachings of John Wycliff. Wycliff was an Englishman, a professor in Oxford whose theories we have already encountered in episode 168. His thoughts travelled down to Prague through the entourage of Anne of Bohemia, the sister of Wenceslaus and Sigismund who had married King Richard II of England in 1382.

Wycliff’s ideas poured oil on the fire of the Bohemian reform movement. Bohemian scholars would travel to Oxford and bring back treatises that members of the Prague university debated, translated into Czech and adapted into their own thinking.

They zoomed in on one particular element of Wycliff’s investigation, the question of what the church was. The sanctioned view was that the church was the community of the faithful and that Christ had put St. Peter in charge of this community when he said that Peter was the rock on which he built his church. And St. Peter had thereby inherited all of Christ’s powers in the temporal world, to bind and to loose. And that power passed through him to every one of his legitimate successors. That was the justification for Gregory VII’s claim that all monarchs are to kiss his feet and that he could depose them, even the emperor and Boniface VIII statement that there was no salvation outside the Roman church.

This stringent argument fell apart when the Western schism appeared. We now have two popes, but only one could be the true successor of St. Peter. As the schism progressed and the popes refused to yield as we discussed, the only viable solution was to call a church council that would decide who was the true pope and depose all the false popes, which is what they did in 1409 in Pisa.

Now by doing this the church council claimed to represent the community of the faithful, the holy church itself, that ranked above false and corrupt popes. If these popes could be ousted on account of their sinful claim on St. Peter’s throne, then they weren’t members of the Holy Church any more. Which leads to the next question, which is – who is a true member of the holy church?

That will only be conclusively revealed at the last judgement, when the faithful are admitted to heaven and the sinful are cast down to hell. That does not help because we need to find out right here and now who is one of the faithful and hence a member of holy church with a vote on who should be pope and who is a black sinner who can be ignored. And that runs into a major problem. It would not be just preposterous but outright blasphemous to preempt the final judgement by stating that John was a faithful and Jack was a sinner. So the only thing we can do right now is to look for the signs. Someone whose demeanor and actions emulates the teachings of Christ is more likely to be predestined to heaven, whilst someone living a dissolute life was more likely to end up in hell.

That makes a lot of sense, but is totally explosive. Because if you come across a drunken, fornicating bishop, who acquired his post through simony,  well that guy is unlikely to be one of the faithful. If he is not one of the faithful, then he is not a member of the church. If he is not a member of the church he cannot tell me what to preach or who to preach to. Meanwhile someone with an impeccable lifestyle and deep faith but no church license would be not just entitled to preach but should be listened to above the debauched prelate.

What Wycliff proposed would lead to a complete dissolution of discipline in the church in its current state of corruption, which is why he proposed a fallback. The temporal authorities, the kings and princes were to maintain the discipline in the church until such time that it was completely reformed.

That was grist to the mill of the Bohemian reformers, who had been looking for the theological justification for their rejection of the corrupt prelates at the top of the church.

Jan Hus was one of these Bohemians who picked up and digested Wycliff’s theses. There is a tremendously complex debate about what of Wycliff’s theses Hus exactly endorsed and which ones he did not. That mattered for the legality of the judgement that led to his execution at Constance, but did not matter much for what went down in Bohemia. Bohemia embraced much of Wycliff’s theses.

But I am jumping ahead.

Last we saw Jan Hus the person was in 1390 when he arrived in Prague. He studied at university and by 1401 was ordained as a priest and took holy orders. He preached in a number of churches in the Old Town before he was appointed the main preacher at the Bethlehem chapel. The Bethlehem chapel was an unusual set-up. Though called a chapel, it was huge, able to take 3,000 worshippers. The reason it wasn’t a full church was because it was a private chapel created and funded by two pious Prague merchants. That made it on the one hand less prestigious than a full parish appointment, but left Jan Hus with a  lot more freedom than an ordinary priest.

When he took up the role in 1402, Jan Hus was well within the mainstream of the Bohemian clerical set-up. Though many ideas the reformers promoted were radical and not in line with general church doctrine, the majority of the established church, all the way up to the archbishop were supportive of their demand for reform. They even tolerated the preaching in Czech practiced by the reformers and something Jan Hus did very much from the beginning.

But though he had helped translate some of Wycliff’s works, his theological writings of that time were fairly tame.

What radicalized him were a sequence of events that unfolded over the coming decade.

In 1405 he became part of a commission to investigate a miracle a parish priest of a burned down church claimed to have witnessed. Something about a bleeding host. What Hus uncovered was a greedy priest who had made the whole thing up to raise money for the rebuilding of his church and the recovery of his main income stream. That investigation led him then to doubt not just the veracity of some of the relics but also whether any relics, in particular those directly physically related to Christ himself were compatible with scripture.

At the same time his career as a preacher was going great. Bethlehem chapel filled up with worshippers not just on Sundays but also on workdays. Jan Hus was a gifted orator and had a knack to convey rather complex theological ideas in a way the common people could understand. His most famous quote is: “Seek the truth, hear the truth, learn the truth, love the truth, speak the truth, hold the truth and defend the truth until death.” And at another point he said “Love the truth. Let others have their truth, and the truth will prevail.” This made it even into the national motto of the Czech Republic “truth prevails”.

When I first read this I stumbled over the term “their truth” which is one of my bugbears. There is no such thing as my truth. There a facts and fiction. But then I do not think that Jan Hus was talking about the modern idea of “my truth”. For him, like his contemporaries faith was truth and truth was faith. There was no differentiation between scientific truth and faith as we see it today. So the correct interpretation of these statements would be to replace the word truth with faith. And then these statements take on a different and a much more amenable connotation. Hus was prepared to die for his truth, his faith, when he said “defend the truth until death”but he did not want to do harm to those who held different beliefs. He demanded “Let others have their truth, their faith”. Because he believed that they would come around to his beliefs sooner or later. And there is another one of his statements I like: quote “From the very beginning of my studying I made it a rule that whenever, in any matter, I heard a sounder viewpoint, I abandoned the one I had – since I know well that we know far less than what we do not know.” Or to say it with Keynes, if the facts change I change my opinion, what do you do? So whatever his teachings are later used for, he himself was no fanatic.

I like that and so it seems did many inhabitants of the city of Prague. And what they also liked was that he would celebrate the eucharist almost every time as Milic and his reformers had demanded. That went straight against church rules that wanted to restrict the sacrament to only once a month.  Hus responded quote: “if ever a pope should command me to play on the flute, build towers, to mend or weave garments, and to stuff sausages, ought I not reasonably judge that the pope was foolish in so commanding” end quote.

Alongside this thriving business, Hus kept a role at the university. He published further treatises which now incorporated elements of Wycliff’s thinking. How much and how far away from the official doctrine these views were is again ultimately irrelevant. What mattered was that Hus was increasingly seen as one of the followers of Wycliff.

In 1409 tensions at the university boiled over. The Czechs who were the most numerous nation kept getting voted down by the three German-speaking groupings. And this was not just a linguistic and social conflict but also a theological one. Whilst the Czechs embraced Wycliff and became increasingly radical, the Germans stuck with the orthodoxy. When it became clear that the squabbling parties could not reach compromise, they brought their case before King Wenceslaus IV. By now Wenceslaus had succumbed to full on alcoholism, so it is unclear how much of the proceedings he really understood. But his wife Sophia was very much on the side of the Czech reformers. The crown also needed the university’s support as they wanted to transfer their allegiance from the Roman pope Gregory XII to the Pisan pope Alexander V. The Germans were leaning to the Roman pope, the Bohemians to the Pisan. So the crown passed a decree that from now on the Czech nation’s vote would count as much as the vote of the other three nations combined. That outraged the German-speaking nations and they simply walked out. Many of these doctors and students left for the recently founded universities of Leipzig and Heidelberg, which propelled these schools up the European academic rankings, whilst the university of Prague turned into a more provincial institution catering for Bohemians only.

What also happened was that the king appointed Jan Hus as rector of the University. And since the university was now free to embrace Wycliff’s theories, Jan Hus as its rector became the face of Wycliff’s theories in Bohemia, irrespective of his personal conviction.

Over the next 3 years the university doctors embraced more and more radical ideas. That triggered a backlash by the archbishop who referenced 45 Wycliffian theses that had been declared heretic. In this debate the king sided again with the reformers against the archbishop. This time it was mainly for monetary reasons. In the tradition of Matthew of Janov, the reformers supported the idea that the king should not only maintain discipline in the church, but should also cleanse it from the swollen body of antichrist, aka take away all the church’s lands and estates. And that was exactly what Wenceslaus did. He took the reins of the church, forced the archbishop into submission and diverted the church funds into his own pocket.

This alliance between king and reformers fell apart, as one would expect, over the same thing it had kept it together in the past – money. The new Pisan pope, John XXIII had declared a crusade against king Ladislaus of Naples, the one who had attempted to take the crown of Hungary from Sigismund and whose father had died trying. To fund this most Christian effort John was selling indulgences all across the lands of his obedience, including Bohemia. As we mentioned in episode 168, indulgences had become key to papal finances now that the church was split into three and many obediences regularly refused to pass through tithes and other incomes. The  indulgences of 1412 were so egregious, they truly shocked Jan Hus. Already deeply skeptical of saints and relics, this blatant money grab pushed him over the edge. He began to equate John XXIII with antichrist and declared all prelates selling these papers corrupt. And when he found out that Wenceslaus was supporting the indulgences because he had been promised a cut of the profits, he condemned his king as well.

The pope immediately excommunicated Hus. The king was still more interested in continuing the cooperation and first tried to calm him down. But Hus kept preaching against indulgences, called the archbishop a Simoniak, which was true, and just generally turned from a useful tool of royal politics to a genuine nuisance.

After Wenceslaus had tried several time to get Hus back on side, he sent a brutal message. Three of Hus’ young supporters had protested against the selling of indulgences and stopped the pardoners from going about their business. The king had them arrested and the next day, he had them hanged. Meanwhile the  pope had declared an interdict over the city of Prague, banning all church services and sacraments for as long as Jan Hus was allowed to preach.

That was too much for Jan Hus. To protect his friends and fellow citizens, he went into exile.

In the following 2 years, from 1412 to 1414 he did write like a man possessed. He published no fewer than 15 books, the culmination of the previous decade of thought. The most important one was de ecclesia, about the church.

There he compared the church to a field where wheat and weeds grow together. But only the wheat, the good parts belongs to the actual church. And if the church itself was unable to pull out the weeds, it falls to the king to do that, and if the king was unwilling or unable to do it, it was down to the laity to clean up the field. And since most of the weed, the corruption in the church stems from the property they had obtained over time, that should be all be given over to the secular authorities.

This is where the rubber hit the road. Dietrich von Niem, a German chronicler called Hus’ ideas as great a threat to Christendom and papal power as the Qur’an. And it was this book that the judges in Constance used most extensively to prove the heresy of Jan Hus.

These books, but even more the relentless persecution by the church had made Hus the face of the Bohemian dissent, a dissent that was about to tip over into revolt. As early as 1412 pamphlets were circulating that mixed religion with violence. They declared that all those intended to be Christian were to take up swords and be prepared to wash their hands in the blood of God’s enemies. Jan Hus they declared was no longer a timid goose, but a ferocious lion prepared to confront the papal antichrist and all its wickedness. There is no evidence that Hus endorsed or encourages such talk, nor is there evidence that he made efforts to stop it.

It is in late 1414 that Jan Hus is summoned to the council of Constance that had gathered since November of that year. He was asked to come and subject his teachings to review by the doctors and senior clergy at the greatest of church councils. Sigismund, by now elected king of the Romans and presiding over the council promised Hus safe conduct.

One cannot know whether Hus believed Sigismund’ promise or whether he willingly walked straight into his martyrdom. This again mattered as much or as little as the question whether or not he was guilty of heresy. Because what mattered was what the people back in Prague believed happened and what actions these beliefs triggered.

Some of that we will find out next episode when we finally talk about the great council of Constance. I hope you will join us again.

In the meantime, should you feel so inclined, listen back to some of the older episodes when we talked about Bohemia, for instance way back in episode 26 when we look at the murderous Bohemian succession crisis in the early 11^th century, episode 54 when a Bohemian ruler tilts Barbarossa’s campaign in Italy in favour of the Germans, or some of the more recent ones, like episode 140 about the fight between Rudolf of Habsburg and the Golden King Ottokar II. And what you could also do is make a one-time donation at historyofthegermans.com/support, just in case you feel like it.