The Council of Constance Part 2
The Council of Constance, which took place from November 1414 to April 1418, became a monumental event in history, not just for its pivotal decisions like the election of Pope Martin V and the execution of Jan Hus, but for the dynamic and often chaotic atmosphere it fostered among its diverse attendees.
Over the course of three and a half years, the city transformed into a melting pot of intellectual exchange, as leading minds from across Europe converged to debate pressing issues of the time, including the rights of indigenous groups and the justification of tyrannicide.
Amid cramped living conditions and a thriving entertainment scene, scholars exchanged ideas and manuscripts, paving the way for the Renaissance. The presence of 718 licensed sex workers also highlighted the social complexities of the gathering, reflecting the era’s attitudes towards prostitution and morality, even among the clergy.
The Council served as a critical juncture that would shape not only religious but also political landscapes in Europe for years to come.
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TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 172 – The council of Constance Part II, also episode 9 of season 9 The Reformation before the Reformation
In November 1414 30,000 academics and aristocrats, bishops, blacksmiths and bakers, cardinals, counts and chefs, doctors, dancers and diplomats, princes, prelates and public girls descended on a town in Southern Germany built to house 6 to 8,000 people. They planned to stay a few weeks, 2-3 months max. But 3 and a half years later most of them were still there.
What did they get up to? The great tentpole events, the trial of John XXIII, the burning of Jan Hus and the election of Martin V is what the council of Constance is remembered for, but what about all that time in between?
When I began working on this episode, I had planned to move straight to the showstoppers. I think I said something to that effect at the end of the last episode. But when I dug deeper, I realised that this world event was so much more than a papal election and the trial of a dissenter. For 3 years Constance was at the same time a never-ending G20 summit, the greatest academic conference of the Middle Ages, a permanent imperial diet and the centre of the catholic church. Everybody who was anybody was there either in the flesh or had at least sent a delegation.
Issues and concerns were brought before the council that still plague people today. Is it ever right to kill a tyrant, and if so, when can it be justified? What rights should be guaranteed for indigenous groups, in this case Pagans, and how should their dignity be protected? Other attendees sought justice for crimes committed against them in a world where political murder had become commonplace. Others still demanded their reward for years of service or simply wanted their rights recognised.
Living cheek by jowl in tiny Constance the leading minds from across Europe, from the ancient universities of Paris, Oxford and Bologna as well as from the newly founded seats of learning in Krakow, Prague, Heidelberg and Vienna shared their ideas, opinions, books and discoveries, paving the way for the intellectual shift we call the Renaissance.
Enough, me thinks to provide 30 minutes of great historical entertainment….
But before we start here are the customary 90 seconds of pleading for support. Let me keep it short – no I do not own a mattress from the internet, or have a razor subscription, nor do I put my precious mental health into the non-existent hands of a disembodied voice on Zoom. And if I did, you would not hear about it. Because the History of the Germans is advertising free. And to keep it that way many of you have already made a one-time donation or have subscribed on historyofthegermans.com/support. In particular we thank Thomas Barbeau, Robert K., James P., CC, Mit S., and Beau W. for having signed up already.
Constance: A Cultural Hub
The Council of Constance lasted from November 1414 to April 1418. All this time the participants had to live in incredibly cramped conditions. The great cardinals and imperial princes stayed in the splendid mansions of the patricians, Bishops and counts in the local inns or living with the more prosperous members of the artisan’s guilds. But the 5,000 prelates and hundreds of knights had to move into bedsits and further down the food chain we hear of simple folk moving into empty wine barrels.
Much of their time was taken up with building consensus within and between the nations, a process that was drawn-out and laborious. Position papers were exchanged, academic essays published, sermons reported, letters sent back and forth between the representatives and their principals and much backroom work undertaken, not dissimilar to modern day political gatherings.
But that still left room for other pursuits. The city and the various princes and prelates called on the hundreds of buglers and pipers, dancers and acrobats to put on entertainments. Tournaments were held.
But sometimes one had to breathe some fresh air. Many ventured out of the overcrowded city in their spare time, often to the spa town of Baden near Zurich. There, you could find hot springs that had been enjoyed since Roman times. And much like today, foreigners would write home in astonishment that the locals enjoyed their sauna in the buff.
Talking about the delights of disrobing, there is one topic that comes up in the lore of the council again and again and even made it into a symbol for the city of Constance, and that are the sex workers coming to service the councillors. I think this needs to be seen in context. Prostitution in the Middle Ages was largely tolerated, even by the church, and for simple pragmatic reasons. It was better men went to prostitutes than ending up messing up marriages or even worse raping women. Ok, the church also thought that it was better than masturbation and homosexuality, but let’s leave that to one side. Thomas Aquinas put it best when he said that if you remove the latrines from the palace, the staterooms will start to smell. There is the well documented case that the bishop of Winchester ran the brothels of Southwark in London. Clergy too used prostitutes, for instance in Dijon, about 20% of the brothel customers were members of the clergy. Attitudes to clergy using prostitutes are hard to gage. We have preachers who railed against the hypocrisy of priests demanding moral standards of their flock whilst building a special gate to facilitate their tete a tetes. But there are also reports of people believing that sex was a natural urge and that it was better the vicar went to the bathhouse than seducing the members of the congregation. And we have to remember that a lot of men and women had taken vows of chastity who weren’t necessarily that pious. Many a second son or daughter were sent to monasteries because there weren’t enough funds to provide a living or a dowry. For ambitious men from humble backgrounds the church provided the only route to wealth and status and many an archbishop had been lifted into the post by his princely father purely for political reasons. None of these had signed up to the lifestyle that Bernhard of Clairvaux or St. Francis expected. That is why Rome had one of per head largest populations of prostitutes.
What made the story of the whores of Constance so famous was for one the sheer scale. 718 licensed sex workers in a town of 6-8,000 are pretty visible. It would be the similar to the Las Vegas night entertainment crowd coming in force down to Bismark, North Dakota for a the National Party Conference. Nothing against Bismark. I have been there and loved it, even got myself an UffDa hat, but if such a thing happened, we would talk about it for a century.
And then the story of fornicating prelates made good copy in support of the Reformation agenda, further embellished by prudish 19th century writers.
What definitely did not happen was that there was a great courtesans called Imperia who steered council proceedings from her bedchamber as Balzac imagined. The reality was more likely grim. When I mentioned people living in upturned wine barrels for three years, that story referred to one of these prostitutes.
Constance was more than a place for powerful lords and bishops to gather (sometimes naked). It was first and foremost a place for the leading intellectuals of the Late Middle Aged to congregate. The universities sent their most prominent professors, the theologians and canonists of the papal court were out there in force and the chancellors and lawyers of the temporal princes joined in as well. And they did what intellectuals do to this day, they researched, they wrote and they debated.
But one thing was different. In a world before printing, intellectuals also came together to swap books. Not just to read, but also to copy, or to have copied by one of the hundreds of scribes who now lived in the city. Smart entrepreneurs quickly realised that this was a great opportunity and brought in books from all across Europe. Council participants went to the local monasteries to sift through their ancient libraries. Two of the oldest and greatest were nearby, Reichenau and St. Gallen, centres of learning, art and culture since the 9th century.
These works were read and copied over and over again, so much so that the libraries of europe filled with manuscripts that bear the postscript “Compilatum Constantii tempore generalis concilii”, compiled during the general council at Constance.
The Swedish prelate Tore Andersson copied theological works for his monastery at Vadstena as well as Cessolis’ book on chess. The city scribe of Brunswick copied legal documents, the bishop of Ermland in Prussia collected copies of the classics, of Florus and Vitruvius that are now in the library of Krakow. The cardinal Filastre, who we met before, developed a passion for cartography. He obtained a copy of Ptolomy’s Geography from Manuel Chrysoloras, the envoy of the Byzantine emperor. Later Filastre would encourage the Dane Claudius Clavus to create his map of the Nordics, the first map ever to show Iceland and Greenland, places Clavus had actually visited.
Leonardo Bruni who had arrived with the now deposed pope John XXIII made a living from his translations of the works of Plato and Plutarch.
Early Humanists finding ancient Roman and Greek texts in monasteries
But more than writing and copying, book hunting was the supreme discipline that early humanists engaged in. What they sought was the wisdom of the ancients, the long lost Greek and Roman texts that would open up a new perspective on the world, a world that was to replace the medieval certainties that were gradually fading away.
The reason so much of the ancient texts were lost was simply the material they were written on. Plato, Aristotle, Ovid and Virgil wrote on papyrus and parchment, organic materials subject to decay unless they are preserved in the dry soil of Egypt.
The only reason we can still read the works today is because for hundreds of years monks in their scriptoria or Islamic scholars in their libraries had copied them, not once but four, five , six times over the millennium since the fall of Rome.
Hence, for a 14th century humanist the only place where he may hope to find, say Catullus poem 16 or Ovid’s metamorphoses was an ancient monastery or a cathedral library. One can only wonder what these pious scribes must have thought when faithfully copying some lurid tale or materialist philosophy. But we must be grateful that they did revere these ancient works enough to not let them disappear for ever. That being said, they did not put them on the eye level in their libraries, forcing the book hunters to bend down in the search for the intellectual treasures. Echte Bückware.
Book hunters have been uncovering these works since Charlemagne seeded the idea that ancient civilisations could hold the key to knowledge. And much has been recovered. You may remember Einhard wo used Suetonius “Lives of the Caesars “ as a model for his life of Carolus Magnus in the 9th century, Widukind who drew on a wide range of Roman sources when he produced his chronicles in the 10th, the scholastics dug up Aristotle and took inspiration from Muslim scholars in the 12th. By the late 13th and early 14th century hounding Italian monasteries in the search of relics from the Roman or Greek past had become a preoccupation of the likes of Petrarch and Dante. The aforementioned poems of Catullus for instance came to light in 1305 at the cathedral library of Verona.
One of the most prolific book hunters was Poggio Bracciolini. He had come to Constance in the service of John XXIII, but once his master was convicted and deposed he found himself at a bit of a lost end. He was a notary and had worked in the papal chancery for 11years. Since his career was tied to the church and the church had pretty much in its entirety decamped to Constance, he had to stay to find a new job.
And in between jobhunting and networking, he visited monasteries all across the German speaking lands and even in France. And my god did he bring in a great haul: lost speeches by Cicero, Quintilians 12 volumes on rhetoric, poems by Statius Silvae, the histories of Ammian, handbooks on civil architecture, grammar and early theology.
Two finds made him famous across europe, the first was Lucretius De Rerum natura, a didactic poem explaining the main tenets of epicurean philosophy. Lucretius wanted to release humanity from its fear of the wrath of the gods. He postulated that the world was made of atoms that veer randomly through time and space, leaving it up to us humans to use free will to determine how we wanted to live our lives. As I said, not very much in line with the faith of the copyist who might have spent months writing these 7,400 hexameters down thereby preserving a whole school of Greek philosophy.
The other find was a complete copy of Vitruvius the Roman architectural writer and theorist. One of Bracciolini’s copies ended up in the hands of Leon Battista Alberti. Alberti then used Vitruvius as a basis to write his De re aedificatoria that became the textbook of Italian renaissance architecture. In 1459 he was commissioned to build the first planned city in Europe since antiquity, the city of Pienza for Enea Silvio Piccolomini the pope Pius II. The circle was closed by the personal physician of pope Pius II, Andreas Reichlin von Meldegg. Meldegg picked up his patient’s architectural ideas and when he returned to his hometown of Űberlingen just across the lake from Constance, he built his family palace, arguably Germany’s first renaissance building.
The elevation of Friedrich of Hohenzollern as margrave of Brandenburg
Talking about palaces, what made life in Constance during the council so uncomfortable for even the most eminent cardinals and bishops was that they had to compete for suitable accommodation with the imperial princes, the dukes, counts and even lesser nobles.
What brought them there was in part the church council. Since there was no acting pope for almost two years it was the council that decided whether their younger sons would get into an attractive benefice, how to resolve a long-running conflict with the neighbouring bishop or whether to place the local monastery under their direct control.
But it wasn’t just matters of the church that brought them there. Constance had also become the seat of the imperial court. Sigismund stayed in Constance from December 1414 to July 1415 and then again from January 1417 to the end of the council in April 1418.
The Holy Roman Empire famously never had a formal capital. The ruler was perennially on the road and would occasionally call the princes to an imperial diet that would last a few weeks and would take place on different locations.
But when Sigismund was in Constance, he had most of the participants of an imperial diet right on hand. As we mentioned last week, all of the Prince-electors not only the three archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier but also the duke of Saxony, the king of Bohemia and the count palatinate were in the city either in person or represented by an envoy. On top of that we have various dukes, of Bavaria, Austria, Schleswig, Mecklenburg, Lothringia and Teck as well as hundreds of lesser nobles who had taken up residence in the city.
So whenever an issue relating to the empire came up that would normally require a full assembly, one could be called immediately. As we heard last week, Sigismund was able to place duke Friedrich of Austria under the imperial ban and raise an imperial army within just 10 days, not in months as would normally be the case. These few years were by far the most proactive of Sigismund’s reign as emperor.
One of the main roles for an imperial administration to perform was to enfeoff vassals and to receive their oath of allegiance. These were splendid events that celebrated the power of the empire and the emperor, all lavishly depicted in Richental’s illustrated chronicle.
One of these elevations would have implications far out into the future. Smart observers may have notice that there was someone missing in my list of prince electors – the Margrave of Brandenburg. That was not an oversight. Because the margrave of Brandenburg was Sigismund himself. You may remember that he had received the electorate in his inheritance and then pawned it to his cousin Jobst to fund his wars in Hungary. Jobst died in 1411 and that was when Sigismund took his margraviate back.
But he did not keep it. Instead he enfeoffed a certain Frederick, Burgrave of Nurnberg with the mark of Brandenburg. Why give it away.? His father had paid the astronomic sum of 500,000 silver mark for this precious principality that came with one of the seven votes in the election of an emperor and was to be the second centre of Luxemburg power alongside Bohemia. And then why give it to Friedrich, the Burgrave of Nurnberg.
His family name was Hohenzollern, I guess you have heard that name before. Just a recap on who the Hohenzollern were. They are originally from Swabia, where they were first mentioned as counts of Zollern in the 11th century. Their ancestral castles at Hohenzollern and Sigmaringen still stand.
They had a knack of staying close to the imperial family, whichever it happened to be. Emperor Frederick Barbarossa rewarded their loyalty by making them burgraves of Nurnberg, the city they had so actively sponsored. You heard that another Frederick of Hohenzollern had been instrumental in the election of Rudolf of Habsburg as king of the Romans in 1272. This brought rich reward in Franconia, the area surrounding Nurnberg.
In 1331 they acquired Ansbach and in 1340 Kulmbach, gradually building a asizeable land holding in Franconia. That brought them on the radar of emperor Karl IV who was keen to build a land bridge from Bohemia to Nurnberg and from there to Frankfurt and Luxemburg. The land of the Hohenzollern was right in this corridor. Hence Karl IV regularly offered marriage alliances to the Bruggrave and even though these never materialized, the two houses remained closely associated. This alliance survived the death of Karl IV and was inherited by both Wenceslaus and Sigismund.
Therefore, it was not a surprise that when Sigismund regained the margraviate of Brandenburg after his cousin Jobst had died, he turned to Frederick of Hohenzollern to be his governor in these lands. At the time Brandenburg was still an absolute mess. Though in Luxemburg hands for nearly forty years, the owners had rarely visited and left the place to its own devices. Local families had taken over the countryside, without being able to suppress the robber barons or becoming robbers themselves. The cities had thrown off any semblance of princely overlordship and bishops and abbots hardly took notice of the margrave.
Frederick of Hohenzollern embarked on a campaign of reconquest that would take his family a good fifty years to complete. From Sigismund’s perspective Brandenburg was a money sink. Whatever revenues these lands generated – all was ploughed back into Frederick’s military campaigns. And as long as the Hohenzollern was just a governor, Sigismund was the ultimate bill payer. And paying bills was not his strong suit. So, in April 1417 Sigismund could no longer prolong the inevitable. He enfeoffed his friend and governor with the margraviate. Making him not just an imperial prince but a prince elector in one fell swoop.
The Hohenzollern had arrived in the top flight of imperial society. From here they would build out their lands, become archbishops and grand masters of the Teutonic Order. The latter post was most important since Albrecht of Brandenburg ended up being the last of the grandmasters. He turned Prussia into a secular state in 1525 that would later be inherited by the margraves of Brandenburg and the rest is a history we will spend a lot of time with in the future. If you want to double check on the transition of Prussia from the Teutonic Knights to the house of Brandenburg, check out episode 137.
The feud between Heinrich the rich of Landau and Ludwig the Bearded of Ingolstadt
Having all these imperial princes to hand meant that Sigismund could also convene the imperial lawcourt, the Hofgericht much more often. The court went through more cases in this period than it did during the remainder of Sigismund’s long reign.
One case became notorious. The duke Heinrich of Bavaria-Landshut had fallen out with his cousin Ludwig of Bavaria Ingolstadt, over – what else – but the inheritance of another cousin, the duke of Bavaria-Straubing. If there was one tradition amongst the Wittelsbachs, it was to constantly squabble amongst their cousins.
These two took family feuding to new heights, even by Wittelsbach standards. Heinrich who everybody called ‘the Rich’ tried to put together an alliance of interested parties against his cousin Ludwig, who everybody called the Bearded.
This creation of a league against him irritated Beardy and he went before the entire imperial diet in Constance and said something exceedingly rude about his cousin’s mother that cast serious doubt about him being his cousin in the first place.
You can imagine how that went down. The rich duke hired 15 henchmen to attack the bearded one on his way home from a council meeting. Ludwig the Bearded was severely injured but survived. The imperial court was ready and on hand and was willing to convict Heinrich the Rich of attempted murder. Only by paying a fine of 6,000 guilders to king Sigismund and the intervention of his son-in-law Friedrich of Hohenzollern could he retain his freedom. Heinrich and Ludwig did get their war in the end, which devastated their lands and destroyed any future hopes of putting a Wittelsbach on the throne for the next 400 years.
Heinrich the Rich’s attempts to murder his opponent wasn’t an isolated incident. As the 14th century gave way to the 15th political violence had become a fact of life. Hungary had always been a particularly rough place where the killing even of anointed kings had happened on regular intervals. But not only there. We have encountered attempts at poisoning several times in these last few episodes. You remember king Albrecht of Habsburg who was saved from poisoning by hanging upside down for days until his eye had popped off? Our friend Sigismund had to undergo a similar treatment but luckily kept his eye. Then there was the last of the Premyslid kings of Bohemia, Wenceslaus III who was stabbed to death by an unknown assassin, and Sigismund’s half-brother Wenceslaus IV who was also poisoned but survived.
Political murder was even more common in Italy where the local lords had taken power in military coups. That made them vulnerable to both internal rivals vying for their position, idealists who wanted to revive the institutions of their ancient commune and outside forces trying to dislodge them. This is the world that bred a Cesare Borgia and his admirer, Machiavelli.
In England we even had a genuine regicide when Richard II ran into a red hot poker – backwards – allegedly.
The tyrannicide decision on Jean Petit
But it was a political murder in France that became the case that triggered a debate over tyrannicide, the question under which circumstances it was acceptable to murder the ruler of a country. The murder in question was the killing of Louis of Orleans, the brother of King Charles VI on November 23rd, 1407 by henchmen of the duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless.
You remember John the Fearless, famous for a feckless foray into the fierce fire of the Janissaries at Nikopol. And you may remember Louis of Orleans, one of the many rivals of Sigismund for the inheritance of Hungary
The disagreement between these two men had however nothing to do with Hungarians of Ottomans. This was over control of France itself.
The reigning king Charles VI had experienced ever more severe bouts of mental illness. He once attacked his own men, forgot who he was or who his wife and children were and towards the end famously believed he was made of glass, terrified to shatter at the lightest touch.
France was ruled by a regency council made up of the royal uncles of Berry, Anjou and Burgundy, the queen, the gorgeous Isabeau of Bavaria, and Louis of Orleans, the brother of the king. To say the members of the regency council struggled for consensus does not quite cover it. They constantly tried to outmaneuver each other, used the hapless king, the royal children, the administration of France, the schismatic church, even the English enemies, anything they could get hold of to get one over their opponents. And on this fateful November night, in the rue Vielle du Temple in Paris backstabbing became front-stabbing. The duke Louis of Orleans lay dead in a ditch, courtesy of his cousin John the Fearless, the duke of Burgundy.
John’s plan did however not work out and the party of Louis of Orleans, the Armagnac’s regained supremacy in the council. But the infighting had weakened the French side so much that King Henry V, Bolingbroke of England saw his opportunity and attacked. The result was the battle of Agincourt that took place in 1415, in the middle of the Council. And that was followed by the Burgundians allying with the English against the king and then the dauphin of France, who was saved by Jeanne d’Arc..etc., etc., basically 100 years war Shekespeare and all that.
What brought this case before the council of Constance was that immediately after the attack on Louis of Orleans a Dominican friar, Jean Petit, had publicly proclaimed that the murder was justified because it was a tyrannicide. In consequence the court granted an amnesty to John the Fearless for the killing. That was later withdrawn when the Burgundians had lost influence and a synod of the French church condemned Jean Petit’s defense of the murder. The Burgundians then appealed to pope John XXIII which is how the council in Constance found itself discussing one of the most famous political murders of the Middle Ages..
One of the great voices at the council, Jean Gerson took a strong interest in this question. He believed the church had to take a stance against this proliferation of political murder and in particular against those who defended it. He asserted that the killing of a ruler, in particular a legitimate ruler was always prohibited, even if the ruler may have acted as a tyrant.
This thesis was opposed for obvious reasons by the Burgundians, but also made many other delegates feel queasy. After all the son of the man who had Richard II killed was now king of England. Equally many Italians had supported the murder of the duke Gian Maria Visconti of Milan a few years earlier.
The Council of Constance was too divided to make a clear decision. It refuted the statement of Jean Petit that tyrannicide was not only allowed but demanded by faith, but even that decision was later withdrawn.
So the church failed to weigh in on political murder as Jean Gerson had hoped. It is doubtful whether they would have been able to reign in on the brutality that was ever faster spiraling out of control. But it would have been nice if they had at least made an effort, in particular because the topic came back before the council concluded.
The debate about the Teutonic Order
The reason the council had to look at tyrannicide again had to do with the Teutonic order. In 1410, four years before the council opened, the Knight Brothers had experienced the utterly devastating defeat at Tannenberg /Grunwald.
Being defeated by the Poles was bad enough. But what turned it into a life threatening calamity was that the chivalric brothers had also lost their raison d’etre the moment Jogaila, the grand prince of Lithuania, had converted to Christianity in order to become king of Poland. The now Christian ruler of Lithuania made it his job to convert those of his subjects who were still pagan. And reports were reaching Constance that his peaceful approach had been a lot more successful than the conversion by fire and sword propagated by the Teutonic Knights.
That meant there was nothing left of their mission to defend Christendom in the Baltics. Moreover, the Reisen, the chivalric adventure trips they had organized for the European aristocracy to play at crusading had stopped. And with it the warm rain of cash and free soldiers the order had enjoyed disappeared.
Sigismund had offered them to relocate to the Hungarian-Ottiman border to defend Christianity there, but the brothers declined.
Instead, they went all out on Jogaila and his cousin Witold. They argued these Lithuanians were fake Christians, their conversions had just been a show and their souls still black with pagan beliefs. And that they had made alliances with heretics, aka the orthodox rulers of Moscow and Novgorod. And then the usual rundown of depravity and cruelty that was the stock-in-trade when talking about people of a different faith.
Sigismund was trying to find a compromise between the Poles and the Teutonic order, both of which had sent large delegations to Constance. But the discussions led nowhere. There was no real compromise possible. If the order admitted that Lithuania was now being converted peacefully by the Jagiellons, then they had to either find a new job or call it a day. If the Jagiellons admitted that they had only converted to gain the crown of Poland, then they had to give it all up again.
And even a negotiation genius like Sigismund could not build a bridge between these positions….
But there was a second leg to it. Another Dominican, a somewhat deranged man called Johannes Falkenberg had fully embraced the Teutonic Knight’s position, even though he was neither a brother nor did he have a close relation with the order before 1412. For some reason he published a treatise where he called Jogaila a worshipper of false idols, all Poles he declared were idolaters, shameless dogs who had returned to their ancestral pagan religion. Hence it was an obligation for all good Christians to oppose these vile stains on the mantle of the faith, all the princes were called upon to raise armies to wipe them from the face of the earth.
This was plain silly. It did not need the extraordinary skills of the rector of the recently founded university of Krakow, Paulus Vladimiri to refute this pile of false accusations. In February 1417 the council formed a commission investigating Falkenberg’s claims and easily dismissed them as heretic. Falkenberg was captured and put in prison.
Meanwhile his opponent, the Polish envoy Paulus Vladimiri made an impressive speech to the council where he argued that pagans and Christians shared the same humanity. Their beliefs he argued was no justification to kill, hurt, or destroy their lands, as long as they lived peacefully alongside their Christan neighbors. And then he cited multiple cases where the Teutonic knights had killed, hurt or destroyed the lands of the Lithuanians and Samagitians without provocation.
If that had become church law and the atrocities could have been proven, the Order of the House of St. Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem would have had to be dissolved. Which is why that did not happen.
If you want to get deeper into the Teutonic Knights and the issue of their behavior in Prussia and Lithuania, we have produced a whole series on their story. Check out episodes 128 to 137.
A hundred years later the Spanish Conquistadors arrived in South America and destroyed the Mayan and Aztek civilizations, Paulus Vladimiri’s ideas of peaceful co-existence had by then been comprehensively forgotten outside Poland. The Dominican Bartolomea de Las Casas who pointed out the horrific crimes committed against the indigenous population did not reference Paulus Vladimir’s attempts at getting the church to do the right thing.
Conclusion
And that is all we have got time for today. Next week we will go on to the two events that have made the Council of Constance famous, the election of pope Martin V that ended the Western Schism for good. And the crucial moment in Czech history that is commemorated in the dead centre of their capital, the Teyn square in Prague’s Old Town, I speak of course of the condemnation and execution of Jan Hus and Hieronymus of Prague which triggered the Hussite uprising and paved the way for a very different approach to organize religion. I hope you will join us again.
And before I go, just a last reminder that if you want to support the show, go to historyofthegermans.com/support where you can make a one-time donation or link to the Patreon website where you can make a longer term commitment – jus make sure to not do it on the Patreon iPhone App.