The Hussite Revolution Part 2
Revolutions are exceedingly rare in world history. And they are so rare because they require a whole host of things going wrong and going wrong all at the same time. In 1419/1420 a whole host of things are going wrong in the kingdom of Bohemia. We did already hear about the defenestration, the first in Czech history. As dramatic an event that was, there was no reason to believe that death and destruction was inevitable at that point. After all there had been dozens, if not hundreds of bloody revolts that did not end up with a revolution.
Amongst Mike Duncan’s very many achievements, the concept of the great idiot theory of history is my absolute favorite. A great idiot of history is someone who out of incompetence, stubbornness, narcissism or other impediments created a situation where historical time accelerates and change occurs. It is the counterpart to the great man theory of history that is presumably a bit better known.
Which gets us to what we will discuss in this episode. Looking at my gradually swelling library of books about the Hussite revolt, it appears as if Sigismund, the king of the Romans and heir to the Bohemian crown was one of these great idiots of history. Many an author, not only Czechs, has blamed him for turning a simple revolt into a revolution out of bigotry, incompetence or even malice. But is that fair? That is what we will investigate in this episode, along a spot of street fighting on Europe’s top 3 backpacker destination.
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TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 176 – A Great Idiot of History? also Episode 13 of season 8 The Reformation before the Reformation.
Revolutions are exceedingly rare in world history. And they are so rare because they require a whole host of things going wrong and going wrong all at the same time. In 1419/1420 a whole host of things are going wrong in the kingdom of Bohemia. We did already hear about the defenestration, the first in Czech history. As dramatic an event that was, there was no reason to believe that death and destruction was inevitable at that point. After all there had been dozens, if not hundreds of bloody revolts that did not end up with a revolution.
Amongst Mike Duncan’s very many achievements, the concept of the great idiot theory of history is my absolute favorite. A great idiot of history is someone who out of incompetence, stubbornness, narcissism or other impediments created a situation where historical time accelerates and change occurs. It is the counterpart to the great man theory of history that is presumably a bit better known.
Which gets us to what we will discuss in this episode. Looking at my gradually swelling library of books about the Hussite revolt, it appears as if Sigismund, the king of the Romans and heir to the Bohemian crown was one of these great idiots of history. Many an author, not only Czechs, has blamed him for turning a simple revolt into a revolution out of bigotry, incompetence or even malice. But is that fair? That is what we will investigate in this episode, along a spot of street fighting on Europe’s top 3 backpacker destination.
Before we get down to the soon blood soaked streets of Prague just another irritating but inevitable reminder that the History of the Germans is advertising free thanks to the support from so many of you. If you want to join the ranks of these most generous patrons, you can do so on my recently redesigned membership page at historyofthegermans.com/support. There you can become a member or make a one-time contribution very much as you could on patreon.com before. If you are already on Patreon, there is no particular need to change, though you are obviously most welcome to do so. On the new membership site you find the bonus episodes as before and a chat room where members can exchange views and ideas about the show. Unfortunately I have not yet found a way to invite Patreon members to this chatroom, but I am working on something. In any event we should thank Dave E., Margus S., Jesper Glargaard – which I hope I got right!, Lidija F., Nick S. and Cat C. who have already joined this illustrious set.
And with that back to the show
Last week we ended on the first defenestration of Prague in 1419, the one that was much deadlier than the more famous second one in 1618. A protest march of Hussites demanding the release of prisoners had gathered outside the Town Hall of Prague’s New Town. Things got out of hand or went according to plan – depending on who you listen to. In the end 13 royal councilors lay dead on the pavement having taken involuntarily flying lessons. The Hussite revolt had its own storm of the Bastille.
Louis XVI diary entry for the 14th of July 1789 was famously “rien” = nothing. The king of Bohemia Wenceslaus IV did not display the same sang-froid. Our chronicler Lawrence of Brezova reports that King Wenceslaus was “angered, vexed, and aggrieved [..] and decided to eradicate all Wycliffites and Hussites, especially their priests”. This decision, like all his other great pronouncements came to nought. Instead, a month later having vexed, angered and aggrieved a bit more, he suffered a long overdue stroke and died with “a great shouting and roaring like a lion”.
The city of Prague was in such a state of unrest that the king could not even be given a proper burial. His body was moved under cover of darkness from the Royal castle on the hill to the castle of Vysherad on the opposite bank of the river and from there again in the night to the monastery of Aula Regia where he was finally put to rest. Only a few monks, fishermen and bakers were in attendance at the funeral of a man who had once been king of the Romans, king of Bohemia, duke of Luxemburg and Margrave of Brandenburg. His father, the great emperor Karl IV was lucky not to have seen what had become of the boy he had placed so much hope in, whose election had cost him the humungous sum of 500,000 mark of silver and the support of the once loyal imperial cities.
When news of the king’s demise spread, Prague erupted in an even greater frenzy of destruction. The mob broke into the remaining catholic churches and tore down the images and decorations, the priests and monks fled or hid. By the evening the crowd looted the Carthusian monastery and took away everything that wasn’t nailed down, got drunk from the liquor the monks produced and spilled what they could not pour down their throats. They seized the friars and dragged them through the streets of Prague in a riotous procession, because, as the chronicler said “they had consented to the death of master Jan Hus and resisted utraquist communion”. The next day the monastery was consumed by fire. Over the coming days even more churches and monasteries were ransacked and put to the torch.
The mob controlled almost the entire city with the exception of the Royal Castle. The nobles and rich merchants either left town or hunkered down in their fortified houses. Meanwhile out in the countryside the faithful of Mount Tabor were replicating the events of Prague in dozens of towns and cities.
The death of the king not only triggered street violence, it also caused a massive political problem for the more moderate Hussites, the barons, patricians and university doctors. Until now their strategy, assuming there was one, had been to put pressure on the weak king Wenceslaus to recognize the Hussite program. The masters of the university and the barons knew their king extremely well. They knew that his wife and maybe he too had Hussite sympathies and that the only reason Wenceslaus had sanctioned the conservative backlash of 1419 had been external pressure from his brother Sigismund and from the pope. Hence a carefully administered spot of mob violence was needed to tilt the balance in the favor of reform.
But now Wenceslaus was dead and the waving of flags and shouting had turned into full blown riots – not what the moderate Hussites had been aiming for.
Moreover, Wenceslaus’ heir was none other than Sigismund, the man many of the Hussites held responsible for the burning of Jan Hus. The man who had urged Wenceslaus to clamp down on the spread of utraquist communion across the country, in short the man who was at least one of the forces behind the catholic retaliation.
That left the moderate Hussite, basically the intellectual and political elite of Bohemia between a rock and a hard stone. On the one hand they really, really did not like Sigismund, but on the other hand the university professors and barons could not imagine a world without a legitimate feudal ruler, this is the 15th century after all. And for the barons in particular, their legitimacy was also tied closely to that self-same feudal system and hence the king.
As we have heard in the episodes about Karl IV and Wenceslaus, Bohemia had a rather unusual constitution. Unlike the other prince Electors, the king of Bohemia ruled with the consent of his barons. The barons were able to and had in the past deposed kings and invited new contenders to take the throne. This is how the Luxembourgs had become kings of Bohemia in the first place. And new kings could be made to sign settlements with the barons laying out their respective rights. Karl IV had done that and so did Wenceslaus.
For many moderate Hussite barons such a capitualation seemed to be the most sensible solution. Therefore, at the same time as monasteries were going up in flames all across the country and the radical reformers were dancing on the tables, the Hussite Barons and the university masters opened up negotiations with the royal party holed up in the Hradčany above the city. They put together a list of demands that if granted would allow them to recognize Sigismund as their overlord. These demands contained four main points, that priests could preach freely, only subject to the jurisdiction of the Prague archbishop, that the eucharist could be offered in both forms, as bread and wine, that the church was to give up all its property and that no Bohemian could be forced to stand trial outside Bohemia, in particular not in Rome. To soften the blow they promised to leave the Catholics unmolested and would return some of their churches.
That was the offer, the crown of Bohemia in exchange for the recognition of some key Hussite demands.
Before Sigismund could even respond to the offer, events moved on.
On September 28th there was a large gathering of the rural Hussites in a place called the Crosses. After their usual extended sermons and religious rites followed by communal dinners, they decided to march on Prague. The citizens of Prague welcomed them, led them through town in a torch-lit procession, fed them and housed them in one of the monasteries that were still standing. What further happened during this stay is shrouded in mystery. But most likely the two radical factions, those from the new Town of Prague and the rural activists who we will call the Taborites after the name they gave the hill they had gathered on, agreed to a joint position, a position that is unlikely to involve the kingship of Sigismund or toleration of Catholics.
Seeing the thousands of militant peasants all over Prague who were talking about sharing the wealth and forcing babies to take wine at communion was the final straw for the moderates. They joined the beleaguered royalist party up in the Royal Castle, conditions agreed upon or not.
This newly formed royalist party made up of Wenceslaus’ widow Sophia, the catholic barons and the moderate Hussites mustered their forces and recruited German mercenaries. Meanwhile the radicals down in the city were forming militias. We are moving to the stage in the revolt where a military confrontation becomes inevitable.
Which begs the question, where was Sigismund, the heir to the Bohemian crown, whilst his kingdom was tumbling towards civil war? In one of these twists of fate, the one man who could have deescalated the situation was unable to come to Bohemia.
After his long stay in Constance the situation in his kingdom of Hungary had become even more challenging than normal. The Ottomans had recovered from the catastrophic defeat at the battle of Ankara in 1402. Sultans Mehmed I (1413 to 1421) and Murad II consolidated the divided empire and resumed their expansion policy across the Balkans. Hungary was now Europe’s forward defence against the Turks, not counting the Byzantine empire that had shrunk to not much more than the city of Costantinople.
Moreover, Venice had begun its territorial expansion first along the Dalmatian coast and then into the Terra Ferma, its northern Italian hinterland. This impacted two of Sigismund’s realms, the kingdom of Hungary that used to comprise Croatia and Bosnia and the Empire which included the patriarchy of Aquilea and the Friaul. Venice not only dominated the Adriatic but was also completely ruthless. In 1418 the Great Council had passed a formal decision to have Sigismund assassinated – nothing personal, just business – it was cheaper than raising an army. Spoiler alert, they did not succeed and still had to raise the armies
That I think were good enough reasons for Sigismund to stay away from Bohemia, but they weren’t good enough reasons to mess things up in Bohemia. He played for time. In his letters he said things like, do not worry, I will confirm all the rights and privileges of the estates and we will surely find a solution for the religious differences once I come down. Just for the time being could you please all refrain from any more violence against the Catholics, restore the monasteries to the monks and nuns and allow the expelled German citizens to return to Prague. Being the future king and emperor he did not say please, please. Instead he ended his statement with “if you do not do what I command…we will make you do it”.
After decades of drunken Wenceslaus’ rule his new subjects were not accustomed to imperial commands. They did not refrain from violence against Catholics, did not return the monasteries to the monks and nuns and did not allow the expelled German citizens to return to Prague. At which point Queen Sophia who is now Sigismund’s regent put the second part of his statement into action. The mercenaries and baronial troops took over several of the monasteries and garrisoned key strategic points in the city. They rounded up some of the radical preachers and then they waited.
Jan Želivský , the leader of the New Town radicals called on the Taborites in the provinces to come to Prague and defend their religion as they had promised in the meeting a few weeks earlier.
The civil war began on October 25th 1419 with the radicals capturing Vyšehrad castle.
It may be useful at this point for you get an idea of the topography of the city of Prague. The city spans two sides of the Vltava river, which the Germans call the Moldau. The left bank is dominated by the Royal castle, the Hradčany with its huge cathedral and enormous palace. Below the castle is the so-called Lesser Town. The Lesser Town is connected to the Old Town on the right bank of the river via the Charles Bridge. The Charles Bridge itself is protected by two towers, one at each end. The Old Town is, as the name suggests, the oldest and still richest community of the city. That is where you find the famous Teyn square and the Jewish ghetto. The Old Town is surrounded on three sides by the New Town, the massive extension emperor Karl IV began. That is where the artisans and the labourers lived. It is also where the enormous squares, St. Wenceslaus Square and Charles Square are found, as well as the Bethlehem chapel. At the southern end of the New Town also on the right bank is Vyšehrad castle, the original residence of the Bohemian kings.
In October 1419 the Royal castle and the lesser town were held by the royalists. The new Town was held by the radicals. The old Town was caught between both sides, trying to steer a course between them. When the Vyšehrad fell to the radicals on October 25th, the royalists were limited to their bank of the river, the Hradčany and the lesser Town, unable to relieve the Old Town against attacks by the radicals. So the radicals moved into the Old Town.
The two sides were now heading for a showdown. The radicals in the new Town were waiting for more of the rural radicals to join them whilst the moderates and royalists tried to prevent these supporters from getting to the city. Several groups were intercepted and forced to return. The largest contingent, the one that had gathered on Mount Tabor, was held up by a contingent of royalist soldiers. This was the very first battle of the Hussite war and one where the Taborites sustained severe losses and were forced to return.
On November 4th, 1419, the war got under way properly. Led by Nikolas of Hus militiamen from the New Town, the Old Town and rural insurgents crossed the Charles Bridge under canon fire and broke into the Lesser Town. The drawn-out street fighting lasted until nightfall and ended with a victory for the radicals. Before they could be wiped out completely, the royalists rushed back up the hill into the safety of the Royal castle.
It is hard to understand why, but that same night the radical militia returned across the bridge to the old Town. So, the next morning the royalists reoccupied the Lesser Town. The same process repeated itself, the militia crossed the bridge followed by street fighting, only that this time several of the main buildings on the left bank, including the archiepiscopal palace, the monastery of St. Thomas and the house of the dukes of Saxony caught fire and burned down to the ground.
Looking down on her burning capital, queen Sophia and her ally and largest landowner in Bohemia, the Baron Rosenberg, fled. The remaining garrison in the Royal Castle was put under siege. Out in the countryside a royalist army was defeated by the rural radicals and their mercenaries were turning tail.
Hurrah, the Revolution had won. The Queen and her mercenaries were gone from Prague, the barons were defeated. Surely now a Hussite paradise of free worship, primacy of scripture and utraquist communion was at hand.
Not so fast. There is also another way of looking at this. The city that was burning was not just the city of the queen and the barons. It was a city where people lived. People who had followed Jan Hus’ sermons whose most famous quote was “Love the truth. Let others have their truth, and the truth will prevail.” The Hussite movement had not been about overthrowing the catholic church and the existing political order, it had sought to bring the catholic church back to its roots in the church of the apostles, a church built on faith, the teachings of Christ, forgiveness and community.
And now, instead of sharing food and listening to the word of God together, dead bodies were strewn across Charles Bridge, not just foreign soldiers, but Bohemian men and women too. The night sky was illuminated by the embers of the burning houses and monasteries.
Did anyone really want that?
Once the frenzy of the fighting was over and calmer minds surveyed the wreckage, there were two options laid out before the Hussite leadership.
One route was to push on, to cleanse the country of the catholic clergy, establish utraquist communion everywhere, set up a new political system with another king or even no king and brace for the inevitable backlash from the catholic forces of Europe. The alternative was again to seek reconciliation with king Sigismund, with pope Martin V and the catholic forces of Europe. A reconciliation that would seek toleration of the Hussite beliefs, freedoms and practices but would allow Bohemia to remain within the catholic church.
It was the same question that had been posed right after the defenestration and that would be the question that will run through the entirety of the coming decades of Bohemian history. The pendulum will swing back and forth between these two extremes.
And just now the pendulum had swung far out towards the radical side which could only mean it would swing back to the moderate position. What is astonishing is the speed with which this happened.
The battle over the Lesser City of Prague had taken place on November 4th and 5th. On November 13th the magistrates of Prague signed a truce with the royalists in the castle. This truce was scheduled to run until April 1420. Under the agreement the royalist could not only keep the royal castle but also got the Vyserad back and with it some control over the Old Town. In return the queen promised to not just tolerate but to defend the utraquist communion and what the chronicler calls “the law of god”, i.e., the freedom to preach from scripture.
At the end of December Sigismund called for a diet of the Bohemian crown in Brno in Moravia. All the barons, Catholics and Hussites, the magistrates of Prague and the major cities and church leaders gathered there. This was the big moment, the great reveal. Sigismund will now finally disclose where he stood on the deal the Moderates had been proposing for a while – toleration of the Hussite beliefs and rites in exchange for the Bohemian crown. This was the opportunity to reinvigorate the royalist coalition of Catholics and moderate Hussites, suppress the more extreme elements in the New town and on Mount Tabor and bring an end to the unrest.
If that is what the delegates from Prague were hoping for, they were in for a very cold shower. Sigismund was in no mood for reconciliation. He let the delegation from Prague wait for three days before receiving them. Once admitted to his presence they knelt before Sigismund and recognised him as their hereditary king and master. Then he quote spoke to them quite harshly, and sent them to Prague with the order to remove all chains and posts from the streets of the town and to pull down all fortified buildings in front of the castle [..]. This was to be indicative of their submission to his power and reign. [..] at the same time he deposed all of the officials of king Wenceslaus as well as the burgraves of castles who were supporters of Utraquist communion [..], and installed in their posts adversaries of the truth and blasphemers.” End quote. In other words, Sigismund ordered the power structure of the Hussites to be dismantled.
That was a very hardline position. The conditions posed by the Moderates weren’t really that demanding. Allowing Utraquist communion wasn’t that much of a theological issue, after all that is what had been practice in the catholic church until the 12th century. Freedom from courts outside Bohemia was at least on temporal matters something that had been part of the various special privileges of Bohemia for centuries. Whilst on the other hand forcing the Bohemians to accept him as king unconditionally will prove extremely expensive if at all possible.
So why did he not take the offer?
Some see him simply as evil and debauched. After all he sported a forked beard and w sin the habit of dancing wildly and dropping his pants at the end of dinner parties. From there it is only a small step to being the devil’s apprentice.
Most writers point to his catholic faith as the reason why Sigismund turned this option down. But that is confusing to me. At no point so far had Sigismund displayed any of the deep personal piety of his father. Sure, he was a believer like everybody else in the Middle Ages. But a malicious bigot who was hell bent on destroying heresy, that simply does not gel.
Others claim he wasn’t a great politician and diplomat. But that does hold even less water. This was a man who had acquired the kingdom of Hungary despite not having a valid claim to the throne and against the opposition of the dowager queen, the heiress of the kingdom herself and two-thirds of the magnates. And then he had engineered the end of the schism, something that had eluded the brightest political minds of Europe for 40 years.
If Sigismund did take a hardline position and it wasn’t for bigotry or stupidity, then it must be based on a sober political calculation. And that calculation might have gone as follows. Sigismund was not just the hereditary king of Bohemia. He was also king of Hungary and king of the Romans. Hungary, as we have just heard was in a fragile state, under pressure from both Venice and the Ottomans. And Sigismund’s position as king of Hungary was still subject to potential challenges from his nobles and the Angevins in Naples. Just relisten to episode 169 to remind yourself of the cut and thrust and occasional decapitation of Hungarian politics.
His position as king of the Romans was even more wobbly. In 1420 this king of the Romans had no landholdings in the empire – nada, zilch. He had granted his margraviate of Brandenburg to Friedrich von Hohenzollern. He had lost the ancient family lands in Luxemburg to his niece when he was unable to repay a loan. And as for the most valuable part of the Luxemburg inheritance, the crown of Bohemia, well, see above.
That meant his position as king of the romans and his eventual imperial coronation in Rome was down to nothing but his personal standing, his imperial prestige. And he had been working very hard on that. His involvement in the council of Constance had less to do with his personal spiritual unease about the schism but had been an amazing platform to establish himself as the first lord in all of Christendom. But all this was a walk on a tightrope. One false move and it would become apparent that this emperor could not afford even his clothes.
Embracing Hussite positions, even just tolerating them would have been such a misstep that tarnished his reputation. The Bohemian reform ideas had percolated into Saxony and Poland but not much beyond. For the Prince electors, the senior imperial princes and the magnates of Hungary, the Hussites were heretics whose leaders had been convicted by a legitimate church council and had been burned at the stake. Leaving them be was not only negligence on the part of the ruler of Bohemia, it jeopardised the unity of the holy mother church and thereby endangered everyone’s smooth transition to the afterlife.
As far as Sigismund was concerned the offer from the Hussite moderates amounted to no more than to resume the position of his brother Wenceslaus in Bohemia whilst losing the crowns of both Hungary and the empire. And sitting on the Hradčany and get bullied by barons, university masters, archbishops and radical preachers wasn’t really such an appealing prospect.
From Sigismund’s perspective the only viable political position to take was to turn back time, if necessary, by brute force. That does not make it a good decision, but a rational one. So he was not one of the great idiots of history, but certainly not one of its great men either. Just a man standing before a kingdom and asking it to kneel before him.
Next thing is now sent the magistrates back to Prague, where they did as they had been ordered, they removed the fortifications and readmitted the catholic clergy and rich merchants who had fled the city during the uprising. The garrison of the castle, seeing the enemy ramparts being torn down laughed and called down quote “Now the Heretics and Wyclifites will perish and will be finished” end quote.
Why did the moderate Hussites comply with Sigismund’s orders? Simple. Once their deal was rejected by Sigismund they had neither the backing of the committed royalists nor could they call on the radical forces to support them. Their power has simply been stripped from them. For now, all they could do was obey the king.
The most eminent American scholar of the period, Howard Kaminsky, believed that had Sigismund gone directly to Prague after the knee fall of the magistrates at Brno, he could have successfully suppressed the Hussites for good.
This I very much doubt. By 1420 Hussitism had taken deep roots in the country, both in Prague and the provinces, amongst peasants and labourers as well as barons and patricians, it would have required and did require a massive military and political presence to keep them down.
And this is what was now deployed, both from within Bohemia and from without.
The backlash against the Hussites moderates and radicals alike inside Bohemia had already begun in November. The chronicler Lawrence of Březová reports that quote “enemies of the truth inflicted on the [Hussite] Czechs the theft of property, cruel manners of captivity, hunger, thirst, and bodily slaughter. [..] They turned them over to the miners of Kutna Hora, and some were indeed sold to them. These people of Kutna Hora, being Germans, cruel persecutors of the Czechs, [..] inflicted various blasphemies and different manners of torture on them, inhumanely threw them down into very deep pits, or mine shafts, primarily at night. Some were still alive when they were thrown down, others were beheaded first. This was done primarily at a place the mountain men called Tabor.” End quote. The chronicler goes on to say that a total of 1,600 Hussites were killed in that way “in a short period of time”.
I will leave this standing here as the chronicler reported it. I have tried to find corroborating evidence about the scale of these atrocities and the role of the German citizens of Kutna Hora but have not been able to find anything in English or German. If any of you Czech listeners have more information, I would be very interested.
What is fact though is that the miners of Kutna Hora were largely German speaking. Germans had developed mining expertise when the first European silver mines opened in Goslar in the 10th century and German miners were active from the enormous copper pit of Falun in Sweden to the great mines of Hungary. As we discussed in episode 153 Nürnberg had become the European centre for mining and in particular smelting technology. Hence it is very likely, if not certain that the miners of Kutna Hora had been German speaking.
And it is also true that Sigismund had issued orders to all his recently installed chamberlains, burggraves, burgomasters and city councillors that they should by any means possible arrest, persecute and to the extent possible wipe out the Wyclifites and Hussites, and those practicing communion with the lay chalice. This order was however issued after the date the chronicler gives for the massacres at Kutna Hora.
As for the exertion of military might from abroad this came to fruition three months later. Sigismund had called an imperial diet in Breslau, Wroclaw in Silesia for early January. Two items had originally been proposed for this diet, the first was the resolution of the conflict between the Teutonic Knights and the kingdom of Poland and the second one the organisation of another crusade against the Ottomans.
We will leave the Teutonic Knights to one side, if you want to refresh your memory on this less successful intervention, check out episode 135.
As for the crusade against the Ottomans, Sigismund convinced pope Marti V to give him a sort of carte blanche to repurpose it as a crusade against the Hussite heresy if needed.
The crusade was first to go to Bohemia and should the Bohemians give up their Utraquism and exceptionalism the crusaders would then march on the Ottoman. But if the Bohemians persisted in their beliefs, then the forces of the lord would be unleashed against them.
These three events, the sudden collapse of the Hussite front after the victory in Prague, the brutal catholic repression and the call for a crusade against them left the Bohemians not just distressed but also wondering what could have brought all of these calamities about. And many looked for answers in the New Testament and in particular the Book of Revelation. Quote: “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?”
And what do you do when antichrist is about to take the throne? Where do you go? Shall you arm yourself and defend the faithful or shall you “hide in the dens and rocks of the mountains” as the “kings of the earth and the great men, the rich men, the wise men and every free man” will do when the seventh seal of the Apocalypse is opened.
That is what we will talk about next time…and I hope you will join us again. And in the meantime, as we are talking about a revolution you may want to look again at our first revolution. The one that kicked off with a letter sent to pope Gregory VII calling him Hildebrand, not pope but false monk” Episodes 32 to 42. And do not forget that if you want to support the show, you can do so at historyofthegermans.com/support