The Council of Constance – part 4
“They will roast a goose now, but after one hundred years they will hear a swan sing, and him they will have to endure.” These were allegedly the last words of a certain Jan Hus whose surname meant goose and who was burned at the stake on July 6, 1415.
Almost exactly one hundred years later a spiritually tormented monk, frightened by a vengeful God who sought to damn him, was assigned to teach the book of Romans at the new university of Wittenberg. And 2 years later this monk by the name of Martin Luther did (or probably did not) nail his 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church of that same town.
As far as prophecies go, this must be one of the most accurate, assuming it was indeed true. But it wasn’t just the foretelling of the next reformer that makes the trial of Jan Hus such a fascinating account. So much is foreshadowed in this tale, it is almost uncanny. The railing against indulgences, the wealth of the clergy, the pope, a promise of safe conduct, a trial, villains and archvillains, accusations upon accusations, defiance in the face of certain death and then the big difference to the diet of Worms, actual death. Have a listen, it is fun.
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TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 174 – The Trial of Jan Hus. This is also episode 11 of Season 9 “The Reformation before the Reformation”.
“They will roast a goose now, but after one hundred years they will hear a swan sing, and him they will have to endure.” These were allegedly the last words of a certain Jan Hus whose surname meant goose and who was burned at the stake on July 6, 1415.
Almost exactly one hundred years later a spiritually tormented monk, frightened by a vengeful God who sought to damn him, was assigned to teach the book of Romans at the new university of Wittenberg. And 2 years later this monk by the name of Martin Luther did (or probably did not) nail his 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church of that same town.
As far as prophecies go, this must be one of the most accurate, assuming it was indeed true. But it wasn’t just the foretelling of the next reformer that makes the trial of Jan Hus such a fascinating account. So much is foreshadowed in this tale, it is almost uncanny. The railing against indulgences, the wealth of the clergy, the pope, a promise of safe conduct, a trial, villains and archvillains, accusations upon accusations, defiance in the face of certain death and then the big difference to the diet of Worms, actual death. Have a listen, it is fun.
But before we start, the usual passing round of the begging bowl. Just to give you an idea what this stuff we are doing here entails. It is now Wednesday late evening and with editing I will be here until 9 or 10 tonight. I started the writing process with some light research on Thursday. On Friday I discussed the structure of the episode with my script editor. Then I started writing and doing more research. All of Saturday I was in the London Library, mostly reading. Sunday and Monday I worked on the first draft. Tuesday morning I threw that draft in the bin and started from scratch. I spent half of yesterday and all of today writing and reading and rereading and rewriting. Admittedly this was a particularly hard one and I am not complaining, I love this stuff. But it is hard work. If you feel that is worth supporting, you can do so at historyofthegermans.com/support or you can get one of your loved ones to do it for you. I really appreciate it. And big thanks go to: Bengt-Ake A., Greg R., Jerry G., Stephan C., Allison K., Ryan G., and Owen W. who have already committed.
This week we will finally get to the end of what has become a bit of a miniseries on the council of Constance. I admit, things have gone a bit out of hand, but then when will we again have period when the center of European politics shifts to Germany – unless there is some horrific war! So forgive my indulgence.
Everybody expects the (Spanish) Inquisition?
But today we will get to the grand finale, the trial of Jan Hus. This trial was in fact not a normal trial but an inquisition. Ah, I hear you say, an inquisition. We have been expecting those. Guys in robes, applying the screws until they get a confession and off to the pyre it is.
Well yes, but also not yes.
If you were a peasant in South West France at the height of the persecution of the Cathars and someone would show up and say: “I am from the inquisition and I am here to help”, you would probably have shouted – praise the lord.
Because before the inquisition got going the persecution of heretics went a bit like that: In 1209 the city of Beziers in Languedoc had come under siege from some crusaders. This crusade, the so called Albigensian crusade had been called to eradicate the Cathar heresy. The citizens of Beziers were split roughly down the middle between Cathars and non-Cathars. Though they did not agree on religion, they did agree on hating the crusaders. So they resisted them, but as it happened unsuccessfully.
As the walls were breached and the population sought refuge in the cathedral, the military commanders asked Arnaud Amalric, the abbot of Citeaux and religious leader of the crusade what he should do now. The saintly abbot allegedly said: “Kill the all, god will know his own”. So they set fire to the church, and the entire population, men, women and children, heretic or orthodox, were killed.
The Dominican friars who had come along on this particular crusade and watched the mindless brutality realized that this approach led nowhere. Summarily executing whoever appears to have a different opinion or just simply looked as if he had a different opinion would only create more martyrs for the Cathar belief.
They Dominicans proposed a new, two-pronged approach. One was to convince the populace of the superiority of the orthodox teachings through sermons and the example of personal piety. And the second was to carefully identify those who held a different set of beliefs, explain to them the error of their ways and only once they refuse to recant, to punish them, including having them burned at the stake.
Not that I would condone burning people for their beliefs, but this surgical removal of individual troublemakers was a much more humane and likely more effective way to move hearts and minds than the indiscriminate killing of anyone remotely suspect.
And if you look at the numbers during the 14th century, this more positive perspective on the inquisition is borne out by fact. Some of you may have read Montaillou, the book by Emmanuel le Roy Laduire. In it he analyses the social structure of a 14th century village in South West France based on the files from an inquisition process performed by the local bishop. In that inquisition the authorities interrogated roughly 250 people but in the end convicted only a handful, declaring the majority of suspects innocent. And even convictions at least in this period were not that severe. For instance Bernard Gui, one of the most famous inquisitors in the 14th century and archvillain in Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose convicted 650 individuals of heresy during a 20-year career. But only 45 of them ended up on the pyre.
Is Heresy really that bad?
Ok, but there were still 45 people being killed in the most horrific way for disagreeing with the authorities. That is obviously not justifiable from a modern perspective. But in the late Middle Ages heresy was a very serious crime, a crime infinitely worse than murder or high treason.
There are many reasons, but two stand out for me. For one there was the fear was that if heretic belief spread, it could split the church resulting in horrific religious war and persecutions. And given in the upcoming 200 years of our narrative we will see several instances of 1/3rd to half of populations being wiped out in religious war, so these concerns were more than valid.
And then there is another key consideration. If you were to believe in the afterlife as most people in the 15th century did, then the short span of time on this planet paled into insignificance against the 10s of thousands, maybe millions of years one would dwell in either hell or heaven. Hence inflicting damage on the immortal soul that would cast a sinner down into the inferno for eternity was a more severe infringement than shortening the lifespan even of a saintly individual.
And that is what heretics are accused of. They were teaching dogma that would lead those who listened to it down a path of error and ultimately away from god. And that led straight down to hell, it was murder of the immortal soul. Heretics, in particular those who gathered a large followership were considered genocidal terrorists endangering thousands of people, even threating the whole of Christianity.
Dissenters therefore needed to be isolated from the rest of the faithful before they could infect others with his deviant ideas. If they recognized their errors and truthfully recanted, they could be re-admitted, but if not they needed to remain contained, either by wearing clothes that marked them out as a heretics, imprisonment or in the most severe cases, cleansing by fire.
We may disagree with the premise of the whole process, but for the contemporaries these were important questions, namely whether Jan Hus was indeed a heretic and if he had received a fair hearing at his trial. And given what we just discussed about the probability of being convicted, Jan Hus had a decent chance of acquittal or leniency. Arguably a higher chance than defendants in the US and UK where conviction rates are above 80% or Japan where they are a staggering 99.3%.
So, what exactly was Jan Hus accused of?
That as it turns out is not an easy question to answer. A medieval trial did not start with an indictment outlining the charges that the prosecution would then attempt to prove beyond reasonable doubt. In the prosecution of Jan Hus he received no fewer than14 different lists of accusations, each containing up to 25 separate charges.
However, all these different lists have three common themes, namely:
- First, that he was disobedient to the church, a rabble rouser who refused to follow explicit orders from his archbishop and even the pope himself, and
- Second, that he supported and distributed the ideas of John Wycliffe even after he was declared a heretic, and
- Thirdly that his ideas of who is part of the holy church and the role of the papacy were a major deviation from doctrine, even dangerous to the continued existence of a unified catholic church
And was he guilty? If you have listened to episode 170 where we talked about Jan Hus background, career and thought, you may already know the answer, but let me lay it out here for you:
On the first point, disobedience, Jan Hus was not one to follow orders. Even before he had arrived in Constance he had been excommunicated no less than four times, twice by his archbishop, once by a commission of cardinals and once by the pope himself. Being excommunicated meant he was barred from even entering a church, let alone preach in it. That however was what Jan Hus did at every possible opportunity, even during his journey from Bohemia to Constance. There was also his opposition to the indulgences created to fund a political war against Naples, that was labelled a crusade. Hus had preached against these indulgences and even encouraged his followers to beat up the pardoners who were trying the sell these tickets to heaven. So not exactly an obedient son of the church.
As for the endorsement of Wycliffe’s works, that is a bit more subtle. First up, Wycliffe had not been branded a heretic in Bohemia until 1410. Before that only some of his theses, not his entire works had been banned, and not in Bohemia but in England. There was also the thing that when the orthodox members of the Bohemian church wrote down 45 theses they ascribed to Wycliffe, quite a few of them were made up. When Hus was asked whether he had ever defended any of the 45 Wycliffe theses, he responded that these weren’t Wycliffe’s theses and hence he had never endorsed them.
The debate over Wycliff had escalated in 1410 when the Prague archbishop Zbyněk Zajíc formally banned all of Wycliffe’s writings. Moreover, Zbyněk ordered that these works and others associated with it were to be burned. He collected 200 volumes from across Prague, from the university library, churches and private homes. All of these were to go up in flames.
That was a brutal and extremely wasteful act. Producing a book before the invention of the printing press cost the equivalent of several months of a skilled laborer’s wage. 200 books were not only worth a fortune but a huge chunk of the total number of books available to scholars in Bohemia. To put that into context the Duke Humphrey’s Library in Oxford, the predecessor of the Bodleian, held 281 books in 1447. Cambridge’s university library had 163 books in 1363. Paris was larger and may have had as many as a 1,000 books. So burning 200 books in a young university was huge, shockingly huge.
And not all of these were books by Wycliffe himself. Important writings on logic, philosophy, mathematics and other topics were also destined for the fire. Jan Hus and the professors at the university were shocked about this act of vandalism. They protested violently against their university being stripped of its key research capabilities. And the population at large who were proud of having such a place of learning in their city were appalled. Hus called it an act against the laws of god and incited his flock to take up arms and prevent the burning. In response he was banned from preaching, his license revoked.
The books still went up in flames in July 1410. Street protests broke out and were violently suppressed. Songs circulated ridiculing the archbishop and his canons were sung and embellished for decades afterwards. An international outcry followed as news reached Paris, Oxford and Bologna.
To bring it back to Hus, he took the view that quote “one is permitted to read and to have in one’s home books even if they contain certain false or heretic opinions”. The real heretics he said weren’t those who wrote such books, but those who burned them! I have said before that there is much to like about Jan Hus approach to religion and just to life in general, and this is just another piece in the puzzle that makes him out as a much more modern and actually more sympathetic character than Martin Luther.
But his objection to burning books does not automatically make him a supporter of Wycliff. Throughout his various trials he insisted that he never endorsed the 45 theses, mainly because they had not been Wycliffe’s actual thoughts. As it happens, that s not quite true. In a debate at Prague university he had defended some of the 45 theses. It is unclear whether he omitted this out of fear of the legal consequences or because in the thousands of pages he had written and hundreds of debates he had taken part, he had simply forgotten about the incident.
Apart from this minor moment of wavering he was consistent. He kept saying that there are elements of Wycliffe’s writings he believed to be true and accurate, just not in exactly the way the 45 theses had laid them out. That qualification did however not help. In 1415 the Council of Constance confirmed previous decisions that all of Wycliffe’s works were heretic. Therefore even just a partial support of his ideas made Jan Hus technically a heretic.
Which gets us now to the third accusation, Hus’ idea about who was a member of the Holy church and who was not. As we described in episode 170 in more detail, Hus’ idea about the church was based on the following set of arguments:
At the last judgement the world will be divided between the faithful who are to be admitted to eternal bliss and the unworthy who are to be cast down to the underworld.
It follows that those bound for perdition cannot be true members of the church.
So how to find out whether one is a true faithful or an unworthy, unrepentant sinner? One could not preempt the final judgement, that would be blasphemous. But it was possible to look out for signs. If a prelate was greedy, had bought his benefice for cash and was too busy with his various concubines to say mass not even on Sunday, chances are he might be going down the abyss once the time comes. On the other hand a layman who was pious, knew his scripture and did good works, that person was more likely to move to cloud nine.
If you follow this line of argument to its natural conclusion, as Hus did, than there will be members of the clergy that are not part of the faithful and hence not part of Holy Mother Church. If they are not members of the church, how can they demand obedience from the faithful, the actual members of the church. What are the sacraments, the baptisms, marriages and last rites worth if performed by a non-member of the church?
This was ecclesiastical kryptonite. If the Council of Constance had let this notion stand, all discipline in the church would have collapsed. Every order or demand from above could be returned with “not doing that unless you get your own act together”. The entire church administration would grind to a standstill. When asked whether he would obey the pope, Jan Hus said, yes, but only as long as the pope obeys scripture and lives an apostolic life. And who determined whether the pope was obeying scripture and living an apostolic life? Well, in the absence of a clear sign of god, Jan Hus obviously.
No wonder that some called Jan Hus writings “more dangerous than the Qu’ran” and threat to Christendom.
But was that heresy?
If you look at the traditional papalist dogma that went back to Gregory VII with all its ideas about the infallibility of the pope and the obedience every single soul, kings and emperors included owed the pope, well, definitely that was heresy. In fact there is an even a really old heresy, Donatism, that had a similar concept of unworthy priests being unable to perform valid acts and that heresy had been banned since the very first church council in 314 AD.
But, but we are at the council of Constance in July 1415 and just 3 months earlier this self-same council had deposed a pope for being unworthy of the office, for being a pirate, a money grabber, a relentless fornicator and generally a very bad person.
It was only one small step further from there to the Hussite idea of the role of the church. But then, “one small step further” were also the last words of the girl with the selfie stick. Which is why the council of Constance did not go one small step further.
And in the end we all know that Jan Hus deviated from the existing orthodoxy and was hence a heretic. That is why we are interested in his story. His stance was part of a major shift in the way europe thought about its spiritual wellbeing. For 400 years there had been wave after wave of attempts to clean up the church. And every single one of these waves had petered out after a while, the Cluniacs, the reform papacy, the Cistercians, the Franciscans, all at some point or another succumbed to the corruption of wealth and power and as the saying goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. It was time to try something new. And Jan Hus was a huge part of this push for an alternative.
But Jan Hus was neither the first nor the most extreme advocate of a fundamental rethinking of the church. There were lots of others, though they almost all had something in common, Jan Hus did not share. William of Ockham died in his bed, Marsilius of Padua, died in his bed, John Wycliffe died in his bed, Martin Luther, died in his bed, John Calvin died in his bed, Ulrich Zwingly died on the battlefield, only Jan Hus died on the pyre.
Which gets us to the really interesting question, did Jan Hus get a fair hearing or was he set up?
There are few participants in this drama that have been branded as the villains who caused the death of a good man, namely the archbishop of Prague, Zbyněk,the emperor Sigismund, his former friend and fellow reformer, Štěpán Páleč [Pals]and his special prosecutor Michael de Causis.
The archbishop of Prague, Zbyněk Zajíc was a typical product of the late medieval church. A member of an aristocratic family he had started out as a military leader in the retinue of king Wenceslaus IV. In 1402 he bought the appointment as archbishop for 2,800 guilders. The traditional reading is that Zbynek knew nothing about theology and was totally unsuited for the role as a bishop. What did qualify him in the eyes of the king of Bohemia was that he was loyal. His appointment happened only 9 years after King Wenceslaus had Johann Nepomuk murdered as part of his conflict with a previous archbishop.
Initially Zbynek and Hus got on really well. Hus acted as an advisor to his archbishop, helping him to navigate the complexities of the Schism and the Bohemian reform movements. But by around 1408 Zbynek started to turn on Hus. The exact reason for that is unclear, but it seems that Zbynek was getting under pressure to reign in on the progressives in Bohemia. The spread of Wycliffe’s ideas as well as the constant criticism of his prelates made him look bad. So he wrote back to Rome that there was no heresy in Bohemia at all whilst at the same time trying to suppress the movement at home.
Initially he attacked a wide range of Bohemian reformers, but then zoomed in on Jan Hus. That made Jan Hus the focal point of the reform movement, in particular once Zbynek had excommunicated him. As we said in episode 170, Hus was only one of many theologians and preachers in Prague who demanded fundamental change, but the relentless persecution by the archbishop raised his profile. In a sort of tit for tat, every time Zbynek hit out at him, his popularity increased and his influence grew.
And there are a number of things Zbynek did that weren’t cricket, not even by the standards of a time when buying an archbishopric was regarded as standard practice. One we already heard about, the burning of Wycliffe’s books. The other was the issuance of excommunications and even interdicts related to Hus whilst his case was actually pending before the papal court. Once a case had moved up to Rome, or Bologna in that case, the local church was normally shut out and had to wait for news from the south. But Zbynek kept going after him. He gained the upper hand when Hus attacked the indulgences which lost him the support of the king and forced him onto exile. Zbynek did not get to see Hus burn since he died in 1411.
But it is fair to say that if Zbynek had not gone relentlessly after Hus, Hus may not have ended up excommunicated and on the pyre. But if it had not been Hus, it had been someone else. Revolutions need leaders and whatever was brewing in Bohemia in the early 1400s was a revolution. And that leader would have been excommunicated and brought to trial, one way or another.
Which gets us to the next one in our gallery of villains, the man who got Jan Hus to come to Constance (quote):
“In the year of our Lord 1414, the most serene prince and lord, Lord Sigismund, king of the Romans and of Hungary,[..]…sent from Lombardy certain noble lords of Bohemia[…], charging them in his royal name to conduct Master John of Husinec, formatus bachelor of sacred theology,’ [to that Council]. They were to assure him of a safe-conduct, in order that he should come to Constance to the said general Council for the clearing of his own evil reputation as well as that of the Bohemian kingdom. […] The king was also willing to send him a special safe-conduct in order that, having come to Constance, he might return to Bohemia. He also solemnly promised to be ready to take him under his and the Holy Empire’s protection and defense.” End quote
Jan Hus arrived in Constance on November 3rd 1414 and 3 and a half weeks later but before Sigismund had arrived, he was arrested and locked up in a dank and cold cell in the Dominican monastery. When Sigismund got to Constance he protested against the flagrant disregard of the personal assurances he had given the reformer. But he was rebuffed by the various canon lawyers who assured him that his safe conduct could be easily set aside on the basis that Jan Hus was already excommunicated for longer than one year and hence had no rights of protection and promises made to him were invalid. That is legally correct, just remember emperor Henry IV’s journey to Canossa in the depth of winter as he needed to get his excommunication lifted within a year and a day to preserve the oaths of his vassals.
But in practice Sigismund had ways and means to protect Jan Hus. The issue of Hus had been relatively low on the agenda of the council which was busy with the trial of John XXIII. Sigismund had received the keys to Hus’ prison and was able to place him into more comfortable surroundings. He had military control of Constance. So he could have easily organized his return to Bohemia at any point. But he did not.
Why he did not is subject to some debate. Joerg Hoensch in his biography of Sigismund said that the emperor prioritized the smooth running of the council over that promises he had made. And once he had grasped that Hus’ argument that nobody owed obedience to a badly behaved superior applied equally to kings as it did to popes, he actively wanted Hus to be burned.
We do not know what Sigismund was thinking, but another theory could go as follows. Sigismund had most probably never read anything Hus had written before he sent the letter of safe conduct. All he knew was that Prague had been branded a nest of heretics and that was not good for his family’s reputation and his prospects as the future ruler of Bohemia. Therefore he had an interest to have a public debate on Hus theses and resolve the issue, ideally with a full acquittal.
Hus too wanted his day in court. He did know that this was an extremely risky undertaking and he was cracking jokes about roasted geese right from the day he arrived on the lake. He could have avoided all that by ignoring Sigismund’s invitation and staying in one of the castles of his Bohemian supporters indefinitely. It is therefore hard to argue that Sigismund lured Hus to Constance to see him burn.
What one could accuse him of is that he did not get him out once the proceedings went pear shaped. Actually, Sigismund did pro-actively the opposite. At the latter stages of the proceedings he, as president of the council at the time, urged the delegates not to let Hus go, even if he recants. He told them that Hus would not truly recant and upon return to Bohemia resume his heresies. Hence he made sure that if Hus was found to be a heretic, there was only the choice between life imprisonment and death by fire.
Sigismund did however one thing on behalf of Hus. He secured him a series of public hearings. Normally inquisitions could and were often held in private. The risk of spreading falsehoods that would infect the souls of the bystanders was seen as too great. This was of great importance to Hus whose sole chance of survival was to sway public opinion on to his position.
At this point we progress to the attorneys for the prosecution. The first of those was Štěpán z Pálče. His career was very similar to Jan Hus’. From a small village in Bohemia he arrived at the university of Prague a few years before Hus. He graduated in 1386 and in 1399 became dean of the liberal arts faculty. He joined the circle of Bohemian reformers and immersed himself in the works of Wycliffe. He and Jan Hus became close friends working towards church reform.
But at some stage around the 1408 to 1410 the relationship soured. This may have had some personal reasons, but it may as well be that Pálče was simply unwilling to follow Hus down a path towards more and more radical concepts. It was fine to attack badly behaved priests and demanding a better sort of people at the top of the church, but that did not mean he wanted to blow up the entirety of the structure. As time went by, Pálče became more and more uncomfortable with what was going on. Preachers who had been suspended continuing to preach, the German speaking professors and students pushed out of his university, the mob parading prelates and their girlfriends naked through the streets of Prague, papal excommunications ignored.
Pálče became convinced that Wycliffe and Hus were a threat to the fabric of society, to the church and the immortal souls of all of Christendom. He turned from friend to foe and mounted the prosecution of Hus in Prague, first in conjunction with archbishop Zbynek and then with his successor. When Jan Hus arrived in Constance in November 1414, Pálče was waiting for him. Together with the fourth and last of the villains, Michael de Causis he affected Hus’ arrest and incarceration. When they succeeded and guards were taking Hus away to his cell quote “they danced around the dining hall, gloating and saying: ‘Ha, ha, we have him now. He will not get away from us until he has paid in full.” End quote.
At this point now, enter stage left the true archvillain of the case, Michael de Causis. Whilst Hus and many contemporaries saw Pálče as Hus’ most formidable opponent on the grounds of his thorough grounding in theology and his sincere conviction that Hus was dangerous, the less well known Michael de Causis was at least as important, if not more important. He had been relentless in the pursuit of his one objective, to see Jan Hus burn. There was no ruse too base, no trick to onerous to get him to this objective.
Michael was another Bohemian, though from the German speaking minority. Both Pálče an Zbynek had been Czech speakers.
His career and motivation also differed considerably from his colleague. He had started his career in the church administration in Bohemia, had become a public notary and later priest at a church in Prague’s new town. In 1408 he suddenly disappeared, around the same time an embezzlement scheme came to light where several individuals had been siphoning off profits from a major royal gold mine, a gold mine Michael was involved with.
We next find him at the papal curia where he rapidly moved up the food chain. The pope he worked for was John XXIII, former pirate and still active money grabber and fornicator. Unsurprisingly the two of them got on brilliantly. John XXIII made Michael his special prosecutor in matters of the faith, procurator de causis fidei, which is why he became known as Michael de Causis or Michael the Pleader.
And Michael immediately zoomed in on Jan Hus. He calls him the prince of heretics and convinces otherwise sensible men like Dietrich von Niehm to write treatises full of vitriol against Hus. He encourages Zbynek to excommunicate Hus and when the case arrives at the Curia he has Hus’ lawyers arrested and ensures his appeal is overturned. When one of the members of the curia, the eminent cardinal and accomplished lawyer Zabarella sees some merit to Hus’ case, he has the case transferred to the pope directly.
And once the trial gets properly going in Constance, Michael is everywhere, lurking outside the prison, working the corridors and lobbies to turn delegates against Hus, to bring the case to the top of the agenda. He writes up the accusations against the reformer, some justified, but he does not refrain from making things up. He accused him of all kinds of mind-crimes, things Michael said Hus had thought even though Hus never said anything of that sort, and he topped it off with an accusation that Hus had told his supporters he would be the fourth manifestation of god, alongside the trinity.
Which begs the question, why he pursued this case with such dogged persistence. The other accusers, Zbynek and Pálče had reasons that were justifiable, at least within the context of the times. Michael de Causis did not. He may have had it in for Hus for revenge. We do not know what triggered the Pleader’s expulsion from Prague. Investigating and exposing an embezzling Priest was right up Hus’ street. And/or it might have been simple ambition. By making Hus out to be the biggest threat to Christendom, the creator of heresies as big as the Cathars and Waldensians meant that he, the man who brought Hus down would be seen as the hero of the day. He might have read his Cicero and drawn his own conclusions what the Catilinarian conspiracy was really about.
So we have an archvillain, Michael de Causis and two men who had a major hand in Jan Hus tragic demise, but does that mean he did not get a fair trial?
The judges in his trial were the delegates of the Council of Constance with Sigismund as its temporary president. Many of these men were highly trained theologians and canon lawyers. They were very much capable to discern between simple errors and heretic conviction. Yes, presentation of arguments and facts mattered even to such a competent jury, so things like the rapid change of accusations made it hard for the defendant to prove innocence.
But Hus is given four separate public sessions to defend his position. That is a big concession, since heresy is normally tried behind closed doors to avoid contamination. He is given the list of charges and the opportunity to refute them.
And several of these he was able to push back. The more outlandish allegations brought by Michael de Causis were quickly dismissed. And even accusations that could have had some legs, like his position on transubstantiation of the wine and bread were dismissed.
It has been argued that Hus was denied a proper legal representation, but that again wasn’t guaranteed in a heresy case. In fact it was often difficult to find anyone willing to defend since that bore the risk of being associated with the heretic.
Then these public hearings turned occasionally somewhat chaotic. The closest chronicler of the trial, Petr Mladenovics who had been present in many of these hearings described them as “So-called hearings but in truth not hearings but Jeerings and Vilifications”. He reports that whenever Hus wanted to respond to an allegation, quote “many with one voice clamoured simultaneously” . They also twisted his words and then shouted “leave off your sophistry and say yes or no”. And once he became silent, they took that as consent.
Mladenovics was a member of Hus’ delegation and clearly on the reformer’s side. So he might have exaggerated the shouting and bullying, because we then hear a huge amount of detail on Hus’ responses to individual accusations.
The court zoomed in on the three topics above, obedience, support of Wycliffe and his position on the role of church hierarchy. And on all three they found him guilty. Frankly, how could they not?
The whole reason we have talked about Jan Hus for the last 30 minutes or so is because what he proposed had the potential to blow up the late medieval Church. We would not spend that much time on the trial of a man who agreed with papal orthodoxy and just happened to be falsely accused and killed.
The Verdict
On June 8th, 1415 the council gathered and Hus was presented with 39 articles that all of 60 doctors of theology believed were things he had said and that they found to be heretical. He was told that if he submitted to the council’s instruction, acknowledges his errors, recants these articles, publicly revoke and retract them and from now on hold and preach the opposite, if he did all that, he would be readmitted to the church. Hus refused, saying as he had done several times before, that these articles do not accurately reflect his writing and where they do he had not seen evidence from scripture that convinced him they were wrong. Or no for short.
The debate went on for a while until it was clear that no meant no and Sigismund shut it down. Jan Hus had the last word when he said: quote: “I stand before God’s judgement Who will judge justly both me and you according to merit”.
As he turned to be led out the church he was a by all accounts a condemned heretic and soon to be burned at the stake, he noticed a man, a friend coming towards him, Lord John of Chlum, who reached out and shook his hand. This was an act of enormous bravery in front of hundreds of men who saw Hus as a mass murderer of immortal souls and were only looking out for who else was involved. I take my hat off John of Chlum
The formal judgement was announced on July 5th, and he was given another opportunity to recant, which he turned down.
The execution of Jan Hus
The next day, July 6, he was brought again to the cathedral. He was given again an opportunity to recant which again he turned down. That opened up the last act.
As he was still a priest, he needed to be stripped of his ecclesiastical protections that would have prevented him from getting executed. First he was shown the communion cup and told that he would never again be allowed to drink from it. He responded that no, he will be drinking from it that same night in heaven.
Then he was made to relinquish his priestly vestments, one after the other, until he was just wearing his shift. Then they obliterated his tonsure. But the bishops officiating could not agree whether to shave it off or just use scissors. Hus laughed at them saying, look they cannot even agree on how to vilify me. They settled on scissors.
Finally they placed a paper crown on his head that showed three awesome devils fighting over a soul and the words “I am a heresiarch”, a lord over heretics. He saw the crown and pointed out that his lord had worn a much heavier crown than that.
And with that they handed him over to the secular authority who led him to the place of execution. All the way there he prayed joyfully . When they tied him to the pole he was facing east towards Jerusalem until someone pointed this out. So he was turned around to face west. They placed two large bundles of wood below his feet. The imperial marshal von Pappenheim approached him and asked him one last time whether he was willing to recant but Hus answered “I am willing gladly to die today”.
At once the executioners lit the fire and according to our eyewitness Petr Mladenovics Hus began to sing “Christ, Thou son of the living god have mercy upon us”. And again “Christ, Thou son of the living god have mercy upon us”. And the third verse, “Thou who art born of Mary the Virgin”, and when he began to sing the third time, the wind blew the flame in his face. Praying within himself and moving his lips and his head he expired. The whole thing had lasted no more than 2 or three 3 “Our Fathers”.
When wood of the two bundles and the ropes were consumed but the remains of the body still stood in its chains, hanging by the neck, the executioners pulled the charred body along with the stake down to the ground and burned them further by adding wood from the third wagon. And walking around, they broke the bones with their clubs so that they would be incinerated more quickly. And finding the head, they broke it to pieces with the cubs and again threw it into the fire. And when they found his heart amongst his intestines, they sharpened the club like a spit, and, impaling it on its end, they took particular care to roast and consume it, piercing it with spears until finally the whole mass was turned into ashes. And at the order of the said Clem and the marshal, the executioners threw the clothing into the fire along with the shoes, saying: “so that the Czechs would not regard it as relics; we will pay you money for it.” Which they did. So they loaded all the ashes in a cart and threw it in the river Rhine flowing nearby.” End Quote
The news of what had happened in Constance raced to Prague and from there all across Bohemia, Saxony, Poland and wherever people had read Hus’ books or had heard him preach. It triggered an event that we call the Hussite revolt and that will not just engulf Bohemia but will bring about profound change, some of it religious, but most of it military as the next great Czech hero steps onto the stage, Jan Ziska. But that we will talk about in next week’s episode.
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