History of the Germans Podcast

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To make it easier for you to share the podcast, I have created separate playlists for some of the seasons that are set up as individual podcasts. they have the exact same episodes as in the History of the Germans, but they may be a helpful device for those who want to concentrate on only one season.

So far I have:

Ep. 178 – No Hill to Die On, from Tabor to Vitkov

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 178: No Hill to Die On– From Tabor to Vitkov

Quote: “It is we the followers of master Jan Hus, who are obeying the law of God, we who are the true followers of Christ. Thus therefore, who oppose us, oppress us, kill us, are themselves heretics, trying to thwart the will of God. Out of this deep, passionate conviction was born the determination not to yield, not to surrender, but to challenge if need be, all the forces of the religious and political order which had dominated medieval europe for nearly a thousand years, to fight it out against odds the like of which have seldom been seen in history”

And now an announcement forced upon us due to recent events. I have always kept the show out of current politics. This is a history show and everybody is welcome. I am actually taking a lot of pride in the fact that there are many listeners to this show who fundamentally disagree with my political views and still enjoy it. We may come to different conclusions from the same facts, but we share a passion for historical accuracy and willingness to listen to different perspectives.

However, there are moments when limits are breached, and things need to be said. My limit is $86, £86a of the German Penal code which bans the distribution and use of national socialist propaganda. That does include the Hitlergruss, the Hitler Salute. Elon Musk did perform the Hitler Salute on January 20^th, 2025. That needs to be said. That is why the History of the Germans Podcast had comment on social media. Further the History of the Germans will no longer post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

And with that, back to the show.

Last week we left the Hussite radicals under the military leadership of Jan Zizka at the gates of Tabor. They had left the city of Pilsen that had been put under siege by a royalist army in late March 1420. Though they had been promised free passage to join their brethren in southern Bohemia, the small army of about 400 found itself under attack from a much larger and much better equipped force of catholic royalists.

Thanks to Zizka’s quick thinking and the sun setting, the Hussites did win that encounter. And a few days later they arrived at the place that would become the centre of radical Hussitism for the remainder of the conflict.

But at this very moment there was not a lot there. It was just an open space on top of a hill. The ancient settlement that had once occupied it had perished in the 13^th century. When Zizka and his small warband arrived, they found friends and fellow Hussites from Southern Bohemia who like him had left Prague in November 1419.

This group had gone to the town of Pisek. When Pisek was besieged by a royal army in February 1420 they left and headed for the city of Usti. They hid in the woods until Ash Wednesday, when they knew the predominantly catholic inhabitants would be nursing an almighty post-carnival hangover. They captured the city with ease. But Usti prove difficult to defend, so they put the whole city to the torch and chose this abandoned hillfort as their new base.

They renamed it Tabor after the mountain in Galilee where the miracle of Jesus transfiguration is believed to have taken place, That was the moment when he appeared radiant and in the company of Moses and Isaiah revealing himself to be the bridge between the divine and the temporal.

This was not the first hill the radical Hussites had named after Mount Tabor. At least one of the mountains where they had gathered before to pray, to take communion as bread and wine and to experience their communal meals had also been named Mount Tabor. Mount Tabor was not meant to be a physical location as more of a spiritual place.

But this Mount Tabor would be a very physical a permanent space, no longer a sort of religious Woodstock. This was to be where the elect, the true members of the church can be together. It is here that they would build their own society, uncontaminated by any outsiders. And a very different society it was to be. Here is how one Taborite writer described it; quote “at Tabor there is nothing mine and nothing yours., but everything in the community is possessed equally, so everything should be in common for all and no one may have anything privately. And if he does, he sins mortally” end quote. All social hierarchy was dissolved, the baron and the labourer were equals who called each other brother and sister. The priests were their spiritual leaders but they would wear the same peasant shifts as their congregation nor would they stay in better tents or houses. The host was not passed in its round form, but as a torn piece of unleavened bread, the wine served not from a golden chalice but from any cup or tin or any common receptacle available. The writings of the great doctors of the church were not to be accepted, university education was seen as vain and heathen, the rites were abolished as traditions of antichrist. No chrism, no holy water, no canonical hours, chasubles or church chant. Just the prayer and the eucharist.

There was however one problem. Like Wenceslaus Koranda who had led the radicals in Pilsen, the Taborite priests had called the end of days for February 14^th, and like in Pilsen, not much happened on that day. Babylon did not fall.

There are two well-trodden ways for any prophet of the apocalypse to deal with this, so far inevitable occurence. One part of the Taborites just pretended they had never made any such claim and simply soldered on, building their community of the faithful on the hill. Nothing to see here.

The remainder went the other way and dialled it up to eleven. I never thought I would find myself reading the book of revelation, but now that we are deep in the weeds of the debate of what happens at the end of the world, I had to. And to say it with the inimitable words of George Walker Bush: That’s some weird shit. Open to literally any kind of interpretation. There is this whole debate about the millennium before or after antichrist or Jesus arrival, which may be bliss or horror, or does not happen at all, take your pick.

The interpretation the Taborite millenarians went as follows. The day of wrath had actually come. But instead of wiping out all the bad people, it brought on the thousand years of righteous rule. So from now on, those who had left for the five cities and had now all come together on Mount Tabor would be ruling the world. That they would no longer have to pay rent to their lords, take over all the villages, fish ponds, meadows and forests, in fact they would be drowning in an abundance of silver and gold. The only bit that was required to get there was the extermination of the sinners, which god had now assigned to them. As one chronicler said, quote “the seducers, wanting to bring the people to that freedom and somehow to substantiate their lies, began to preach enormous cruelty, unheard-of violence and injustice to men” end quote.

This is a revolution and like every revolution it has to stay in motion. At every junction a new chapter is opened and the rhetoric is ratcheted up. Once the movement stalls, the forces of the counterrevolution brings the process to a halt. And the Hussite Revolution still had a lot of motion.

Back in the physical world we should note that this new Jerusalem found itself in a geographically advantageous position, on a rock, surrounded on two sides by rivers. But that was it. The defensive walls of the previous settlement if they had ever been material, were gone, as were the houses. With Sigismund’s crusade being called and royalist armies swarming the land, for this community to survive it needed walls and towers and most importantly soldiers.

And to deliver those, even an egalitarian community requires someone who organises things. Which is why on April 6, days after the faithful from Pilsen had arrived, they elected four leaders, captains as they called them. One of them was Jan Zizka who would soon take charge of all military matters.

And they got going on building defences. Day and night the Taborites, the older men, the boys and the women carried stones and mortar, creating a hexagonal fortress surrounded by a double wall, a moat and strengthened by six bastions, one at each projecting corner. Originally there was but one gate into the city leading to the bridge over one of the rivers. This was a remarkably modern, impregnable fortress that would mightily impress Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini, the future pope Pius II.

And here is the truly astonishing thing, it was built in less than 2 months, between March 27^th and May 18^th. The people who built it lived in tents inside the walls. There was no time to build houses or churches yet.

Even the mightiest walls and towers are of no use if there aren’t soldiers able to defend them. And that is where Jan Zizka’s true genius played out. At the same speed as the walls rose up around Tabor did he create an army such like had never be seen before.

Medieval military doctrine stated that no infantry force could withstand a charge by armoured riders. This doctrine had already been challenged hard at Muhldorf, Morgarten, Poitiers, Agincourt and Nicopol where the flowers of chivalry had been decimated by people they regarded as beneath them.

There is a difference though. The Janissaries at Nicopol and the English Longbowmen at Poitiers and Agincourt had trained for years before they got deployed in battle. The Swiss and Bavarian infantry too had training and benefitted from knowledge of their very specific geography.

What Zizka did was to turn a ragtag bunch of peasants, a few artisans and even fewer experienced soldiers within less than two months into an army that would never be defeated by an army of knights, never. How he did it, well even though there are many accounts, in the end, it is hard to explain and even more difficult to replicate.

On March 27^th he had brought 400 men from Pilsen who may have had received some military training during the fighting there, but Zizka will leave Tabor at the head of an army of allegedly 9,000 on May 18^th.

The early 15^th century was a time of such brutality, that everyone had a weapon and knew how to use it. That means townsfolk, even artisans would likely have a swords or a crossbow and some experience in handling these. But the majority of Zizka’s new army were peasants who had their agricultural tools, their pitchforks and flails as their means of defence.

Just in case like me you do not know exactly what a flail is, here is what I found out. It is a tool that consists of a striking head that is attached to a handle by a metal chain or rope. It is what was used for threshing, i.e., for separating grains from their husks. The flail has some advantages. An agricultural flail has a fairly long handle and because the striking head is on a chain, it is hard to parry. It can go around a shield or hit over a wall. By adding spikes or studs to the striking head, it can be become deadly. These agricultural flails are not to be confused with the military flails you see for instance in many depictions of Jan Hus. These have shorter handles and small metal spiked balls at the end. Germans call them Morning stars. These were expensive weapons yielded by the nobility. What we are talking about here are peasant tools, repurposed for warfare.

And that means they were available, and other weapons weren’t. One of the most famous contemporaneous depictions of a Hussite army shows the men carrying very long flails, maybe two metres tall.

The men carrying flails were one of three major infantry formations. An other one were the pikemen or lancers. They carried long lances meant to unseat riders. And the third formation were archers and crossbowmen who provided long distance firepower.

Mustering the men and optimising their weapons was one thing, but the most crucial component of infantry going up against a cavalry charge was discipline. I think I said that many times before, but there are very few things more terrifying than a thousand riders on heavy hoses bearing down on men on foot. They may know that they will almost certainly die if they run, but for centuries after the fall of the Roman empire, running was what infantry in europe did.

Discipline did not just come from the imposition of authority, though that surely existed given the religious fervour and respect for the scarce military experience, but from the structure of warfare Zizka had invented.

That is where his first major innovation came in, the war wagon. The wagons Zizka had used at the previous two encounters had been just ordinary carts of the kind used to transport foodstuff to market or on campaign.

The war wagons that Zizka used later and presumably developed further as he went along, were of a different kind. These were designed as moveable fortresses. They were heavy and robust carriages. The sides could be reinforced with movable boards for his soldiers to take shelter behind. Other boards could be deployed to protect the wheels and to stabilise the wagon. The gap between two wagons was protected by a heavy mobile shield. That meant the Hussite army could create a mobile fort simply by pulling their war wagons into a circular formation and deploying the shields into the gaps. If they had enough time to set it up on top of a hill and dig a moat around it, these fortifications were almost impregnable. And as we will see, he also found a way to turn the war wagon from defensive tools to offensive weapons.

But beyond the mechanical change this brought, it also forced a complete rethinking of European military tactics. A medieval battle was effectively a giant melee where the great lords decided more of less freely when to attack, where and who. They were all doing more or less the same thing and since the only honourable formation was to go straight at them, no flanking or other cowardly moves, there was less need to coordinate across different divisions.

That lack of discipline and coordination is what led to the catastrophic French defeats in Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt, the loss of the battle of Nicopol and scores of other, less famous encounters. None of the field commanders were able to bring in the kind of discipline that allowed generals to deploy their forces according to some battle plan.

An army that fights out of a formation of wagons was forced into coordination for the simple reason that the movable fortress only worked as well as its weakest link. Every wagon team had to get to the right place at the right time. Otherwise there would be a giant opening in the wall. Operating war wagons required specialisations, some soldiers were manning the wooden walls, other the shields between the wagons, there were the wagon drivers and those who handled the artillery. Every member of the team needed to know what to do and their comrades had to rely on him, or in fact her, doing their job.

The last component that made the Hussite armies so special was the use of field artillery. Artillery had been around for at least fifty years by then. The oldest surviving European firearm, the Tannenberg handgunne dates back to 1399 but they had been mentioned far earlier. These guns were predominantly used in static warfare, i.e, as a way to break walls during sieges. There were guns deployed at the battle of Tannenberg in 1410, but it is in the Hussite wars that they start to make a material difference. Shooting balls from behind the walls of their mobile fortress not only terrified riders and their horses, but as aim and speed increased it became a way to overcome the advantages of steel armour.

We do not know when Zizka exactly developed this form of warfare. It might have already gone around in his head when he fought in the wars against the Teutonic Knights. We have heard that he first deployed some of his tactics during the siege of Pilsen and then on the trip over to Tabor. But it is during this time in April 1420 that he was able to scale it up.

It was almost certainly an iterative, learning by doing process. During these two months he kept his new army in the field, running a number of attacks across the neighbourhood of Tabor. They raided the castles of the lords who had broken the promise of safe conduct. They attacked the small army of Nicholas of Jemniste, the man in charge of the massacres in Kutna Hora. They inflicted damage on his forces and forced him to release his prisoners. Once the truce between the royalists and Hussites ended on April 23^rd, he felt free to attack any of the local lords who had sided with the king. In the process he took a lot of booty which included arms as well as horses, which allowed him to add a small troop of cavalry to his force.

As the Hussites became more powerful they also became more cruel. At one point they told six prisoners that they would release whoever was prepared to decapitate all his five comrades. Zizka himself ordered seven monks to be burned at the stake.

But the next great battle was however not fought over Tabor as the leaders of the community had feared, but in Prague.

Prague as we know had signed a truce with the royalists in November 1419 and had cowed before Sigismund in December. The leaders of the city and the moderate Hussite barons had believed that there was space for reconciliation, in particular that Sigismund could be made to tolerate the chalice, the communion of bread and wine as well as three more demands. But as we explained last week, Sigismund as emperor elect and king of Hungary could not compromise, even if he had wanted to.

The pointlessness of their attempt at compromise became abundantly clear when Sigismund sanctioned the burning of a Prague merchant who was reluctant to give up his Hussite beliefs. Then he issued an order that anyone who was found practicing Hussite beliefs by the time he arrived in Bohemia would be punished by death and loss of all possessions.

At that point the leader of the moderate Hussite barons, Cenek of Wartenberg, who had been appointed Sigismund’s regent in Bohemia and who held the Royal castle above the city, turned publicly against the king. In a symbolic act he sent back his precious insignia as a knight of the dragon. And then convinced his fellow magnates to side against the enemies of their faith. And even the most conservative Hussites amongst the city councillors and nobles concluded that they had to fight.

On April 3^rd, 1420, the city of Prague formulated what would become known as the four articles, a summary of the key demands of the Bohemians to their king. It was a manifesto all the now various factions of Hussites could agree upon.

And this is what they said, quote:

We stand for the ministering of the body and blood of the Lord to the laity in both kinds, for … this was Christ’s institution and …that of the first apostles.
We stand for the proper and free preaching of the word of God and of his every truth
All priests, from the pope down, should give up their pomp, avarice, and improper lordship [..] over temporal goods and they should live as models for us.
We stand for the purge and cessation from all public mortal sins, by each in his own person; and for the cleansing of the Bohemian realm and nation from false and evil slander; and in this connection, for the common good of our land.” End quote

From now on, whenever Bohemia is threatened from outside, the various Hussite forces will coalesce around these four demands, and every time they are left alone, they will fall out over what exactly they mean.

For now they were under attack and hence they were united. The city of Prague was readying its defences. They expelled the remaining Catholics, most of them German speaking. The Vhysherad they had so foolishly handed over to the royalists in 1419, was put under siege.

Meanwhile Sigismund’s army marched from Silesia towards Prague. The numbers for the size of Sigismund’s army are all over the place. Our chronicler Lawrence of Brezova talks about 150,000 men, including bishops, archbishops, dukes and secular princes, approximately 40 in all, not counting margraves, counts, barons and nobles. These were Bohemians, Moravians, Hungarians, Croats, Dalmatians, Bulgarians, Wallachians, Huns, Tassyans, Ruthenians, Russians, Slavonians, Prussians, Serbs, Thuringians, Styrians, Misnians, Bavarians, Saxons, Austrians, Franconians, Frenchmen, Engishmen, and so forth and so forth. Sigismund’s chronicler talks about 80,000. Neither of these numbers are believable. The French and English side at Agincourt in 1415 counted each about 15,000, at Tannenberg/Grunwald, high estimates talk about 30,000 men. And these were battles involving some of the richest and most powerful monarchies of the middle ages, not an impecunious claimant for the crown of a medium-sized kingdom.

But it was still a huge army, quite likely one of the largest forces assembled in that century to date. Seeing all this, some moderate Hussites were either getting cold feet or became disconcerted about the increasing brutality of the Taborites, or both. Amongst them was the grand magnate and leader of the moderate Hussite barons, Cenek of Wartenberg. He opened discussions with Sigismund and in exchange for the promise that he and his family could continue receiving the chalice, handed over Prague castle.

That was a massive blow for the defenders. The city of Prague was now wedged in between Prague Castle and the Vysherad. They tried to take either of them and failed. With the main forces of the enemy approaching at pace, despair spread through the city. Again they were considering a truce and sent delegates to discuss with Sigismund in Kutna Hora.

And again Sigismund turned them down. He demanded unconditional surrender, no ifs no buts. Return to old school Catholicism, no chalice, the return of the monks and the Germans, and restitution of church property. And there was no way the Hussites could accept it, certainly not the radicals, but neither could the moderates. The delegation returned to Prague and the city prepared to fight to the end. One of the astonishing things about this conflict is how often the moderates try to reconcile with the king and how they do not understand that he would not and could not budge.

So, rather than dissolving their militia and removing their barricades as they had been ordered, wherever there had been one chain to barricade the street, they put two, and locked themselves up against the king.”

And the city now called for help. Hussites from all across the country mustered their forces and journeyed to Prague. On May 18^th, an army, 9,000 strong, armed with flails, swords, crossbows, lances and pikes, accompanied by war wagons and led by Jan Zizka set off from Tabor on the 50 mile journey to Prague. Medieval armies tended to be slow and it would have usually taken a week to cover this distance. Zizka made it in three days, which included a successful skirmish with Royalist troops halfway through.

Whilst the city was filling up with determined fighters, the strategic position remained extremely challenging. The Hussite positions were the Old Town and the New Town which are lying on a plain on the right bank of the Vltava. The Lesser Town on the opposite side of the river was a smouldering ruin. The royalists held Prague Castle, one of the largest medieval castles in the world that sits 150 meters above the town. And they hold the Vhsherad, a somewhat less imposing hill, but still a mighty fortress to the the south.

Both sides assumed that once Sigismund arrived, he would try to put the city under siege, cutting off food supply and slowly starve them out. To do that he needed to close down all access roads into the city.

There are four main routes into Prague, along or on yhe river, either from the north or the south, and by road from either the South-east or the North-east. Three of those routes were blocked by Prague Castle and the Vysherad. There is always a reason why the castles are built where they have been built.

The only road the royalists did not control was the North-eastern access route. That road came in on the right bank of the Vltava, i.e., the side where the Old and New Towns are and crossed a fairly wide plain called Hospital Field. Hospital field was bordered on one side by the river and on the other by a 70m high, long ridge called the Vitkov Hill.

The destiny of Prague and now that all Hussite forces were gathered inside its walls, the movement itself was to be decided on Hospital Field and on Vitkov Hill.

Sigismund and his army arrived in early summer and made camp by Prague Castle. And that is where they stayed for the next couple of weeks, growing in number as more and more crusaders arrived. Prague was after all one of the largest cities in the empire. Surrounding it from all sides will take a huge army. Hence they were waiting for the moment that their forces would be sufficient to fully invest the city.

Meanwhile the defenders dug moats and strengthened walls. And they prepared the key strategic point, Vitkov Hill. On one end of the ridge stood an old watchtower, once built to protect the royal vineyard on the southern slope of the hill. Zizka then had two more wooden bulwarks built at the other end. These were fairly small, each holding maybe 30 defenders. Around these bulwarks all trees had been felled and houses that could impede access or visibility had been taken down. And then they waited.

The action began on July 14^th, 1420. Sigismund planned an all-out assault. One contingent of a few thousand cavalry, mostly troops from Meissen and Thuringia were to take Vitkov Hill. Once that was accomplished a force of 16,000 was to come down from the royal castle and fight their way across the bridge, whilst another large army was to attack the new Town from the Vysherad. Overall a sound plan. Either the defenders would give up as soon as Vitkov Hill had fallen, or if they continued to resist, they could be starved to death.

Here I leave the storytelling to Lawrence of Brezova: quote “Those from Meissen climbed the mountain with their own troops and the 7,000 to 8,000 cavalry allied to them, in force and with trumpets blowing, and launched an assault on the aforementioned wooden battlements., successfully crossing the moat and taking the watchtower in the vineyard. When they wanted to scale the walls made from mud and stone, two women, with one girl and 26 men who had remained temporarily in the bulwark offered brave resistance with stones and spears and were repulsing the attackers, having neither shells nor gunpowder. One of these women, even though she was unarmed , surpassed even the courage of the men, refusing to yield a single step, saying it was wrong for a faithful Christian to yield to an Antichrist. Fighting with great zeal, she was killed and breathed her last. Then Zizka came to their defence and he himself would have been killed had his own men not come with flails and rescued him from the hands of his enemies. Just as practically the whole city was terrified at the prospect of its doom, and the citizens were pouring out tears and prayers with their small children, counting on heaven alone to aid them, a priest approached with the sacrament of the body of Christ. Behind him were about 50 archers and a number of peasants unarmed except for flails. When the enemy saw the sacrament and heard the little bell, together with the loud cries of the people, laid low by powerful fear, they turned their backs, fleeing in haste, everyone trying to get in front of those before them. Many were unable to keep their balance against the onslaught and fell from the high rocks and broke their necks, and many more were killed by their pursuers. Within an hour more than 300 of them were slain while others were mortally wounded or captured” end quote.

I understand that this story as told here is one of the foundation stories of Czech national identity, so I will not dig too deep into the embellishments our chronicler might have added to the story. Let’s just say that Jan Zizka would not be much of a military genius if he had left the garrison at this crucial point without weapons and in particular without guns. It is also somewhat doubtful that a thousand battle hardened mercenaries would be turned into panicked wrecks by the sight of a priest with the Holy sacrament and 50 archers.

Despite this spot of myth making, the fact remains that Sigismund’s army was unable to take Vitkov Hill on that day and the following days the citizens of Prague dug deeper moats and build larger forts on Vitkov Hill so that the supply lines into Prague remained open.

And as it had happened twice before, the victory of the rebels was followed by negotiations. Again the Leaders of the city of Prague and the moderates sought reconciliation with their king and with the catholic church.

Sigismund, realising he could no longer take the city by force began to lend his ear to the catholic barons who promised him Prague without bloodshed. At which point the German princes who had been promised the land of the Hussite barons as well as booty from the sack of Prague turned first on the Bohemian barons and ultimately on their own king. One by one the imperial princes left the camp and went home, burning and plundering as they went. Sigismund was crowned king of Bohemia in St. Vitus cathedral but immediately afterwards retreated to Kutna Hora the centre of catholic power in Bohemia to await the peaceful resolution of the conflict.

We will see next week whether Jan Zizka and emperor Sigismund will hold hands and ride off into the sunset. But even more importantly, we will find out what repercussions these events have in the German lands, how they change the institutions of the empire and the position of its ruler. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime, if you feel inclined to support the show, you can do so at historyofthegermans.com/support.

Episode 177 – The Day after the End of Days

by History of the Germans Podcast on 16th January 202517th December 2025

The Hussite Revolution Part 3

“To our great shame and sorrow, we must acknowledge how our brethren have been cleverly seduced by Satan, and how they have departed from Holy Scriptures in strange and unheard-of ideas and acts. When Satan first came to them it was not with an open face, as the devil, but in the shining garb of voluntary poverty, [..], and in the zealous work of preaching to and serving the people and in giving them the Body and Holy Blood of God. And [..] a great many people flocked to them.

Then the devil came to them clothed in other garb, in the prophets and the Old Testament, and from these they sought to confect the imminent Day of Judgement, saying that they were angels who had to eliminate the scandals of Christ’s kingdom, and that they were to judge the world. And so they committed many killings and impoverished many people; but they did not judge the world according to their words, for the predicted time has elapsed with which they terrified the people, telling them strange things.” End quote.

Strange things indeed were happening in Bohemia. Peter Chelcicky whose words you just heard reported how the radical Hussites had called the End of Days for February 14^th, 1420. But when that day came, and instead of all the enemies of the faith lying dead with their noses pointing skywards, royalist forces surrounded the radical Hussites in the city of Pilzen. Now the end really seemed nigh, but cometh the time, cometh the man, even if the man is a one-eyed, gruff ex-Highwayman.

Strange things indeed were happening in Bohemia. Peter Chelcicky whose words you just heard reported how the radical Hussites had called the End of Days for February 14th, 1420. But when that day came, and instead of all the enemies of the faith lying dead with their noses pointing skywards, royalist forces surrounded the radical Hussites in the city of Pilzen. Now the end really seemed nigh, but cometh the time, cometh the man, even if the man is a one-eyed, gruff ex-Highwayman.

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So far I have:

Ep. 177 – The Day after the End of Days (Jan Zizka in Pilsen)

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 177 – The Day after the End of Days, which is also episode 14 of Season 9 The Reformation before the Reformation.

Before we get to the delights only a full blown apocalypse can offer, let me offer you nothing, nothing to buy, nothing to sign up for, nothing but the gratitude of your fellow listeners and your humble podcaster. Protecting us against an ever rising wave of advertising is a noble pursuit you can indulge in at historyofthegermans.com/support. Hence we thank all the lords and ladies who have so graciously lent a hand, namely Phil Grass, Hendrik N., Brian K., Chris C., John F., Martin W. and special thanks also to Historygirl Susan E. whose generosity and support all across social media is much appreciated.

And with that, back to the show.

Last week we left the Hussites at a low point. Though they had won the battle of the Lesser Town of Prague, their subsequent truce and kowtow before emperor Sigismund had wiped out all of this success. A massive Catholic backlash against the religious reformers was under way. Sigismund had ordered the magistrates of Prague to lift the siege of the Royal Castle and to dismantle their fortifications, an order they were too weak to resist. The monks and nuns returned to their ransacked monasteries and the German merchant elite re-occupied their houses in Prague. The mining town of Kutna Hora became a centre of the repression of the Hussites who were thrown down mine shafts, some dead but also some still alive.

Sigismund, rather than entering Prague for a coronation went on to Breslau for an imperial diet. At that diet the Electors and princes signed up for a crusade against the Hussites. That crusade was initially intended to defend Hungary against the Ottomans, but pope Martin V had allowed for it to be diverted to eradicate the heretics of Bohemia. And to make it abundantly clear that there was no room for reconciliation between even moderate Hussite demands and the imperial will, the diet convicted another Hussite priest, dragged him behind a horse over the cobblestones and when he still refused to die, burned him next to the abattoir.

What made all this even more disconcerting for the people was that most of that calamity had been self-inflicted. On November 5^th, 1419 the Hussites were a cohesive movement. The citizens of Prague, both the more radical artisans and labourers in the New Town and the more affluent patricians of the Old Town, the provincial communitarians who had come from their mountains to support their brethren and many of the Bohemian barons had all been united in their opposition to the royalists up in the castle. They had fought together, they had died together and they had won together.

But just 8 days later, the moderate factions in Prague had agreed a truce with the Royalists which allowed the Catholics to retaliate. The Radicals were opposed to the truce and the movement splintered into factions.

For these radical Hussites who had come from the provinces, this turn of events was almost impossible to understand. How could they get through the canon fire on the Charles Bridge and put experienced and well-armed mercenaries to flight, only to see the enemies of the faith triumph.

And this was not the first time they had experienced hardship. This is the early 15^th century and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse are riding high.

The rider on the white horse had brought the plague, the plague that had begun in 1348 but had come back again, and again and again taking its grim toll.

The rider of the red horse had come to take peace from the earth and to make men slay other men. He had brought war, incessant war between the kings of France and England, between the princes of the empire over this, that or the other parcel of land, and the war between Wenceslaus, his barons, his cousins and at times his brother that devastated Bohemia the once richest and most august of the principalities of the empire.

The rider of the black horse came with a pair of scales weighing what little bread was allowed in times of famine. And now that the climate was turning colder and colder, even a good harvest in 1410 was no better than a poor harvest 150 years earlier. Those who have stayed on their land and failed to negotiate better wages found themselves re-enslaved following the plague whilst many who had left for the bright lights of the cities found themselves as menial labourers or domestic servants.

And the fourth rider on his pale horse of death was ever present, the catch all for those who had not succumbed to disease, war or famine.

It was a brutally tough time to be alive, very much the opposite of the beautifully illuminated images that the early renaissance masters, the Giottos, Lorenzettis, Martinis and Masaccios produced during that time.

And for the men and women who had left their homesteads in the autumn of 1419 to come to the aid of Prague, all this felt even more dystopian. Not only had they suffered the agony of disease, war, famine and death, they thought they had found the reason for their suffering. And that reason had been the corruption of the church, the church that turned its back on the example of the apostles, that had them denied the sacrament of bread and wine, without which there was no salvation. And they had not only found the reason for their suffering, they had begun remedying these ills. They had gathered on the mountains and had taken the bread and wine, they had shared their worldly goods as the apostle had done and they had listened to and tried to live by the scripture.

If they had done all that was required, how could it be that they found themselves leaving the city of Prague in fear of persecution and with nowhere to go?

Their priests were as confused as they were themselves and sought the answers in the one place they knew had all the answers, the holy scripture. Here is what our chronicler, Lawrence of Brezova reports they did next quote: “during this time some Taborite priests were preaching to the people Christ’s Second Coming, during which time all evil ones and adversaries of the truth deserved to perish and be annihilated, and all the righteous ones would be saved in five towns. [they were] warning that everyone who wished to escape the wrath of almighty God, which was supposed to be sent into the entire world, should move from their towns, castles and villages like Lot from Sodom to the five cities of refuge. These were the names of the cities: Pilsen, which they called the city of the sun, Zatec, Louny, Klatovy and Slany. This was on account of the fact that almighty God wanted to annihilate the entire world, with only those who fled to the aforementioned towns being spared” end quote.

Medieval history is full of predictions of the end of the world, from the millennial fears that gripped the contemporaries of Otto III and Henry II to the predictions of Joachim of Fiore that called upon Frederick Barbarossa to go to Jerusalem to bring about the 1000 years of bliss that preceded the coming of antichrist.

Seeing the defeat of their side and hearing that Sigismund was about to arrive in Bohemia to strike the final blow, the Taborite priests wrote quote: “The lion has gone forth from his lair and the heathen pillage has arisen..[..] the King of Hungary has gone forth to lay waste your land. Your cities will be wiped out..[..] therefore, knowing these things give diligent heed to the lord God himself and do not be tardy; He is at the gates.” end quote

And they gave a date for when he, Christ, not Sigismund, was to arrive – they said soon, very soon, in fact in just three months, in mid-February 1420.

And with that date being so close, the persecution of heretics in full swing across the country and a crusade against them being called, thousands of ordinary people left their homes, sold their belongings and took their husbands or wives, their children and their livestock to seek safety in one of these five cities. At this stage the biggest concentration was in the city of Pilsen, today more famous for Pilsener beer, the original Lager. Pilsen was turned into a fortress, many of its citizens who did not adhere to the Taborite beliefs left or, according to some accounts, were thrown out or even killed. The monasteries were ransacked as were the churches and the homes of the rich. In line with the tradition they been had established in their gatherings on the mountains before, they pooled their possessions, or as the our rather biased chronicler said, threw their money at the feet of their priests.

Conditions within these five cities must have been very difficult. Pilsen may have been a city of a few thousand people if that and the influx of thousands of pilgrims from the countryside must have led to massive overcrowding. Moreover, these people had no business in these towns, no work or income. And since they were there only to wait out the coming apocalypse, there was no incentive for them to set up shops or create much of a society. Feeding these masses was a challenge even before the cities were put under siege. And then there was the question on how to defend the city with nothing but pilgrims, most of them peasants and artisans and very few soldiers

The answer to that last question had already arrived in November 1419, a grizzled old soldier with only one eye who had fought for decades but had never held command of a major force.

I have promised to talk about Jan Zizka for three episodes now, and finally we are getting there. And at this point a big thank you to Czech listener Jiri D. who kindly summarised some of the recent Czech historical research for us.

There is precious little information about the first fifty years of the great Czech hero, the man who broke the dominance of the armoured knights and whose bronze equestrian statue overlooking Prague is the third largest in the world. But recently a major works has been published by professor Petr Čornej that sheds more light on his life before the Hussite Revolt. And from that we can conclude that Jan Žižka had already lived and survived more lives than the proverbial stray cat before he came into historical focus.

Jan Žižka was born between 1360-1363 most likely in Trocnov, 16km southeast of Budvar, yes, another town that makes great beer and also gave its name to something called Budweiser. The family background was petty landed gentry which provided him with a coat of arms of a red crayfish on a silver field, but not an awful lot more.
His parents and relatives owned two farms, covering together not more than 40-50 hectares of very poor soil. The place was later deserted and converted into pastures, so not enough to maintain the standards of even just the lowest level of gentry.

The name Žižka by which he is known, was actually a nickname. It means “one eyed” as Jan lost an eye quite early, probably due to an accident roughhousing with a childhood friend.
His early years, upbringing or education left no trace. He first appears in public records in four documents dated between 1378 – 1384, presenting him as a poor manager and householder, constantly in debt and incapable of taking care of his farm. He gradually sold off all of his land and assets and disappeared from the local land register. In the meantime, Jan had two short-lived marriages. Both wives died very early, probably in childbirth, leaving him with only one surviving child, his daughter Catherine.

Jan Žižka initially served Heinrich von Rosenberg, the all-powerful lord of Southern Bohemia, but must have fallen out with him fairly early on. Jan Žižka and his brothers, once their money had run out, joined a gang of Highwaymen under a certain “Matthew the Leader”, which operated between the years 1404-1409 in the border region between Bohemia, Moravia and Austria. They were a particular menace to the lands of his former master, the Rosenbergs and the citizens of Budvar. Jan Žižka did what a highwayman does, he took a load of herrings from the Rosenbergs, killing one of the lord’s men, shook down two brothers for cash and fleeced the merchants travelling between Vienna and Prague.
On occasion and at the behest of clients his gang would have a go at larger prey too. They tried to capture the royal castle of Hus and another time they planned to seize Nové Hrady, scaling the walls with rope ladders.

That brought the authorities on to the scene who systematically wiped out their local network and cornered, caught and hanged the gang members. Jan Žižka remained in hiding until he was saved by a royal pardon.

That royal pardon is seen as the great mysteries of his earlier life. Why would a king of Bohemia suddenly pardon a robber down in the south of the country who he may have never met before? Wenceslaus IV wrote to all concerned on July 27,1409 that “…he has accepted Jan the said Žižka, his beloved faithful, on his mercy, forgiving him graciously all the offences committed against Him and against the Crown of the Kingdom of Bohemia.”
Hmm, a state prosecutor pardons a gang member whose affiliates have all been hanged? Honi soit qui mal y pense as they said in the 14^th century..

There is also a completely different story going round. Records of the court of Burgundy mentions a certain Jehan Susque de Behaigne which sound like Jan Zizka from Bohemia who acted as a go-between for King Wenceslaus and duke John the Fearless. This Jehan passed messages between the two princes, brought expensive horses to Dijon and accompanied the Burgundian chancellor on various diplomatic missions to eastern europe. The problem is that the timing of these two stories overlaps, and whilst one can move from convicted felon to ambassador, nobody can be a diplomat and a highwayman at the same time. So either Zizka was a highwayman and this Jehan person was someone else, or Zizka was indeed a diplomat and the pardon was granted to him for a crime committed on occasion of one of his missions.

By 1410 we are on firmer ground. We find him fighting as a mercenary for Jogaila of Poland and Lithuania in the war against the Teutonic Knights. He may or may not have participated in the battle of Tannenberg/Grunwald in 1410 but he was definitely involved in the campaign and the defence of the castle of Rheden/Radzyn. This must have given him a good idea of how detachments of knights operated on the battlefield and how royal armies conducted large scale sieges. And he also could see the use of fire weapons at scale, weapons that had only recently become deployed more broadly.

Sometimes between 1411-1414 Jan Žižka joined the household of King Wenceslaus as a “palace gatekeeper”, someone close to the king, acting as a bodyguard. Wenceslaus was famously unstable and erratic. As a member of his immediate entourage Zizka must have been good at gaging his master’s moods, information that was exceedingly valuable to anyone with business at court. That may explain why his financial situation finally improved. In 1414 Žižka bought a representative house close to Wenceslaus favourite palace, though he did not keep it for long. He sold it to fund his daughter’s dowry two years later. As a member of the royal court Žižka made friends with prominent political, religious and military figures. It also brought him in contact with the Bohemian reformers who had many powerful supporters at court. There is a story that Zizka regularly accompanied queen Sophia when she attended Jan Hus’ Sermons at the Bethlehem chapel.

In 1419 when the Hussite revolt kicks off, Jan Zizka is already in his mid to late Fifties. Very little makes him out to become one of the greatest military figures in European history. Not only is he a relatively old man, he is visually impaired, had never held command of significant military forces before and his backstory is, as we have seen, a little too checkered to lead a religious movement. But then he did all that. Cometh the day, cometh the man!

And that day when Jan Zizka first steps into the limelight of history was the 30^th of July 1419, the day of the first Defenestration of Prague. Our chronicler Lawrence of Brezova tells us that the royal councillors were quote “outrageously slaughtered by the common people and Jan Zizka, courtier of the Czech king” end quote. Many biographers ascribe Zizka a significant role in this event, though there is no further evidence of him even being there. I personally think that it is unlikely that he was one of the ringleaders at this event, simply because if he had been, the chroniclers would have made a big song and dance about it. But they didn’t. Hence my guess is that at this point he was still only another man in the crowd.

More interesting is the question why he was there. He was after all a royal servant, a “familiaris” of the king who had risen to wealth and prestige at court. Taking part in the insurrection, even in a minor role, was an act of treason. So why did he do it.

In a chronicle written about his life in 1436 it says simply, that he “took the field to fight against who did not take the Body and Blood of Christ in both kinds. Those he took for his enemies” end quote.

It was likely as simple as that. Jan Zizka, like almost everyone in Bohemia at that time had to make a decision, to stand either with the Hussites or with the Catholics. There was no middle ground. Zizka was close to the reformers at court who had just been dismissed. And he may simply have agreed with their view of scripture and decided to stand with the Hussites. And that was that.

From here on we find Zizka at the forefront of events. He led the attack on the monasteries following the death of Wenceslaus and then, as captain of the forces of the New Town, led the attack on Vysherad castle that kicked off the actual revolution.

During the battle for the Lesser Town some chroniclers ascribe Zizka a major role alongside the overall commander Nicolaus of Hus. And he seemed to have displayed a lot of personal courage during the fighting on the Charles Bridge.

Which is likely why he took the signing of the truce between the city of Prague and the Royal Castle so hard, in particular the decision to return the Vysherad to the Royalists. He had taken that castle, he understood its strategic importance and he knew what a foolish decision the truce had been. And like so many other disaffected radical Hussites, he left the city.

Passing through the gates of Prague he had once defended and where he once had a handsome house and position at court, he headed to one of the five cities the radical Hussites had declared the safe haven in times of the apocalypse. He went to Pilsen, the city of the sun where he arrived in the middle of November.

He had been invited to Pilsen by Wenceslas Koranda, a Hussite preacher who had already established himself as one of the leaders of the more extreme branch of the Hussites. Koranda was one of the most vocal Adventists who had predicted the second coming of Christ for mid-February 1420 and had urged the faithful to take refuge in one of the five cities.

After Koranda and Zizka had arrived, Pilsen began to fill up with those seeking safety from the Day of Wrath and/or protection from the brutal persecution by the Catholics that was kicking off.

As these people arrived, the demographics of Pilsen changed. Initially a city dominated by Hussite moderates, the radicals took up more and more space. That gave Wenceslaus Koranda the room to imprint more and more of his ideas on to the cityscape. He started with stripping the churches of their idolatry images before moving on to the destruction of the monasteries. The monks and the inhabitants unwilling to fall in line were expelled. And from there he whipped up the crowd with fear of the imminent Second Coming, which got ever more aggressive as news of the massacres at Kutna Hora spread.

I have by the way found another source for these events we discussed last week. A letter written by the magistrates of Prague to the city of Venice in July 1420 highlights both the incredible cruelty and the involvement of the largely German population. The leader of the atrocities was a certain Nicholas of Jemniste. Jemniste had initially been sympathetic and had warned Jan Hus against going to Constance, but he ended up a fanatic anti-Hussite. He is supposed to have devised the murder by mineshaft we discussed last week, earning him the nickname “the fierce”.

Naturally, Pilsen refused to sign up to the truce with the royalists. The government in Prague sent troops to bring Pilsen to heel. Initially this was a small army recruited mainly from the local nobility. They were unable to surround the city completely. Instead, they ran a campaign of destruction of neighbouring fields and villages, thereby reducing the availability of foodstuff in the overcrowded city.

Up until now the Taborites had been a peaceful lot, except for the destruction of churches and monasteries. Their whole ethos was to replicate the lives of the apostles who had spent their time preaching and living a communal life. But now that the armies of the enemy had gathered, the question is whether they were allowed to defend themselves. Zizka and his fellow commanders had already used military force in Prague, but the question was whether the faithful and even the priests could join them in this fight. After all the apostles had accepted martyrdom without resisting and does that not mean they should too? Zizka and his fellow commanders put this question to the masters of the university in Prague. And the masters concluded that it was appropriate for the laity to use violence in defence of their faith but reiterated the prohibition for priests to carry swords. That is often seen as the moment when Koronda and Zizka began to fall out, something that will be relevant later.

For now, the defence of the city was priority number 1. The small contingents of royalists roaming the countryside were clearly just the advance guard of a much larger army that would be sent against Pilsen. Zizka as captain of the city was in charge of defence. We know little of the early skirmishes in that period except for one significant event.

Sometime in December Zizka had made a sortie to take a small royalist fort at Nekmer, a few miles from the city. What he did not know was that this had been a trap, set up by the royalist commander. As Zizka arrived, he suddenly faced up against the entirety of the enemy. forces, made up of dozens maybe a hundreds of knights, all in shining armour confident in the knowledge that nothing could resist their charge.

Zizka, it is said, had just a small force of men, not all of them trained soldiers, a few guns and seven wagons. As far as we know this was the moment when he first deployed the technique that would later make him the greatest military tactician of his day.

He ordered the wagons to form a circle on top of a hill and placed the canons in the middle. As the knights attacked they were met with canon fire that could penetrate their armour. And even if they were willing to dodge the shrapnel, they found their progress barred by the heavy wagons. The defenders meanwhile stayed behind in the safety of their mobile castle, taking shots at the enemy out in the open, or hitting them with their flails. This kind of warfare did not require years of training the knights went through. All you had to do was to be mad enough to handle one of these early guns that were almost as likely to explode in your hands than to send a projectile and to hold still whilst the stampede of armoured riders was coming at you. And if you believe that the End of Days was coming anyway, that was not quite as difficult as it sounds.

This tactic prove extremely effective against medieval knights in this and many later encounters. The royalists fled the field of battle and a new form of warfare was born.

But before this new model could be deployed successfully and at scale, Zizka and his men had to deal with a much, much larger royalist army that now invested the city of Pilsen. If that was pretty bad, what had made their position inside the city even more untenable was that February 14^th had passed as just another uneventful Saturday. Instead of finding quote “all the others dead, with their noses sticking up in the air”. Instead the royalists were putting up their noses at those who quote “had been deceived in such an ugly way”.

The garrison of Pilsen was quickly running out of food, the population grew hostile and the royalist army outside the gates was growing by the day. It was time to go.

There was one silver lining. The commander of the royalist army was Wenceslaus of Duba, the Bohemian nobleman who had accompanied Jan Hus to Constance and had stood by his side until the end. Duba may not have been a full blow Hussite, but he was definitely no catholic fanatic. He offered Zizka and his fellow commanders an honourable surrender. If they gave up, they could leave the city with their camp followers and their weapons. Utraquist communion would be allowed for those citizens of Pilsen who desired it without punishment or molestation.

Jan Zizka took the deal and on March 22^nd , 1420 a small troop of probably 400 armed men accompanied by women and children and now 12 wagons left the city of Pilsen. Though they had been promised safe passage, they soon found themselves under attack from a much larger force of 2,000, most of them armoured riders, commanded by some of the grandest barons of the realm. One had been in charge at the previous encounter and another was Nicholas of Jemniste, the cruel master of Kutna Hora. And again the wagons proved to be their salvation. This time the terrain was much less advantageous. The enemy attacked when his group was crossing a river. There was no chance for them to set up a defensible position on a hill. But Zizka spotted a number of fishponds nearby. That is where he guided the wagons, forming a circle which incorporated the ponds. This time the royalists were not so easily surprised by Zizka’s tactics. Instead of mounting rolling charges one after the other, the knights dismounted and fought their way hand to hand towards the Wagenburg. At one time they nearly succeeded in breaching the line of wagons, destroying two or three of them. But by then the battle had lasted for several hours and night fell. The royalists lines became muddled and ultimately so confounded that they could no longer distinguish friend from foe. Having beaten each other over the head a couple of time, they realised that this was not going to work out and retreated. Jan Zizka and his ragtag band of a few professional soldiers but mostly badly armed peasants had again defeated a much superior and much better equipped force.

On March 25^th, 1420 they reached their destination, a place that was once called Hradiste and where their religious brethren were building a whole new city, a city they called Mt. Tabor and that would become the epicentre of radical Hussitism, giving it its name, the Taborites.

I would love to go on now and talk for another 45 minutes about Mount Tabor, the people who congregated there, what they believed and how they became the most powerful political and military machine of Bohemia, but we have already been going for more than 35 minutes. And that is enough for all of us. So Mount Tabor will have to wait until Next week. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime, just a quick hint, if you want to support the show go to historyofthegermans.com/support and become an imperial knight, a peer of the realm or even a Prince Elector for the equivalent of one, two or four cappuccinos a month. Who else can offer such elevated status?

Episode 176 – A Great Idiot of History?

by History of the Germans Podcast on 9th January 202517th December 2025

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.

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.

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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.

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.

Bohemian Protest on Display | Rare Books & Manuscripts

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 14^th 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 28^th 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 25^th 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 25^th, 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 4^th, 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 4^th and 5^th. On November 13^th 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 12^th 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 10^th 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

Episode 175 – Death and Defenestration

by History of the Germans Podcast on 1st January 202517th December 2025

The Hussite revolution Part 1

“Then on September 2 of the same year, marquises, barons, nobles, and other high-ranking persons of the kingdom of Bohemia and the margraviate of Moravia , [..], wrote letters under their own seals to the council of Constance for the unjust and unlawful sentencing to death of master Jan Hus, [..]. They claimed that the council had condemned him as an unrepentant heretic at the accusations, slanders and instigations of the mortal enemies [..] of the Bohemian kingdom [..], despite [..] not having proven against him any errors or heresies; and that, having condemned him, they punished him with a most harsh and shameful death, to the undying infamy and disgrace of the most Christian Czech kingdom [..].

[..] whoever, no matter what status, eminence or title, no matter his condition, position or professed religiosity, had said or claimed, [..] that the alleged errors and heresies had evolved in the kingdom of Bohemia [..] was lying, and [..] was a scoundrel, villain and a most perfidious traitor [..] and [..] such a man was himself a most pernicious heretic and son of all malice and depravity, and even of the devil, who is a liar and the father of lies” end quote.

That letter, complete with 425 seals of many of the great nobles of Bohemia arrived in Constance in the autumn of 1415. And, did it change the attitude of the great princes of the church? Was there room for reconciliation between the reformers in Prague and those in Constance? Let’s find out.

And from that the Bohemians concluded that there had been foul play. Lawrence of Brezowa summarized the view in Prague as follows: quote “Then on Saturday,[..], 6 July, Master Jan Hus, the scholarly bachelor of Holy Scripture, a man of shining virtue in life and morality and a faithful preacher of the gospel was sentenced to death and unjustly vilified by the Council of Constance. This was based upon the false testimony of the witnesses and the relentless instigations of master Štěpán z Pálče, doctor of Holy Scriptures and Michael de Causis, parish priest of St. Voijtech,[..] representing the Czech clergy and the influence of king Sigismund. This was done despite the fact that he was not given a proper hearing in which to prove his innocence”

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Ep. 175 – Death and Defenestration; the Hussite Revolt

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 175 – Death and Defenestration, the Hussite Revolt, also episode 12 of Season 8 “The Reformation before the Reformation”.

But before we start some Christmas related things. Yes, I did get some lovely presents and my family was most grateful for me being in for Yuletide rather than out there in the early 15^th century. And even happier that I did not sing. I hope I left you in good hands. If you have missed David Crowther’s episode on John Wycliffe, have a quick listen, I very much enjoyed it.

But I have not been completely idle. I have given the website some much needed TLC. It should be quicker and better organised than before. And I have found a solution to the Patreon issue. Just to say upfront, there is nothing wrong with Patreon itself just with the Apple surcharge of 30%. So if you are with Patreon at the moment or you prefer going to Patreon, nothing will change, just make sure when you sign up not to do it on the Patreon app.

But to future proof the system I have created a whole new membership site at historyofthegermans.com/support. You can sign up for membership there or you can make a one-time donation. All that goes to via Stripe, the ecommerce platform millions of other online businesses use and which crucially does not direct you to an app. The membership offer includes the existing bonus episodes and a member chat room which may take some time to kick off. I will however try to do some membership events in the new year which all members, those on Patreon and those on the website will be invited to. So, I hope you will join us at historyofthegermans.com/support as Alexander M., Klaus, Morten P., Justin B., Dr. Norbert K. and Thomas V. who have already done.

Bohemian Protest on Display | Rare Books & Manuscripts

To resume our story, let’s just recap what happened in June/July 1415 in Constance. The great gathering of 10s of thousands from magnificent bishops to modest buglers had heard the arguments of Jan Hus, master of the university of Prague and preacher at the Bethlehem chapel, and dismissed them. His ideas about who was and who wasn’t a member of the church, the role of the pope and the superiority of scripture over canon law had been declared heretic and he himself was condemned to be burned at the stake, and his remains, even his clothes were all turned to ash and thrown in the Rhine river.

The Bohemians had already protested against the treatment of Jan Hus when he was arrested and anger was brewing throughout his trial. Hus hadn’t come to Constance on his own. Several noblemen, including the brave knight John of Chlum had come along to support him. One these man, Petr Mladenovics returned to Prague shortly after the trial and recounted the proceedings in every little detail, complete with copies of letters and other documents. And from that the Bohemians concluded that there had been foul play. Lawrence of Brezowa summarized the view in Prague as follows: quote “Then on Saturday,[..], 6 July, Master Jan Hus, the scholarly bachelor of Holy Scripture, a man of shining virtue in life and morality and a faithful preacher of the gospel was sentenced to death and unjustly vilified by the Council of Constance. This was based upon the false testimony of the witnesses and the relentless instigations of master Štěpán z Pálče, doctor of Holy Scriptures and Michael de Causis, parish priest of St. Voijtech,[..] representing the Czech clergy and the influence of king Sigismund. This was done despite the fact that he was not given a proper hearing in which to prove his innocence” end quote.

The villains were hence the “despicable clergy” of Bohemia, emperor Sigismund and the council as a whole that, as he wrote further down, had accepted bribes to bring about the conviction of this saintly man.

So on September 2, 1415, the nobles of Bohemia wrote the letter of protest to the Council of Constance I quoted at the top of this episode. A copy of this Bohemian Protest is now preserved at the university of Edinburgh. I put a link in the show notes so you can take a look because it is quite an unusual object. The manuscript has attached over 100 wax seals of every conceivable major Bohemian family making the whole thing look like a bibliographic medusa.

And its content was equally unusual. These noblemen did not only blame dark forces from within Bohemia for the unjust and unlawful sentencing, but accused the Council of a miscarriage of justice. Such an accusation was again, within the context of the medieval church, heretic. It implied the council had erred when convicting Jan Hus, and a general council of the church was supposed to be infallible.

Such an act of defiance was dangerous. The church had already been concerned that Bohemia had become a center of dissent, or to say it in their terms, a nest of heretics. By openly siding with the convicted heretic Jan Hus, the Bohemian elites only confirmed the suspicion, that Hus was not a sole actor but part of a wider movement.

This assessment was – as we know – not wrong. Bohemia had indeed become a place where controversial ideas about the role of pope and clergy were circulating, where the king, his wife and many of the senior nobles, even members of the senior clergy were sympathetic to a fundamental reform of the ecclesiastical organization.

So the Council was not unaware of the situation in Bohemia when it decided its next steps, it was just unable to predict the consequences of its actions.

On September 8, six days after the Bohemian protest, the council began the trial of Jerome of Prague, another master of the university and follower of Jan Hus. Jerome was less sure of his convictions and had tried to flee after Hus had been arrested and even recanted. But when it became clear he would never be released from prison, despite his recantation, his resolve stiffened, and he too was burned at the stake.

This created a second martyr for the cause of the Bohemian reform. Then and now martyrs, witnesses for the faith, are great rallying points. They turn from actual human beings with their own thoughts, ideas and contradictions into symbols, banners that can be raised on barricades and can be flown before armies. The image of Jan Hus burning at the stake was replicated over and over in manuscripts and leaflets, distributed all across Bohemia. If you go to the great square in the Old Town you see the enormous Jan Hus Memorial, erected in 1915 as a message of defiance against the Habsburg regime. And it remained a symbol of resistance, most recently when sitting at the feet of Jan Hus was a way to express opposition to the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. In 1985 I seem to have inadvertently joined the protest when I sat down below Jan Hus to smoke a cigarette and was chased away by police…so just for you kids out there, do not smoke, it is dangerous.

But Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague weren’t the only emblems of what was to unfold. Completely separately from the reformer’s ideas about church reform, the theologians in Prague, led by a man the Germans call Jacob of Mies and the Czechs call Jakoubek ze Stříbra [Stibro]. Apologies for my atrocious pronunciation, I am doing my best finding pronunciation guides on the internet, but I seemingly get that wrong at times. So forgive me, this is not meant as a sign of disrespect, just a case of a very difficult language.

Jakoubek of Stibro was a fellow master at the university of Prague and preacher at the church of St. Michael. He too had been heavily influenced by Wycliffe, but even more by the previous generation of Bohemian reformers, by Jan Milic and Matthew of Janow. This previous generation had emphasised the values of the early Christian church when preachers had been poor and solely dedicated to the spiritual side of things. For them and for Jakoubek of Stibro, the downfall of the church began with Gregory VII and his ambition to create a politically powerful, an imperial church that meddled in worldly affair. And whilst Jan Hus and other reformers focused on the role of the clergy or the ostentatious wealth of the popes and cardinals, Stibro zoomed in on something that had been a marginal topic so far, the offer of the eucharist in both forms, as bread and wine.

Stibro went back to scripture and read that Jesus offered both bread and wine to his disciples, and said, „do this in remembrance of me“. He could not find a passage where it said, give the congregation only the bread and reserve the wine for the priests who really appreciate it. For Stibro, taking the eucharist in both forms, sub utraque specie was the most important sacrament. He stated that it was not just a right of the laity to receive it, but an obligation to do so. This became known as Utraquism. U-T-R_A_Q_U_I_S_M, a word we will hear a lot more of.

Jakoubek’s proposal was rapidly picked up by the other reformers in Prague who already believed the common people should take communion more often as a way to bring more spiritual goodness into the world. And claiming the corrupt and money-grabbing clergy had deprived the people of the sacrament of the eucharist just hit the spot. Generally speaking, people do not tend to take up pitchforks to defend a complex point of ecclesiology. But if you tell them they had a right to the wine when St. Peter was in charge and that nowadays the crooked priests withhold it from them on the orders of popes dripping in gold, now that is a good enough reason to get up on the barricades.

In 1414 there had not yet been a need to turn ploughshares into swords in order to partake in the bread and wine, since the reform preachers in Prague’s New Town, in the Bethlehem Chapel and elsewhere were liberally offering the eucharist sub utraque specie.

And that could have easily continued without creating much unrest, had it not been for the debate it sparked at the Council of Constance. The offer of bread and wine had so far not really been a major theological issue. In fact until the 12^th century the catholic church did habitually offer it at mass and pope Gelasius I in the 5^th century had prescribed it as part of the standard liturgy. It was mainly for practical reasons that the catholic church changed tack on the matter and reserved the chalice, the wine, to the priests.

So the council could easily have decided that, yeah, if the churches in Prague want to offer the wine to the laity, just go ahead. And that would have dramatically reduced tensions. But they did not. Instead, on 15^th of June, a week after the hearings of Jan Hus, but before he was burned at the stake, the council of Constance decided that quote “although this sacrament was received by the faithful under both kinds in the early church, nevertheless later it was received under both kinds only by those confecting it, and by the laity only under the form of bread.[..] and since this custom was introduced for good reasons by the church and holy fathers, and has been observed for a very long time, it should be held as a law which nobody may repudiate or alter at will without the church’s permission. [..] Those who stubbornly assert the opposite of the aforesaid are to be confined as heretics and severely punished by the local bishops or their officials [..]” end quote.

That was not exactly the smartest available move. Stating that, yes, originally there was bred and wine, but now we have been cutting you guys off the drink for so long, it is now the law, was a brilliant way of saying, we the church know better than Jesus himself. It was oil on the fire. Even Jan Hus, who had been quite sceptical about Utraquism, switched over to Jakoubek’s position.

We now have a Bohemian population that was enraged by what they saw as the unlawful burning of Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague and had just received confirmation that the Council of Constance was indeed rating canon law, even just established practice above scripture. Whatever these guys were doing, they were not helping to pave the way into the afterlife.

Hence in Prague more and more parishioners moved across to those churches where the priests were offering both bread and wine. The chalice became the instantly visible demarcation line between the old school followers of the papal and conciliar doctrine and the group of reformers who were demanding change.

If you were the archbishop of Prague in 1415 you would probably consider a change in approach. Playing hardball with these reformer guys is clearly not working. You would write to the cardinals and bishops in Constance and suggest they tone it down a little.

Ahh – no. For the senior clergy assembled in Southern Germany, Prague was just a nest of heretics that needed to be exterminated. They ordered the archbishop to enforce an interdict on the city of Prague. All church services had to cease, no more sacraments were to be dispensed, the dying weren’t given the last rites, couples weren’t able to get married and nobody heard their confession.

Or that is what the church overlords wanted to happen. But that is not what did happen. The reform oriented priests in Prague who were already branded heretics for dispensing the bread and wine, for saying out loud that Jan Hus had been a god fearing man and for reading and sharing the books of John Wycliff, they did not care if “breaking the interdict” was added to the charge sheet. They kept their churches and chapels open. And since the catholic priests kept their places of worship closed, more and more citizens of Prague went to what we can now call Hussite churches to get married, baptise their children and receiving the eucharist.

There was little the archbishop was prepared to do to stop it. Konrad von Vechta, the prelate in question, had not bought the post in order to end his days dangling from a lamppost, so he just pretended that none of these things were happening. And as for the king, that king was Wenceslaus IV, the lazy. All throughout the 56 years o his life Wenceslaus had never been decisive or even moderately competent. Part of that was personality, but a 35 year career as a full-blown alcoholic hadn’t helped. He was going round in a perennial hate loop between his brother Sigismund, his overbearing barons, the corrupt clergy and his rebellious subjects. The chances that he would do anything other than having wild tantrums followed by heavy drinking sessions were slim. His wife, Sophie of Bavaria was a much more capable monarch. She understood the mood in Bohemia and sympathised with the Hussites all along.

And so did the majority of the King’s advisers and the barons who held the great offices of state. Many of these had signed the Bohemian protest letter from September 1415 and provided the military cover for the reforms that were now under way.

So, nobody did anything to stop the Hussites from building up a full scale new church organisation in Bohemia. To cover their tracks the king and the archbishop sent reassuring messages to Constance saying, all is going swimmingly, there is nothing to see here.

For the following 3 years, from 1416 to 1419 Bohemia shifted further and further towards the Hussite church. Though the interdict was lifted after a year, most parishioners had gotten used to the utraquist communion. They also enjoyed hearing the sermon in Czech, even hearing some of the gospel being translated so that for the first time they could actually understand what their religion was really about. They also found that many of the Hussite priests took their job seriously, cared about their parishioners and were less preoccupied with money, clothes and the company of loose women.

I do not know whether you have listened to Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast but if you have, the next step in the process will sound familiar to you.

Jan Hus, as we discussed at some length had gone to Constance because he believed that there was at least a tiny chance that he could convince the council of his interpretation of the Holy Scripture. To him it was a theological question whether a corrupt pope had power over the faithful, not a political one. Hence he saw a path to reform that was based on cooperation and compromise with the papacy.

But the cardinals, bishops and doctors of Constance literally burned that bridge down and by condemning utraquist communion deepened the chasm even further. At which point the Prague reformers no longer saw a reason to take the catholic views into account at all. They were heretics whatever they did, So they may as well go the whole hog. They went looking for guidance in the bible itself. And in doing so they found that there was a whole lot of stuff in the church that wasn’t in the bible, such as confession, penance, monks, bishops, popes, indulgences, etc., etc., pp. Meanwhile there was a lot of stuff in the bible that as not a priority in the Avignon church, like blessed are the poor, turn the other cheek,love thy neighbour, though shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, wife, manservant, maidservant, ox, ass, nor anything that is thy neighbours, and so forth and so forth.

The downside of this freeing of the spirits was that it led to the inevitable splintering of the movement into moderates and radicals, and last week’s radicals or tomorrow’s moderates.

One of the more radical demands was the eucharist in both forms for children, i.e., giving not just adults, but children, even babies the sacramental wine. It makes sense if you believe it is a prerequisite to salvation, but not so much if you want your children to grow up without brain damage. Discuss!

And not only did the movement develop ever more radical ideas, it also spread outside Prague. And there is a genuine oddity about the Hussite revolt that makes it quite fundamentally different from most revolutions I can think of. Usually the epicentre of the most radical thought is in the big cities, whilst the countryside tends to be more conservative. Think of the Vendee during the French Revolution or the Russian peasants initial response to the October Revolution. Even in the American revolution the picture was quite mixed. In Bohemia the rural population embraced these new ideas enthusiastically and even went far beyond where the masters of Prague University were prepared to go.

There is a huge debate about why that was the case. In part it may have to do with the Bohemian barons many of whom had embraced the Hussite movement and provided some aircover for dissenters. The Marxist-Leninists pointed to the exploitation of the peasant population as a driver of radicalisation. One of the more intriguing ideas is that the Bohemian countryside might have been a refuge of the Waldensians. The Waldensians were the followers of Peter Waldo, a former merchant from Lyon who turned preacher in around 1100. What exactly they believed we will never know since like in the case of the Cathars, all documentary evidence if from the Catholic church who were determined to exterminate them. But given the complaints of heretic movements since time immemorial go along similar lines, we can assume they too believed that one should return to the text of the bible, that the church organisation was profoundly corrupt and much of its teachings, rituals and requirements were made up. The theory goes that some Waldensians had fled to Bohemia to escape persecution where their ideas spread in secret amongst the rural population until developments in Prague made them come out of hiding.

Maybe that was true, or maybe they were just simply better educated and more open minded in matters of religion than peasants had been elsewhere.

So out in the provinces farmers, serfs, farmhands and their wives and daughters but also nobles and artisans came together to pray, not inside a church but in private houses, barns or even under the open sky. Their priests went around wearing the same clothes as their flock. They rejected all these plush vestments and sacramental objects, the silver chalices and gold reliquaries as vain. Heavily decorated altars weren’t necessary. A priest could say mass on a table, on top of a cask or even just on the ground. Bishops they called locusts and coxcombs, the stone churches a den of thieves and concubines and that it was better to gamble their money away on dice than offer it to the evil prelates.

As the congregations grew, the ceremonies could no longer be held in private houses or barns. They gathered on the top of hills and mountains to hear the sermon and celebrate mass and received eucharists in both forms, everyone from babies to grandmas.

And they weren’t shy to let actions follow their words. They refused to buy the indulgences, to pay the tithes and dozens of ecclesiastical fees and charges. Things then tipped over into violence. Prelates houses were looted, the vicars and the members of their household thrown out onto the street, often naked and pelted with manure.

The same happened in Prague, where we hear of mobs breaking into churches, pushing out the catholic preachers and destroying the images. Yes Iconoclasm was also on the rise.

Whilst all this is happening, the city is shaken by raids on prelates and the hills are alive with the sound of sermons, the political arm of the movement, led by progressive Bohemian barons and many of the great officeholders of the state, organised into the Hussite League. The Hussite League swore to protect the rights of preachers to perform services freely, only supervised by their local bishops. In particular they are not to be made subject to foreign jurisdiction, namely papal or imperial. Interdicts and other punishments are only permitted when based on scripture as determined by the university of Prague.

Bohemia is about to shake off even the semblance of papal and imperial oversight. In the meantime, the council of Constance had run its course and put an end to the Schism with the election of pope Martin V. Church reform both as the Hussites would have understood it as well as the distributional flavour the council itself preferred was postponed until the next council which would not really get going for another 15 years. The pope was hence back in charge of church affairs as if nothing had happened and one of the things Martin V thought needed to happen was to stamp out this nest of heretics on the eastern border of the Empire. He tasked two men with this, Sigismund, the king of the Romans and heir of the Bohemian kingdom and Jan Železný (Schelesni), the bishop of Litomyšl, known as “the iron”.

Sigismund and the iron man did get to work unencumbered by even the slightest understanding of the situation in Bohemia. They leant super hard on Sigismund’ brother Wenceslaus, who was still at least formally the king of Bohemia though in actual fact he did whatever the last person he met had told him to do.

Sigismund and Iron man told him to implement 22 specific measures, intended to bring everything back to where it stood before even the first whiff of reform had been in the air. the churches were to be returned to its former priests, church discipline reestablished, tithes and other ecclesiastical taxes to be paid again and naturally an end to the heretic practice of offering the eucharist in both forms. To round it up, every preacher was asked to publicly declare Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague pernicious heretics who got what they deserved. Ah, and Bethlehem chapel was to be torn down.

Wenceslaus even in his drunken haze realised that this would be disastrous. He pleaded with his brother to take a more conciliatory approach to which Sigismund responded with an open letter threatening him with excommunication and the imperial ban, which would have meant Wenceslaus would lose his crown. So he caved and he issued the edicts.

Sigismund and the iron bishop Železný (Schelesni) were not completely insane though. They did have some allies in Prague. A number of the Bohemian barons had either remained good Catholics throughout or found themselves shifted to the right not by moving themselves but by the Hussite movement shifting left at pace. The other group that sided with the Catholics were the class of German-speaking merchants and bankers. Though many of them believed church reforms were overdue and they had listened to sermons of Jan Milic and Jan Hus, they could not afford to be branded heretics. Their business was long distance trade and as long as their counterparts in Nurnberg, Augsburg, Vienna, Krakow and the Hanse cities remained catholic, they would risk their valuable networks by joining the Hussites.

These allies were still a minority, but a powerful one which the papacy believed could together with the might of an imperial army turn the clock back.

Initially things went alright. Wenceslaus removed Hussite advisors and officials from his court and the city councils, replacing them with catholic-leaning ones. He expelled Hussite priests from churches restoring them to their previous occupants. The inquisition moved in and hunted down heretics in Prague as well as in the countryside.

Until in the summer of 1419 events unfolded that would change the course of Bohemian and German history for good.

The first of these events was a gathering of allegedly 40,000 worshippers near the castle of Bechyne, halfway between Prague and Vienna. These people had come from all over Bohemia, fleeing the inquisition and willing to resist. They held a huge open air mass with sermons in Czech and the eucharist in the Utraquist manner. The priests were split into three groups, one preaching all day from morning to nightfall, another third was hearing auricular confession, again, all day long and the last third gave communion. And they had moved on ideologically as well. Again our chronicler reports that quote “There all called each other brother and sister, and the rich divided the food that they had prepared for themselves with the poor.” and “the multitude of them believed were of one heart and one soul; [..] they had all things in common [..] and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need” end quote. This was a deliberate refashioning of the communism of the primitive church of the apostles, a million miles away from the reality of the late medieval church.

The sincerity and determination these men and women on Mount Tabor was becoming very disconcerting for the conservatives in Prague, and even for relative moderates.

But they weren’t given much time to ponder this, because 8 days later, on July 30^th one of the more radical Hussite preachers, Jan Zelivski, led a procession through the streets of Prague. He preached a sermon outside the church of St. Stephens on Ezejiel 6:3-5 “Behold I, even I, will bring down the sword upon you and will destroy your high places, And your Alters shall be desolate , and your images will be broken; and I will cast down your slain men before your idols” andthen Jermiah 14:13 and the people shall be cast down into the street”. He would later say that he never intended what happened afterward nor had he called on the crowd to do it. These wee jus randomly chosen sections of the bible…

After the crowd had entered and ransacked the church of St. Stephen they moved down the enormous Charles square to the Town hall of Prague New Town. At the time Prague was comprised of four separate independent cities, the Old Town, the lesser Town on the other side of the Vltava, the royal castle district and the New Town. Each had their own town hall. That of the new town stood and stands at the North Eastern corner of Charles Square.

The reason they went to the Town Hall was to demand the release of some Hussites who had been apprehended during street violence the day before. It was a Sunday and under normal circumstances the Town Hall would have been empty. But that day it wasn’t. The new burgomaster and 12 of his council members, all recently appointed good Catholics, had gathered at the hall to plan how they would prevent the procession to turn into a massive street fight. It seems they had not come up with a good idea, because by 09:45 they were surrounded by Hussites loudly demanding the release of the prisoners. Messages had been sent to the royal castle demanding reinforcements which is why the city magistrates felt confident. Hey refused the release and according to some accounts mocked the Hussites, even throw stones at the monstrance that the preacher Zelivski was holding up.

The crowd first became restless and then as time went by and no prisoners were forthcoming, they became angry, very angry. Meanwhile the soldiers from the castle were slow in showing up. The Burgomaster and his councillors grew anxious as the pounding on the doors below became louder and louder, then suddenly quiet as the attackers applied levers followed by a crashing sound as the door broke out of its hinges. Dozens, then hundreds of violently angry citizens of Prague as well as refugees from persecution across Bohemia stormed the council chamber. Not even giving the Royal councillors the chance to speak they opened the windows and threw them down onto the street. The council chamber was on the second floor, so most of them were dead or unconscious when they landed. These were the lucky ones. They did not get to notice as the crowd tore them limb from limb, undoubtably shouting something about god’s will whilst Zelivski held the monstrance above their heads.

When the 300 soldiers from the castle finally got to the new Town it was occupied by the followers of Jan Zelivski. A militia had been formed. All citizens had been asked to come to the town hall and commit to the Utraquist cause, those who refused fled. A new city council was established and the town hall itself and houses nearby were fortified. The soldiers returned to their king to report that the Revolution had begun and taken half of the capital of Bohemia.

One man was amongst the crow, had probably led the men into the town hall, a man called Jan Zizka, a man who will make sure that this medieval storm of the Bastille did not become just another urban revolt as they were taking place around the same time in dozens of cities across the empire, in Flanders, Paris and England. But that is a story for another time, next time to be precise. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime if you want to check out my brand new membership website, go to historyofthegermans.com/support.

Episode 174 – The Trial of Jan Hus

by History of the Germans Podcast on 13th December 202417th December 2025

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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Ep. 174 – The Trial of Jan Hus – Council of Constance Part 4

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”.

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 14^th 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 14^th 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 14^th 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 1/3^rd 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 15^th 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 3^rd 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 8^th, 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 5^th, 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.

In the meantime, if you feel compelled to make a contribution to the History of the Germans, you can do so our website, historyofthegermans.com/support.

Episode 173 – Ending the Schism

by History of the Germans Podcast on 5th December 202417th December 2025

The Council of Constance – part 3

We have talked about church reform for almost four years, the council of Constance talked about church reform for about the same amount of time and Luther will talk and write about church reform until he did no longer believe that the church could be reformed.

But what is church reform. Or more specifically, what did the delegates in Constance mean when they debated church reform, why did they fail to implement much even though they held off electing a pope and the voting system was set up to favour of the national churches and against central papal authority.

All this we will discuss in this episode plus we will hear some angelic voices that made even the most hardnosed church politician kneel in prayer.

Chapters:

00:16 – The Dawn of the Reformation
07:28 – Reforming the Church: Key Areas of Discussion
11:25 – The Council of Constance: A Turning Point in Church Authority
19:03 – The Election of a New Pope
29:59 – The Rise and Fall of the Council of Basel

Choir music by Schola Sancte Scholasticae and St. Cecilia’s Abbey, UK: Veni Creator Spiritus | Gregorian Chant Hymns

As always:

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Ep. 173 – The End of the Schism – Council of Constance Part 3

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and Welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 173 – The Council of Constance Part 3 – the end of the schism, also episode 10 of season 9 The Reformation before the Reformation

All this we will discuss in this episode plus we will hear some angelic voices that made even the most hardnosed church politician kneel in prayer.

Before we start the usual thank yous. I will be brief because Christmas is coming up and all you need to do is tell your oved ones what you really, really want is two things, first an advertising free podcast and second, another year without Dirk singing Oh Tannenbaum. And we should all be eternally grateful to William M. , Jen, Philipp H., Tom C., Linus di P. and Beau W. who are so valiantly protecting us against these evils.

And with that, back to the show

The Stalemate at Constance: Why the Council Delayed Electing a Pope

Last week we talked about what the 20 to 30,000 delegates at the General council of the church at Constance did once they realised they would be marooned in cramped bedsits in a small German town for the foreseeable future. The week before we discussed why they had come there in the first place, and this week we will discuss why they stayed there for so long.

Because that seems at first glance unnecessary. The council’s work could have wrapped up quickly, with delegates returning home after having resolved the most pressing disputes. Just look at the timeline.

The council started in November 1414 and 10 months later by the end September 1415 one of the competing popes was deposed, another one had retired and the third one had made clear he would never resign. The natural next step would the have been to depose the last holdout and then elect a new pope, one that would be universally recognised and bring the Great Western Schism to its much desired end. But they did not do that before late autumn 1417, more than 2 years after the failed meeting of Perpignan.

For all these two years, there was no widely recognised pope. So why leave the church without a lead? This was still the Middle Ages and leaving a major centre of power, a kingdom, a principality or major bishopric without its head was a deeply worrying state of affairs. These hierarchical institutions needed someone at the top who made all the decisions, otherwise they simply did not work.

If the General Council left the Holy Mother church rudderless for such a long time, they needed a good reason to do that, and that reason was that they wanted to kick off a long overdue reform of the church.

Not that I am counting, but the word reform has appeared 322 times in the show so far and even that barely does justice to its importance. It is not unreasonable to say that for the five hundred years before 1400, whoever controlled the process of church reform controlled western Europe.

From Charlemagne to Henry III it was the emperors who led efforts to bring the church closer to the apostolic ideal. The people expected their anointed ruler not just to provide peace and justice but also to ensure they would receive instruction and sacraments from competent and viable intermediaries.

And the early emperors did exactly that. Charlemagne required the clergy to be literate and started a whole industry of book production. Otto III displayed piety on a level normally reserved to actual saints and Henry II cleaned up misbehaviour in monasteries. And these efforts converted into tangible political power in two ways.

For one was the church infrastructure became the main pillar of imperial administration, known as the Imperial church system. And the other was simply the prestige and authority that came with the role as the vicar of Christ, a title they – by the way- used for themselves before the popes nicked it.

And we have seen what happened once the lead in church reform shifted to the medieval reform popes, the Leo IXs and Gregory VIIs. Imperial power was eroded and eventually wiped out as the papacy established itself as the supreme moral authority in Christendom and then leveraged the internal tensions in the empire and the conflict with the Italian communes into temporal power, becoming the Imperial Papacy of Innocent III in the process..

And then we saw the swing back when the papacy moved to Avignon and focused less on dispensing divine grace and more on collecting cold hard cash. Abandoning even the pretense of following in the footsteps of the apostles and replacing it with aggressive money-grabbing and interference in the local church, eroded the pope’s moral authority.

Once nobody expected the papal administration to sort things out any more, emperor Ludwig the Bavarian could safely ignore excommunications and papal interdicts raining down from Avignon. He passed the declaration of Rhense which paved the way for full emancipation from papal oversight that was finally achieved through the Golden Bull of 1356. Episodes 150, 151 and 160 if you want to double check.

Before you think caring so much about the afterlife and the state of the church was just one of those weird medieval things, remember that christianity was not just core to the culture of the times, it was the culture. Living in a world dominated by culture wars as we do now, we should not be surprised that whoever leads the debate on the most important spiritual and cultural norms of a society was also in charge politically.

This long winded story will hopefully explain why there was no papal election for two years. Because as long as there was no pope, the sole authority in charge of church reform was the general council. And if control of church reform meant political control over western Europe, well, who would want to give that up.

The delegates at the council feared that, should they elect a pope, that pope would dissolve the council. And once the pope was back in control, he may or may not continue with the church reform, but would take credit for it either way.

So what areas of much needed reform did the delegates at Constance discuss?

In the HIgh Middle Ages when people talked about church reform they talked about how to make the clergy better intermediaries with the divine.That meant in particular how can we ensure that the vicar knew his bible and wasn’t just telling any old tale. And then it was important that whatever advice was issued from the pulpit was going to help in smoothing the way in the afterlife. And finally the performance of the sacraments had to be effective, the correct liturgy observed and the priest that performed it must not be tainted with sin to an extent that invalidated the act.

If these are the objectives, the important areas to address was first the recruitment of the clergy. It should be on merit and not on nepotism, or worse than that through bribery, the sin of simony. Then it was important that the priest who was selected was actually going to show up for the job rather than send an understudy whilst staying home and collecting the benefice. And third, there had to be standards of behaviour set and adhered to.

By the early 15^th century, the church needed reform across all these dimensions.It is hard to say whether things were much worse than they had been in earlier periods but judging by tales in Chaucer and Boccaccio of monks living the high life and nuns seducing gardeners,at least by now things had deviated sharply for the asceticism of our old not quite friend of the podcast bernard of Clairvaux. And then we hear regularly about archbishops being elected as teenagers and Jan Hus himself admitted that hwt=at he hoped for was a benefice that would pay but not require him to go and do the actual job.

Did the council of constance address these issues? No, not really. They discussed simony in general terms and a ban on concubinage in a bit more detail. This proposed law stated that clergy including nuns and monks could be deprived of their benefices, aka their income, for a total of three months if they continue to openly live with a partner after having received a cessation notice. So that is not a ban on having sexual relations as such, just one on having a lasting attachment. And it required an official notice before the sanction was going to bite, i.e., no notice no salary cut.

What this is really about is to stop the clergy from procreating. Nothing to do with standards of morality but with land, money and power. If priests, bishops and popes had children, even if those were formally illegitimate, their father would still try to pave their way in the world, either into church benefices or temporal positions. And that could create a church aristocracy that would block the path for the second sons of the existing aristocrats. To say it plainly, if the archbishop of Mainz placed his son into pole position to succeed him, the second son of the margrave of Brandenburg could no longer become archbishop. And if he did not become archbishop, what would he do, he would fight his brother over the margraviate. And that would destroy the precarious equilibrium of the empire.

But what the second son of the margrave of Brandenburg gets up to in his bedchamber once he is archbishop – who cares. He never got the job for his piety in the first place.

If they did not discuss real church reform, what did they discuss?

The first complex of issues was about who controlled key appointments in the dioceses and abbeys. The Avignon popes had pulled more and more decision power into the curia. A process that had enraged local cathedral chapters who were used to select their bishops and abbots amongst themselves. They now found themselves saddled with external interlopers with good connections at the papal court.

The second huge topic was the question how much of the income of the local church was to be sent to Rome. In the preceding decades popes had come up with ever more elaborate provisions. For instance, if a seat was vacant, the income was going to Rome, once a new bishop was elected his first year income was going to Rome, additional general taxes were going to Rome. And the papal administration played this system for money. For example they would refused to appoint a successor, thereby extending the period when the seat was vacant, then once someone was appointed and had given up his first year salary, the pope would move him to another seat, creating one vacancy and another first salary obligation in one fell swoop. No wonder the local church grew exasperated and refused to obey, as it did in the german lands pretty much ever since Ludwig the Bavarian

And finally, there was the excessive use of excommunications and interdicts for political and sometimes simply for debt collecting purposes.

What do we conclude from that? Church reform at Constance was not about piety and helping the flock to ascend to heaven, but about controlling the church’s vast resources and political influence.

The delegates at the council were split on all these subjects. On the one hand you have the bishops and abbots representing the interests of the local church against the overbearing central papal administration. On the other side of the debate are the cardinals and the members of the curia, the lawyers and scribes that make up that self-same central administration and whose jobs are on the line.

The princes, the representatives of the European monarchs and the emperor Sigismund himself were backing up the local demands. They had used the weakness of the popes during the schism to establish national churches they could control and were somewhat independent from Rome. The French had already come quite far in the process as had some of the principalities, like for example Bohemia.

So, did any of these so-called church reforms get implemented? The answer to that is – very little. The council could not even pass the watered-down ban on concubinage, let alone any of the far-reaching constraints on papal power.

3. Establishing a constitutional papacy

This failure to pass any of the laws constraining papal authority was surprising given the unique voting system that had been established for the council of Constance.

Council decisions weren’t taken either on the basis of seniority, which would have given the cardinals the lead nor by headcount, which would have given the Italians a majority, but by nations. These nations were designed along the lines of the nations of the medieval universities, i.e., as a mixture of political significance, compass orientation and language.

There were in the end five nations. There was Italica, Gallicana, Germania which included Scandinavia, Poland, Lithauania, Croatia, Hungary and Bohemia, Anglica which was England, Scotland and Ireland and Iberica, which comprised the various Spanish kingdoms and Portugal.

Each of these nations had one vote and the cardinals in aggregate also had only one vote. Add to that that there wasn’t a pope yet, and the supporters of a powerful, centralised papal administration were very much on the back foot.

But still the great decentralisation of the church did not happen. It seems the nations could not agree on a joint position on any of the proposals above. The only thing they could agree on was that they, aka the General church council, should continue to be the supreme authority of the church.

They had made the first point in the decree Haec Sancta in the early days of the council when they moved on John XXIII. In this document the council declared that it derived its authority directly from Christ and was hence the supreme authority of the church able to overrule and even depose popes. And not just heretic popes, but any pope.

The next major decree came out closer to the end, in October 1417. There it stated that “frequent celebration of general councils is the best method of cultivating the vineyard of the Lord Almighty”. Specifically it stipulated that the next council should take place five years after the end of the Council of Constance and should be held in Pavia, the next one after that was to be scheduled five years later, with subsequent councils convened every 10 years. And to avoid the pope wriggling out of it, each subsequent council had to be called a month before the end of the previous one. If the pope refused to set a date or location by that time, the council itself would set such a date. And once a council is called it cannot be cancelled, only moved to a different location should there be war of pestilence.

These decrees turned the papacy from an absolutist monarchy into a constitutional one. The pope and his decisions were now subject to review by the general council and the council could constitute itself even if the pope were to refuse calling it.

Making monarchic rule dependent on the consent of the ruled was very much in line with the spirit of the times.I come back to Marsilius of Padua who had stated this as a god-given fact. And this is also the time when the parliament in england flexed its muscles, the princes from the teutonic knights to the counts of Wurttemberg had to recognise local assembly’s power over taxation and war.

But still, the pope was after all the supreme leader of Christendom and finding him tied down by a gathering of prelates and doctors of theology was a huge change. If that change was to become permanent the council needed to keep the lead in church reform, which as we know is the key to political power.

4. Finally electing a new pope in a demanding voting system

For now what mattered more was that the decree Frequens made this shift in the power balance between pope and council look settled. And since it was settled, the election of a pope would no longer threaten its position or its ability to initiate reform.

As a consequence the mood changed. WIth the risk of a return of the imperial papacy seemingly banished, the delegates could no longer close their ears to the rising chorus of voices demanding the return of the Pontifex Maximus. And maybe the delegates were dreaming of going home too.

By the autumn of 1417, three years after Baldassare Cossa and his umbrella had entered the city, the council agreed to proceed with the election of a new pope.

But what was the procedure for this election going to be? Traditionally a pope was elected by a qualifying two-thirds majority of the cardinals. But that is not the way the council nations would let things play out this time. If they had the right to depose a pope, then they should as well have the right to elect one.

This election was going to be by nations, not by number of cardinals. Which was a logistical challenge. Some of the nations had thousands of delegate members and there was no way they could all discuss and decide on a papal candidate. Electing a pope is difficult at the best of times,but venting the advantages or disadvantages of candidates in an open forum susceptible to interference by the mob was outright impossible. .

So it was decided that each nation was to select six members who would go and join the conclave, representing the main facets of their nation.

Let me give you the names of the 6 representatives of the Germanica Nation because it nicely illustrates how it worked:

There was the archbishop of Riga Johannes Wallenrode. He was a member of the Teutonic Order, had been bishop of Liege before and was originally from Franconia.

The next member was the archbishop of Gniesno, Nicolaus Traba, who led the Polish delegation. This was the delegation that had accused the Teutonic Knights of atrocities and heresy.

The third member was Bishop Simon de Dominici from Trogir in Dalmatia. I could not find out much about him, but given where his bishopric was, he was likely representing the interests of the kingdom of Hungary.

#4, Lambert del Sache was the prior of a Cluniac monastery in what is today Belgium and was a highly regarded theologian.

The fifth member, Konrad Koler von Soest was a professor at the University of Heidelberg and had been involved in the negotiations with Benedict XIII. He had aslo acted as a representative for the Elector Palatinate.

The sixth and last member was Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl, a professor from the other recently founded university in the empire, the university of Vienna. He had been an envoy of the Habsburg duke Albrecht of Austria.

So a fairly mixed bag, linguistically, there were probably three who spoke Middle High German, two French, one Polish and one either Italian or Croatian. Politically they weren’t necessarily aligned, some like the archbishops of Riga and Gniesno were even direct political opponents, only one may be acting on behalf of emperor Sigismund, the rest had primary allegiances to other kings and princes.

Assuming these medieval nations represented the views of a specific monarch or country is inaccurate and anachronistic.They were a stepping stone to the concept of modern nationhood, but still a long way from the real thing.

So you have the six members of the nation who amongst themselves need to find a two thirds majority. Then all five nations and the cardinals have to agree not by majority, but unanimously on one candidate. That meant in practice that three voters inside one nation could veto any selection indefinitely. This voting system was extremely demanding, as had been shown by the inability of the council to pass meaningful church reform for two years.

With the complex voting process agreed, focus shifted to choosing an appropriate location for the conclave.

The cathedral where all previous council sessions had been held would not be suitable. A conclave needed privacy. Nobody outside was to know what was going on until the white smoke comes out. Nor should anyone be able to influence the voters with bribes or threats whilst the election was under way. A cathedral with huge windows and multiple entrances would never be completely sealed off. And finally there was a justifiable concern that we would get a rerun of the conclave of Viterbo that lasted from 1268 to 1271 and only ended when the roof of the papal palace was removed and the cardinals were reduced to bread and water. So they needed a place where the supply of food could be controlled.

That is why the conclave was moved from the cathedral to the newly constructed Kaufhaus, a large counting house. The Kaufhaus was both a storage facility and a space for foreign traders to present their wares. Its doors could be locked and windows shuttered so nobody could get in or out to smuggle food or information in or out.

The conclave began on November 8, 1417 when the 53 voters 23 cardinals and 30 representatives of the nations entered the Kaufhaus. After the first round of voting it was clear the pessimists had a point. Six names had been pulled out of the hat. Cardinal Oddone Colonna, the cardinal-bishops of Ostia, Saluzzo and of Venice, the bishops of Geneva and of Winchester.

The next day the list was down to four, still Oddone Colonna, the bishops of Ostia, Saluzzo and Geneva. Oddone Colonna was technically a good position with support across multiple nations, but consensus still seemed a long way away.

Meanwhile outside the Kaufhaus the people waited and prayed that the electors would choose someone who could be recognised by every nation and every monarch and that the schism would finally and permanently be over. Part of the prayer rituals was a boys’ choir that led a procession around the Kaufhaus singing hymns, in particular one, veni creator spiritus, Come oh Creator spirit. This ancient hymn was also sung at King Charles’ Coronation.

The sound of the boys singing passed through the walls and shuttered windows and had a huge impact on the electors. Many fell to their knees and prayed quietly. They thought they had heard angels sing, calling on them to come to a decision, quickly and unanimously. And so they did. Just minutes after the singing started the electors chose Oddone Colonna to become pope. The French nation who was most opposed to the election of an Italian gave in under the impact of the celestial voices and so did the remaining holdouts.

This story of the angels’ voices is confirmed by multiple sources, so is almost certainly true. And it makes sense. Just take into account the stress these electors were under. Apart from the cardinals, none of them had ever expected to have to make such a decision. They knew how much hinged on their choice. If they went for someone who would lose the support of one or other of the nations later on, the schism could return. Or if they chose a frail contender he could die soon after and be replaced by another piratical pope like Baldassare Cossa. Plus the isolation, dim lighting and unfamiliar surroundings, you can see why people heard angels.

5. Martin V: The unfulfilled promise of reform

The newly elected pope took the name Martin having been elected by divine intervention on the day of St. Martin. Choosing the name of a man famous for cutting his coat in half seems ironic for a pope tasked with uniting the Church—but what do I know about papal naming traditions?

And Pope Martin V did what the reform oriented council members had always feared. He passed some half-hearted reforms and signed concordats with some of the kingdoms present in Constance and then called the whole thing off.

He left the city on May 29, 1418 and began a 3 year long journey to Rome. This was a possession, a taking charge of the papal lands and authority that had not happened for a long time. He travelled down the Rhone valley and through northern Italy re-establishing the successor to St. Peter as the sole head of the church after a long absence.

Once arrived in the eternal city the focus of his pontificate lay more in regaining control of the papal states and the rebuilding of the city of Rome, the Lateran basilica and the Vatican palace, rather than in pushing church reform.

He did call a council as promised to Pavia, but moved it to Siena when plague broke out. That council again did not pass much in terms of reforms. In line with the decrees passed in Constance, Martin V called the next Council to take place in Basle. This time he was already quite reluctant to adhere to the rules laid down before his election.The council of Basel lasted for – depending on how you count it for 18 years from 1431 to 1449.

This was supposed to be the council that would finally bring about this long delayed reform of the church. It was to conclude the work that had begun in Constance.

But it wasn’t off to a good start. On the opening day there was only one delegate in the city. It took a few months and heavy marketing by the presiding cardinals to get the ball rolling. Once there was a quorum, the council did pass a few measures to reign in on misbehaving clergy, including the ban on concubinage.

But very quickly the political differences between council and pope took precedence over questions of spiritual and pastoral care. As you can imagine, the new pope, Eugene IV who had succeeded Martin V did not like the idea of the church as a constitutional monarchy. And in particular not if the council was actually going to pass the rules they actually wanted to pass, aka, cutting the papacy off from the money back in the bishoprics and abbeys.

We may or may not go into the back and forth of these debates at a later stage as it will impact Sigismund and the Hussites. But for this episode it is enough to point out that the relationship soured rapidly. Eugene IV asked the council to come to Florence, which some did and others refused. The refuseniks passed a number of ambitious reform decrees and then elected their own pope, a layman, the count of Savoy. This antipope who called himself Felix V lasted a few years and then stepped down. The Council of Basle finally in 1449.

With it the project to turn the church into a constitutional monarchy petered out. Councils are still the congregation of the faithful and formally above the pope. But it is now in the pope’s discretion whether or not to call one. And no pope calls a Council unless he is 100% certain of the outcome.

The other even more important outcome was that reform the church, and I mean a proper reform all about spirituality and pastoral care did not materialise, neither sponsored by the council nor pushed through by the papacy. Had constance or Basle succeeded in its ambition, Luther may not have had as much as 95 individual items to complain about and even if he did, he would not have had as successful a time of it as he ultimately did.

So, despite being the greatest gathering of minds in the Late Middle Ages, in its stated objectives the Council of Constance had been a failure. And in one very specific way it made things a lot worse for the catholic church.

And these most fateful decisions are the ones we will talk about next week, the convictions of Jan Hus and of Hieronymus of Prague that lead straight to the first Prague defenestration. I hope you will join us again.

In the meantime, if you want to rush up on the rise of the papacy from pornocracy to universal moral authority, go to episodes 28 to 32. And on the decline of the papacy, have a listen to episodes 150 and 151.

Now before I go, just a quick one. If you want to help the show to keep going, go to historyofthegermans.com/support where you can make a one-time donation or sign up for a monthly contribution. Thank you all for listening and supporting the show.

Episode 172 – A World Event

by History of the Germans Podcast on 28th November 202417th December 2025

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.

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?

This world event was so much more than a papal election and the trial of a heretic. For 3 years Constance became 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 or their families in a world where political murder had become commonplace. Others still demanded their reward for years of service, making the house of Hohenzollern the margraves of Brandenburg.

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….

Chapters:

00:13 – The Council of Constance: A Gathering Like No Other
03:31 – The Council of Constance: A Gathering of Minds
08:16 – The Gathering of Intellectuals at Constance
12:57 – The Role of Book Hunters in the Renaissance
24:23 – Political Violence in the 14th and 15th Century
29:56 – The Debate on Tyrannicide at the Council of Constance
35:21 – The Council of Constance and Its Impact

As always:

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So far I have:

Ep. 172 – A World Event – Council of Constance Part 2

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

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.

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 19^th 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 9^th 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 14^th 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 9^th 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 12^th. By the late 13^th and early 14^th 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 11^th 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 14^th century gave way to the 15^th 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 23^rd, 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.

Episode 171 – Cleaning House

by History of the Germans Podcast on 21st November 202417th December 2025

Council of Constance Part 1

The Council of Constance marked a pivotal moment in the history of the Catholic Church and the history of Europe in general.

One issue on the agenda was the ongoing schism that the council of Pisa had failed to resolve. Another the reform of the increasingly corrupt clergy all the way up to the pope himself. And then there were a number of individual questions this gathering of thousands had to address.

Whilst all these were crucial questions, the way the council constituted itself foreshadowed a fundamental change in the way European saw themselves.

This part 1 deals with the establishment of the council and the removal of the popes, most importantly the pope who had convened the council on the first place, John XXIII and his counterpart, the emperor Sigismund.

The Council of Constance marked a pivotal moment in the history of the Catholic Church and the history of Europe in general.

Whilst all these were crucial questions, the way the council constituted itself foreshadowed a fundamental change in the way European saw themselves.

Chapters:

00:18 – The Unusual Procession
03:54 – The Journey to Constance
10:35 – The Council of Constance: A New Chapter in Church History
16:51 – The Arrival of Sigismund
20:15 – The Shift Towards National Identity in the Church Council
27:41 – The Turning Point: The Council’s Decree
34:47 – The End of the Schism and the Rise of New Leadership

As always:

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So far I have:

Ep. 171 – Cleaning House – The Council of Constance Part 1

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 171 – The Council of Constance Part 1 – Cleaning House, which is also episode 8 of season 9 “The Reformation before the Reformation”.

On a cold night in October 1414 a most unusual procession appeared near the village of Klösterle on the Arlberg pass. Not an army but almost as large. 600 men, some soldiers and bodyguards, a few high ranking aristocrats but mostly men of the cloth. Clerics, doctors of theology but also abbots, bishops and archbishops as well as the true princes of the church, cardinals, dozens of them. And at the center of the procession an enormous cart and in it the true lord of all of Christendom, the bearer of both swords, pope John XXIII.

The roads they had travelled on for days were terrible. Whatever was left of the old roman infrastructure had long been buried underground or had deteriorated so badly, it had gone out of use. So through the autumn mud the processions ploughs on. Just as they were passing the hamlet of Klösterle, in the holloway that masked as one of Europe’s busiest north-south connection the attendants watched in panic as the right hand side wheels of the papal wagon climbed the bank of the road. Before anyone could reign in the horses and prevent disaster, the carriage rose, went past the point of vanishing stability and with a terrifying thump landed on its side. The holy father was thrown out of his vehicle and lay buried deep in the snow. His lords and bishops run to him and ask: “Oh Holy father, has your holiness been harmed?” and he responded “here for devil’s sake I lie”.

Shaken but unharmed the vicar of Christ kept going. As the panorama widened and he could see the city of Bludenz down in the valley that leads to the lake and the city of Constance he uttered, full of premonition “So this is where they catch the foxes”.

And the old fox was right to be worried. For a year later he will find himself in prison in Mannheim, then just a solitary tower by the shore of the Rhine. How that happened and why he is now resting in a magnificent monument in the Baptistery of Florence paid for by the Medici family and bearing the inscription: John the XXIII former pope, Died in Florence A.D. 1419, on 11^th day before the Calends of January is what we will look at in this episode!

But before we start your usual moment of discomfort and frenetic clicking of the forward button. Yes, the show is still advertising free and that is still down to the generosity of our patrons and donors who have gone to historyofthegermans.com/support and have made a one-time donation or signed up on Patreon. Just a brief update on the latter, for some reason Apple has not yet levied its pound of flesh so you can still go to patreon.com/historyofthegermans and sign up there, even if you have an iPhone. But hurry, the 1 trillion dollar company is going to pounce on your hapless podcast soon. And this week we thank Scott F., Michael, Martin S., Jon-Paul Hart, William O’Brien, Carolyn A. and James A who have already signed up.

And with that – back to the show

Here we are, the pope John XXIII is travelling across the Alps to go to a general church council in Constance. Which begs just one question – why? Why would Baldassarre Cossa, elected pope and recognized as head of the church in dozens of lands, born on the sundrenched island of Procida near Naples call a church assembly to discuss the schism and in a foggy mid-sized town in the German lands to boot?

Well, the answer is, he didn’t. Or at least he did not call a church council to debate the schism. As far as John XXIII was concerned, the schism was done and dusted. The Community of the Faithful had come together in Pisa in 1409 and had deposed the two competing contenders, Gregory XII and Benedict XIII and had replaced them with his predecessor Alexander V. And he, Baldassarre Cossa had been canonically elected as the successor of Alexander V. The fact that Gregory XII and Benedict XIII were still around claiming supremacy was a logistical and maybe military problem, but not one we need a church council for.

So the reason he did still call a church council had to do with one of the provisions of the previous council the one in Pisa. The Pisan gathering had made pope Alexander V swear he would call another council within the next three years to deal with the open issue of church reform. Because in all that debate about how to put an end to the schism, the important issue of how can we make a church a little less corrupt had fallen off the agenda.

That was why John XXIII found himself in a bind to call a church council. And he wasn’t opposed to the idea. Presiding over a major reform council would elevate him on to the level of the great popes Innocent II &III, Alexander III and Gregory X. That would make everybody forget his – how can say that politely – somewhat checkered past.

But as so often, Pope John XXIII struggled to find a suitable venue for his grand ecumenical council. Initially he wanted to do it in Rome, after all his capital and a categorical statement that the time when the Pope had to live away from the eternal city was now well and truly over.

The problem was that John XXIII had to live away from the eternal city except for very brief periods. His neighbor, King Ladislaus of Naples kept conquering papal lands and sacking Rome on regular intervals. That is the same Ladislaus who had inherited and pursued a claim on the crown of Hungary from his father Charles the Short who was made even shorter by Elisabeth of Bosnia. If that last sentence was complete gobbledygook for you, listen back to episode 169.

A lasting peace with Naples was unlikely. Pope John XXIII did not like Ladislaus of Naples very much ever since Ladislaus had his two brothers hanged as pirates. Ladislaus did not like the pope very much, because he could.

With Rome off the list of suitable venues, John needed to find a neutral place in Italy. But by then, the peninsula was in the grip of near perennial war. Many of the former communes have become principalities ruled by local strongmen. And strongmen do what strongmen are wont to do, they go after other people’s lands, cities and treasure until there are armies crisscrossing the land from early spring to late autumn.

Enter stage left our old friend Sigismund of Luxemburg. By now this extremely intrepid man had not only secured his reign over Hungary but had finally achieved his great ambition and had become king of the Romans. And best of all, his hated half-brother Wenceslaus was still around to see it happening.

How did he become King of the Romans, that was simple. Nobody really wanted the job any more. The reign of Rudolf of the empty pocket had shown beyond any doubt that there was no money left to establish any kind of imperial authority. Only the very, very richest could afford to don the imperial coronation mantle. And even after 4 decades of infighting and mismanagement, the house of Luxemburg was still the richest of the great eligible families of the empire. And being a squabbling lot, two Luxemburgs put their hat in the ring, Sigismund, king of Hungary and Jobst, margrave of Moravia. Weirdly, Jobst had the inferior title but a lot more money. But what he lacked was longevity. Both were elected by a mixture of correct and incorrect prince-electors but Jobst died in 1411. Sigismund had the election repeated and was confirmed by all.

Being king of the Romans and future emperor came with the role supreme protector of the church. And whilst John XXIII may think the schism is over, Sigismund did not see it like that. He had to deal with the fact that some imperial principalities, the Palatinate and Baden for instance kept their allegiance to the deposed pope Gregory XII. So this needed to be cleaned up. And he knew that one way to gain true control over the empire and with it the leverage to initiate much needed imperial reform, was to rescue Holy Mother church.

That is why Sigismund pops up in Lodi in Northern Italy in December 1413 to discuss the long overdue church council with the pope. By now John XXIII had considered Bologna and even Avignon of all places, but both had been turned down by his advisors as either too dangerous or totally inappropriate.

At which point Sigismund suggested they all come over to his yard. Yard being the word my teenage son uses to describe a home and I thought I use it since I am a bit tired of using the same words again and again.

To tell what happened next, I have to introduce the chronicler Ulrich Richental. He was a citizen of Constance and he wrote a very detailed account of the council that – despite some biases – is still the #1 source for the events during that period. Richental is a big fan of Sigismund not so much of the popes. So he does make things up occasionally, like the road accident at the start of the episode. But he does it so nicely, I couldn’t stop myself pretending it did actually happen.

And here is Ulrich’s account of the two heads of Christendom discussing the venue for the most momentous event of the 15^th century:

When Sigismund proposed to come to Germany John XXIII responded: “I cannot convince my cardinals to travel north across the Alps”

Sigismund: “In that case I cannot get the princes and electors to travel south across the Alps”

Gridlock

Sigismund then turns to one of his entourage, the duke of Teck: “Isn’t there an imperial city close to the Alps? Teck: “Sure Sire, the city of Kempten”. At which point a count of Nellenburg intervenes: “nah, there is not enough food in Kempten. But there is another city, just an hour’s ride away, Constance on the lake. They have a bishopric and everything”

Sigismund: “Holy father – do you like Constance?”

John XXIII: “Oh my beloved son, I do like Constance”

That’s it – That is how that went down – Richental told us so, so definitely true!

That is why on the 27^th of October Pope John XXIII and his entourage of 600 entered the city of Costance under a golden baldachin carried by four eminent burghers of the free imperial city. The Imperial bailee performed the service of the groom and a group of schoolchildren sang appropriate hymns. The pope grateful for the friendly welcome blessed the congregation.

Everything was going swimmingly. The pope and his immediate entourage was given accommodation in the bishop’s palace opposite the cathedral. The others were distributed amongst the homes of the locals who were all too happy to AirBnB their spare rooms for outrageous rents.

Because it wasn’t just the 600 papal delegates, which included humanists like Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini as well as the various prelates. There were also a total of 3 patriarchs, 23 cardinals, 27 archbishops 106 bishops, 103 abbots, 344 doctors of theology, all of whom came with their scribes, procurators and administrators of various kinds. Then there were the princes, a full complement of the prince electors, the dukes of Bavaria, Austria, Schleswig, Mecklenburg Lothringia and Teck as well as a further 676 noblemen Those who did not come themselves like the kings of France, England, Scotland, Denmark, Polen, Naples, Castile and Aragon, sent representatives, as did the patriarch of Constantinople and the emperor of Ethiopia. And then there were all these people who came hoping to make some money of this incredible gathering, goldsmiths, cobblers, furriers, blacksmiths, bakers, shopkeepers, apothecaries, moneylenders, buglers, pipers, entertainers, barbers, heralds, merchants of any kind and the often mentioned whores and public girls. All of them needed to stay somewhere and somehow all of them did.

The city museum at the Rosgarten hosts a wonderful model of Constance from around the time of the council which gives a great idea of its size or lack of it. Constance had maybe 6-8,000 inhabitants at the time which isn’t huge now and wasn’t even at that time. Places like Augsburg or Nurnberg were more than twice the size. How many people came in total to the council is hard to determine, in particular since our friend Richental tends to exaggerate a bit. Plus not everyone stayed all throughout the 3 years and some the council lasted. In one of my secondary sources they talk about 5000 monks and 16,000 priests which would suggest a total number of 25,000-30,000 new arrivals. I struggle to believe that but it is likely that the population at least doubled during that period and maybe more than tripled in the initial phase.

Given there is so much information available about Constance during that period, I may dedicate a future episode to the conditions not just during the council, but more generally. We have not done a Germany in the year 1400 episode yet, so this may be a good one.

But for now we leave the cramped conditions behind and go back to the high politics.

The pope was here, but the emperor had not yet arrived. The reason for the delay was that Sigismund had been elected three years earlier but had not yet been crowned, not even as king of the Romans. That had to happen before he went toe to toe with the pope. So on November 8, 1414 he was crowned in Aachen and then progressed south towards Constance. In Strasburg he told everyone that he and John were like totally aligned on everything. From there he took the road along the Neckar valley to Stuttgart and then down to the lake where he arrived in Űberlingen at midnight on the 24^th of December.

He had called ahead and asked for transport to cross the lake. So in the middle of Christmas eve the boatmen of Konstance set off across the lake to bring their emperor into their city. It was 3 in the morning when he finally arrived with his wife, several princes and their attendants all loaded up on torchlit boats. The city council came to the harbor to greet him and led him to the town hall where he was given a drink. And then they dashed across the square to the cathedral where – and that is still hard to believe – the pope was waiting for him. John XXIII had halted Midnight Mass for the emperor. And not only that, he had allowed Sigismund to do what the Luxemburg rulers have been doing since Karl IV, he let him read the gospel according to Luke where it says “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.” He read this whilst wearing his crown and holding the imperial sword. No previous pope, not even the king of France had allowed such a display to go ahead. Nobody wanted to be reminded that even the bible acknowledged that the empire was an institution older than the papacy and one that was meant to rule the whole of the Roman world.

John XXIII left no record of his thoughts that night.

The council had started debating before Sigismund had arrived, but as the cardinal Fillastre noted, nothing of substance had yet been discussed, because nobody aka the pope himself, wanted to touch on the actual subject, the unity of the church and the continued schism.

That being said, the council wasn’t stalling. If you think about the sheer scale of what was going on. These thousands of delegates are pushed together into this mid-sized medieval town. The grand debates take place in the Münster, the cathedral, but few delegates get the chance to address the whole council. So they start to meet in smaller groups to debate specific issues, initially spontaneously and after a while in a formal structure of committees and working groups. But what also happened was that factions were forming. And these did not form around political programs or theological perspectives, but along geographic and cultural lines.

The council was establishing nations. The idea of nations came from the way medieval universities were organised as we have heard about Paris and Prague in previous episodes. And since most delegates had studied at university or were practicing academics, these divisions appeared natural. They were also a way to break up the hierarchy structure of the church that monopolised decision making in the hands of the pope and his college of cardinals.

But is not just that, it is also a sign of a changing world. Whilst on the outset it looked as if the council was resurrecting the idea of a unified Christendom under one pope and one emperor, the reality was that this concept was fading away not just as a political structure but also as a cultural entity. Instead the peoples of europe were developing separate identities. We are still centuries away from people seeing nationality as one of their primary defining characteristic and source of belonging, but there is clearly something shifting.

The vernacular has taken over from Latin on much of the cultural and administrative output of the times. For instance our chronicler Richental writes his work in German, more precisely in his native dialect. It’s not that he does not know Latin, more that he does not feel he needs to use it to be taken seriously. In Italy we have Dante and in England Chaucer who elevate the vernacular to a literary language, whilst French has become the language at the court of the Valois. I am not that familiar with developments in Poland and Hungary, but as we have seen last week, the Czech language has become a crucial marker of belonging in Bohemia.

Still the nations that form in Constance were not yet as rigidly defined by etymology and culture as modern nations are. The conciliar nations are created through a mixture of political significance, compass orientation and language. There were in the end five. There was Italica, Gallicana, Germania which included Scandinavia, Poland, Lithauania, Croatia, Hungary and Bohemia, Anglca which was England, Scotland and Ireland and Iberica, which comprised the various Spanish kingdoms and Portugal.

There were discussions about the structure of these nations, but interestingly from the Iberian side. Aragon wanted to be its own nation. That was turned down because in that case Castile and Portugal would also have their separate nations. And if that happened the Germanica nation would splinter as well, making the whole concept of nations unworkable.

Do you remember the cardinal Fillastre, the one who had been moaning that nothing was moving forward in this great church council? Well, in January 1415, two months into the debates he had had enough. He issued an treatise stating that all three popes should resign. And that the council had the power to force all three popes to step down if that was in the interest of the unity of the church.

The response from John XXIII and his supporters was the obvious. Sorry, last time we did that and deposed two popes, we got three. Why do you think by deposing three you will not end up with four? And what was wrong with me as pope?

Well on the last question, quite a lot, an awful lot. Most it were rumours at the time, but still. He might have been a pirate in his youth, after all his brothers had definitely been. Pope Alexander V, the one the council of Pisa had chosen had died only days after having lunch at the house of the man who became his successor. Then the bribes that were paid to the cardinals at his election were legendary, almost as legendary as his income from the sale of church benefices once he was made pope.

John XXIII’s opponents put together a list of 18 accusations, each one of them pretty damning.

But that would not have meant that he was done for. He had made sure that the majority of the participants at the council were Italians and the Italians would be very wary to opening up the ballot again, potentially ending up with a Frenchman who could take the church back to Avignon.

But that line of defence crumbled when Sigismund used his immense charm and power of persuasion to introduce a change in the voting process. No longer should it be by heads or by rank, but by nation. Each of the five nation was to have one vote, as would the college of cardinals.

Voting by nations totally undermined the church hierarchy, because suddenly the archbishops and bishops find themselves acting alongside the priests, monks and doctors of their nation, rather than with their brother bishops. And where it was even harder to take was for the cardinals. They had become accustomed to being a sort of cabinet of the church that would make all the major decisions along with the pope. But here in the council, they were relegated to having just one vote that ranked equal to any one of the nation’s votes.

John was a smart politician and he realised the non-Italian nations had a majority. His line of defence had crumbled and the game was up. So to avoid the publication of the 18 accusations he agreed to resign. Conditions were negotiated over for another 2 weeks but then, at the end of February 1415, three months after he had seen the fox trap from his vantage point above Bludenz, that trap had snapped shut. Pope John XXIII declared his resignation.

Immediately after that Sigismund put Constance into lockdown. The deposed pope must not be able to escape. Because if he escaped and gathered new supporters he could dissolve the council that he had called in the first place. And if he did that, the horror scenario of four popes would almost certainly materialise.

And what happened, well, what do you think? The pope escaped. Disguised as a groom and sitting on – for added humiliation – on a tiny horse.

As we heard at the beginning, John had had had his premonitions when he crossed the alps. So he took out life insurance. With Frederick of Habsburg, the duke of Austria. Frederick promised to help and protect him should the worst happen. And the worst had happened. So it was to neighbouring Schaffhausen, one of the duke’s possessions that ex-pope John XXIII or to give him his correct name, Baldassare Cossa went. The helpful duke immediately came to his side to face down Sigismund and the council members.

Sigismund did not waste a second. He gathered the imperial princes who were in Constance anyway and formed an imperial court. The court gave Frederick 3 days to show and defend himself and when he failed to come they condemned him. They put duke Frederick of Austria in the imperial ban. He was made an outlaw, his vassals released from their oaths and an imperial army was gathered. 10 days after the spectacular flight of the pope, Sigismund’s forces oved on the gates of Schaffhausen.

Baldassare Cosssa fled on to Laufenburg another 30 miles down the Rhine but that was no solution, so on he ran towards Basel. But before he left Laufenburg, he issued a papal bull revoking his resignation and dissolving the council.

At that point the future of the church and the future of Sigismund hung in the balance. If the majority of the council attendants recognised his dissolution order it was over.

At that point the church and the universities had been discussing the role of the council and its relationship with the pope for decades. The schism created by the selfishness of cardinals and popes had undermined Holy mother church to a point a Gregory VII or an Innocent III would barely have recognised her any more. It was time for the congregation of the faithful to put their foot down. The council agreed the decree Haec Sancta which became a sort of Magna Carta of the church. Its opened with (quote)

“First [the council] declares that, legitimately assembled in the holy Spirit, constituting a general council and representing the catholic church militant, it has power immediately from Christ; and that everyone of whatever state or dignity, even papal, is bound to obey it in those matters which pertain to the faith, the eradication of the said schism and the general reform of the said church of God in head and in members.” (end quote)

It banned the pope from dissolving the council, from moving the curia from Constance or to do anything that would undermine its power.

The ecumenical council continued and Baldassare Cossa kept running. Until he could run no more. He was caught near Radolfzell and brought back to Constance to stand trial. The ruling was no surprise. He was convicted and declared unworthy, useless and dangerous and stripped of all his church offices. The next four years he spent as a prisoner of the count Palatinate in a customs tower at Mannheim. In 1419 he paid an enormous ransom and was allowed to return to Rome where he submitted to the new pope Martin V who made him a bishop and cardinal again. He died shortly afterwards in Florence. His memorial in the great Baptistery is a spectacular piece created by the renaissance masters Donatello and Michelozzo. Who paid for it? Not Baldassare Cossa, but Florentine bankers including the Medici family who one can only assume owed the pope their rise to the top of the financial industry in Italy. And yes, the name John XXIII was taken off the official list of popes, which is why we have two popes called John XXIII, the last one reigning from 1958 to 1963 as one of the most popular and sympathetic figures of recent church history and – ironically – a pope who presided over a church council.

That left the council with still two false popes, Gregory XII and Benedict XIII, who needed to be removed before a new, universally recognised pope could be elected and unity of the church could be restored.

Gregory XII was relatively easy. He was already a thousand years old, had lost all support in Italy and had been elected with the explicit provision to resign when asked. All he demanded was that he would not be deposed by a council that had been called by his enemy, the no longer pope John XXIII. So a weird charade took place. Two of Gregory’s ambassadors arrived in Constance and formally called a council in the name of Gregory XII. The council then reconstituted itself, now as one called by Gregory XII. It endorsed all previous decisions. And then they read a letter from Gregory resigning as pope. That was it. Gregory XII stepped back into the college of cardinals and died two years later. His much more modest memorial is in the small town of Recanati in the Marche. But he remained on the list of canonical popes.

One effect of this strange castling was that Sigismund was no longer the president of the council. He had taken that role during the proceedings against Baldassare Cossa, but now that a viable pope had resumed the reigns, if only for a technical second, he was no longer needed.

The task he took up instead was to rail in the last of the popes, the Avignon pope Benedict XIII. This was the most stubborn of the whole lot, who never yielded, not even when he had lost the support of the French. By 1415 he was living in Aragon, enjoying the support of his last remaining ally, king Alfonso V.

Benedict XIII agreed to meet with Sigismund who had come to Perpignan to speak to him directly. But this time the legendary charmer failed. Yes, Benedict XIII promised to resign but only under one condition. Since he was the only surviving cardinal who had participated in the election of Urban VI, back in 1378, he was the only truly legitimate cardinal in the whole world. All other cardinals have been appointed by contested popes. Therefore he was the only person in Christendom entitled to elect the new pope. He promised would do so within 24 hours and promised not to elect himself. Let’s say, argument was compelling, but there wasn’t the resounding support that Benedict might have expected.

Sigismund gave up on the stubborn Spaniard. Instead he worked on the Iberian monarchs and by December 1416 King Alfonso V of Aragon abandoned his pope and submitted to the council of Constance.

And that was all that really mattered. Benedict went to Peniscola a town and castle overlooking the sea between Valencia and Barcelona where he would spend the next 8 years ranting and raving against the council, the king and everybody else. When he died his ragtag band of cardinals elected a new pope they called Clement VIII. It took until 1429 before this pope finally resigned. The last negotiator who brought this sorry tale to an end was an Aragonese bishop by the name of Alfonso de Borgia. He would later rise to become pope Calixtus III who paved the way for his nephew Roderigo Borgia, Alexander VI the most notorious of the Renaissance popes.

Hurrah – we have done it. The Schism is over. Three popes are gone. But we still need a new one, and ideally one that everybody will agree on. Spoiler alert, they will find one. But the council is not done. There are still many other matters to discuss, including the matter of a certain Jan Hus, a complaint from the Teutonic Knights and some Frenchmen wanting clarification on the term Tyrannicide. So, there will be a part 2 of the Council of Constance which I hope you will join us again next week.

And before I go just a quick reminder, the website to make a one-time donation or sign on for Patreon is historyofthegermans.com

Episode 170 – Jan Hus, Reformer and rebel?

by History of the Germans Podcast on 14th November 202417th December 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ep. 170 – Jan Hus, Reformer and Rebel?

14th November 2024

Dirk Hoffmann-Becking

Ep. 174 – The Trial of Jan Hus – Council of Constance Part 4

12th December 2024

Dirk Hoffmann-Becking

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TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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