The fifteenth century was marked by the Hussite revolution which grew out of an attempt to reform the religious lives of the people. Hus was primarily concerned with the reform of religious life both in the individual and in the Church. His skills as a university teacher and preacher to the people helped him capture the imagination and loyalty of his fellow Czechs. After his death in 1415 they took up his cause, attempting to weld the national will around his memory. He and his followers emphasised personal morality, care of neighbour and reform of the clergy by the secular government. They called for the creation of a community whose regulations and pattern of life, both political and ecclesiastical, would be based on the law of God. At the same time their rhetoric assumed a strong national character.
The substance of Hus’s programme was summed up in his tract De ecclesia, which, written in 1413, was strongly influenced by the ideas of the Englishman John Wyclif. Hus defined the church as the congregation of those living under the rule of Christ. Everyone was a member of the Church by virtue of baptism administered just after birth. However, not everyone in Christendom was faithful to the way set out by Christ. The Church, then, according to Hus, included both the sheep chosen for salvation and the goats whose damnation was foreknown. The faith of those predestined to follow Christian love might only emerge later, and so the identity of each could not be positively known. Nevertheless, an indication of faith could be inferred from men’s actions. Hus taught that true Christians should be judged by their fruits.
Hus preached a standard Catholic piety. People needed to recognise themselves as sinners before they could know God. They must renounce the world, with its possessions, pleasures and dignities. He assured them that they were saved by God’s prior grace, and that a living faith was adorned by good works leading to the supreme love of God. The word of God should be preached freely because it enlightened reason, regulated desires, eliminated sin and engendered God’s grace. He recommended that the rich give their wealth to the poor, and spoke against elaborate burials and a multitude of masses for the dead. Judging from the actions of propertied residents of the Catholic town of Plzen, who reduced their gifts to the clergy for funeral rites and replaced them with gifts for the poor, his preaching won widespread support.
Hus gave the laity the choice whether or not to obey priests, saying that they should acknowledge only those priests who lived holy lives. The prelates who lived barren spiritual lives in luxury and pomp, devoured the alms of the poor, accumulated benefices and, as in the case of the pope, allowed himself to be adored on bended knee and to have his feet kissed were unworthy of their calling. As his predecessors of the late fourteenth century had done, Hus also stressed that, in the face of general poverty, the Church’s wealth and affluent life style was a mark of sin and faithlessness. He criticised the Church’s elaborate ceremonies, its pictures and vestments, and its use of chalices, bells, organs and singing which, he claimed, diverted people from God. Lay men and women were urged to admonish priests on the basis of Holy Scripture, and if a priest refused to accept correction, people need not believe him. Christ had appointed Peter ‘captain and shepherd’ of the Church because of his qualities, and only virtuous popes could be elected. In essence such ideas made the people sovereign, and represented the foundation upon which the Hussites assumed the right to choose their own king and Tabor built its republic.
Hus also taught that the Church’s authority was limited to the spiritual realm. The power of the keys given to Peter was for spiritual purposes, for discerning sins, not for juridical or monarchical rule. Coercive governmental powers belonged exclusively to the secular lord and king. At first Hus believed that if he spelled out the scriptural life of faith to his fellow clergy, they would voluntarily reform. The Bohemian Church, however, declined his invitation. Hus took up Wyclif’s idea that the king and the nobility should reform the Church and deprive it by force of its secular dominion and property. The Church should be subject to the sovereign lay ruler. Not surprisingly, Hus’s attack on the ecclesiastical hierarchy, including the Papacy, made his reform unacceptable at the Council of Constance.
The controversies surrounding the reformers and their encouragement to the laity to emulate the apostolic Church stimulated reading of the Scriptures. Like Wyclif, Hus wanted common people to have access to the Bible, and so he advocated both Czech and German translations, albeit in the face of ecclesiastical opposition. In the previous century, parts of the Bible had been rendered into Czech for monastic women who wished to follow the lectionary. Then, in 1381, a wealthy Prague burgher had underwritten a translation of a German Bible, and a partial translation had resulted. It seems that in 1392 Matthew of Janov had a translation of the Czech Bible which the consistory confiscated. It was in an effort to satisfy a hunger for the Scriptures that Hus published the Czech, St Mikulovsky Bible, containing the New Testament, the Psalms and the Wisdom literature in 1406. The Orthographia Bohemica, attributed to Hus, was published no later than 1412, predating the Orthographia Gallica by at least eight years. This text guided Czech writers of theological and moral discourses, as well as poets and story tellers. Hus’s rural ministry among the common people called for the whole Bible in Czech and for the simplified orthography in which cumbersome compounds, such as ‘cz’, were replaced by ‘c’, making the book less expensive and more accessible to the public. Frantisek Bartos assumed that Hus published a fully revised Czech Bible in 1413—14.
Hus also opened the door for women to participate publicly in national life. His affirmation of women is best reflected in his tract of 1412, ‘Recognising the true way to salvation’, also known as ‘The Daughter’, in which he chose woman to represent humanity in a generic sense. In the opening chapter, on creation, Hus reminded his readers that, as women, they were made in the image of God, and that they could act with dignity and courage, fearing no man. Women responded to his call. Female patrons placed reformers into parishes; women preached and wrote tracts. In July 1420 women figured decisively in a key battle fighting off an attack on Prague. In the following year a group of women occupied the city hall and forced a change of policy, placing Prague back in the moderate camp. However, their gains were short. After 1421, Czech men reverted to the principle of masculine privilege, and the body politic remained an arena reserved for males.
After 1407 Hus and his followers stepped up their attack on ecclesiastical property and indulgences, and life in Bohemia became increasingly coloured by ethnic rivalry. The struggle between the mostly Czech reformers and their German opponents reached its first crisis that year. The Czechs found that they were hindered in their efforts because the powerful and remunerative offices in the university were in the hands of their foreign opponents. King Wenceslas’s wish for a representative at the Council of Pisa, which had been convened to heal the schism in the Church, helped the Czechs. As Archbishop Zbynek would not send a representative, in January 1409, through the Kutna Hora decree, Wenceslas gave control of the university’s administration to the Czech masters and students, who subsequently authorised a delegation to go to Pisa.
During these debates over church life, the reformers appealed to national and ethnic identity to which they gave a religious dimension. In 1409, Jerome of Prague described his nation (nacio) not as the territorial community of the university nations, but as a Czech-language community, a political group whose members spoke Czech, both of whose parents were Czech, and who supported the religion of the Bohemian-Wycliffite reform movement. His Czech community, or nation, retained the three estates, nobility, clergy and commons, with respective sub-gradations. He gave predominant place to orthodox belief, persons of other tongues not being per se excluded if they supported reform. Another reformer, the lawyer John of Jesenice, fuelled the conflict when he argued that the king had the right to raise the native sons of the kingdom to the top positions in royal and ecclesiastical offices because they sought the kingdom’s welfare, while foreigners did not.
In 1410 tension between the archbishop and Hus increased as King Wenceslas appropriated ecclesiastical estates. Although the king, Queen Sophia, several lords and the city council supported Hus, the Papacy summoned him to the curia. In 1411, when he did not go, the pope pronounced an anathema over Hus and an interdict over most of Prague. In the following year, the king changed sides and supported the Church in the controversy over indulgences. In the autumn, Hus left Prague for the south of the country where he preached and wrote in Czech, preparing broad social support for reform in this region. In late 1414, in response to Emperor Sigismund’s request, and armed with statements from the king and his court, from the high courts representing the baronage and even from the inquisitor himself clearing him of heresy, Hus travelled to the Council of Constance to defend his cause. About the same time Jakoubek of Sribro gave wine to the laity during communion in several churches in Prague. The chalice thus became the symbol of the Hussite movement and of its rebellion against the Church. This irregular liturgical practice did not help Hus’s case at Constance, and he was executed on 6 July 1415.
Hus’s cause stimulated the nobility to include religion in their area of jurisdiction. From 1415 to the death of King Wenceslas in 1419 the nobles headed the national effort to reform the Church. In the name of the Czech crown they issued a protest against the burning of Hus. Speaking on behalf of the Czech language and all true or poor Czechs, whatever their faith, they accused those Czech Catholics who joined the common front of foreigners of betraying the Czech crown and language. The Council’s execution of Hus, they asserted, was an insult to the most Christian Czech kingdom. To underline their words, they formed a league to defend one another and their clergy against any attack from abroad. These leagues, one for the defence of Hussite priests, the other for Catholics, were designed to retain noble control over the social order. The Hussite league, augmented by a regional association of gentry in 1417, gave protection and assurance to preachers of reform, who ranged from radicals wanting to reduce the use of elaborate ceremonies and vestments of the liturgy to the moderates who hoped to find acceptance within European Christendom for communion in both kinds and a reform of the most blatant clerical abuses. The protection and patronage of the Hussite nobility were particularly important from 1417 to 1419 when the Church launched a drive to suppress reform. King and archbishop vacillated in the face of the nobility, and so a ‘live and let live’ attitude prevailed until Wenceslas’s death in 1419. However, Sigismund, the heir apparent, constituted a test to such religious toleration. Committed to the suppression of Hussitism, he was, as such, unacceptable to the country’s rulers. Consequently, he had to wait until 1436 to secure his throne.
Sigismund’s stance forced the Hussites to face the question of what type of government they wanted. Some, despairing of secular rule, placed their hope in the imminent return of Christ and his kingdom. When Christ did not return on the predicted day, most of these joined other radicals in fortified settlements such as Tabor in southern Bohemia, Hradec Kralove in the east, or New Town Prague. For purposes of maintaining public order in the country there were basically two groups among the Hussites: (i) the moderate coalition of nobles, university masters and municipal officials led by Prague, and (ii) the radicals, led by the gentry and the university-trained priests whose political dynamic depended on the energy of the urban commons and the peasantry. The means favoured by the moderates to establish national order were the diets, of which some twenty were called between 1419 and 1435, which established governing councils for the country. The radicals sent representatives to the diets but, when their programmes were not adopted, they concentrated on organising local communities under the protection of their field armies.
To the radicals, the moderates appeared as traitors because they negotiated away castles as well as religious principles in a vain hope that Sigismund and the Church would accept Hussite reforms. The radicals also disliked what they regarded as the indulgent life style of the moderates, their elaborate liturgies and vestments and their refusal to give communion to infants. To the moderates, the radicals disrupted the social order with their attacks on monasteries and churches, and through their destruction of property. Both groups saw themselves as providing social order. The moderates hoped the way was through negotiation with the king, compromise being implicit. The radicals declared that the welfare of the realm required a total religious cleansing of the individual, and tended to separate themselves into their own communities in which they tried to establish religious purity.