CHAPTER VII.

BOHEMIA.

There is no historical foundation for the legend that Peter Waldo's missionary labors carried him into Bohemia, where he died, but there can be no question that the Waldensian heresy found a foothold among the Czechs at a comparatively early date. Bohemia formed part of the great archiepiscopal province of Mainz, whose metropolitan could exercise but an ineffective supervision over a district so distant. The supremacy of Rome pressed lightly on its turbulent ecclesiastics. In the last decade of the twelfth century a papal legate, Cardinal Pietro, sent thither to levy a tithe for the recovery of the Holy Land, was scandalized to find that the law of celibacy was unknown to the secular priesthood; he did not venture to force it on those already in orders, and his efforts to make postulants take the vow of continence provoked a tumult which required severe measures of suppression. In a Church thus partially independent the abuses which stimulated revolt elsewhere might perhaps be absent, but the field for missionary labor lay open and unguarded.[470]

We have seen how the Inquisitor of Passau, about the middle of the thirteenth century, describes the flourishing condition of the Waldensian churches in Austria, along the borders of Bohemia and Moravia, and the intense zeal of propagandism which animated their members. Close to the west, moreover, they were to be found in the diocese of Ratisbon. That the heresy should cross the boundary line was inevitable, and it ran little risk of detection and persecution by a worldly and slothful priesthood, until it gained strength enough to declare itself openly. The alarm was first sounded by Innocent IV. in 1245, who summoned the prelates of Hungary to intervene, as those of Bohemia apparently were not to be depended upon, and there was evidently no inquisitorial machinery which could be employed. Innocent describes the heresy as established so firmly and widely that it embraced not only the simple folk, but also princes and magnates, and it was so elaborately organized that it had a chief who was reverenced as pope. These are all declared excommunicate, their lands confiscated for the benefit of the first occupant, and any who shall relapse after recantation are to be abandoned to the secular arm without a hearing, in accordance with the canons.[471]

We have no means of knowing whether any action was taken in consequence of this decree, but if efforts were made they did not succeed in eradicating the heresy. In 1257 King Premysl Otokar II. applied to Alexander IV. for aid in its suppression, as it continued to spread, and to this request was due the first introduction of the Inquisition in Bohemia. Two Franciscans, Lambert the German and Bartholomew lector in Brünn, received the papal commission as inquisitors throughout Bohemia and Moravia. It is fair to assume that they did their duty, but no traces of their activity have reached us, nor is there any evidence that their places were filled when they died or retired. The Inquisition may be considered as non-existent, and when, after a long interval, we again hear of persecution, it is in a shape that shows that the Bishop of Prague, like his metropolitan of Mainz, was not disposed to invite papal encroachments on his jurisdiction. In 1301 a synod of Prague deplored the spread of heresy and ordered every one cognizant of it to give information to the episcopal inquisitors, from which we may infer that heretics were active, that they had been little disturbed, and that the elaborate legislation elsewhere in force for the detection and punishment of heresy was virtually unknown in Bohemia.[472]

In 1318 John of Drasic, the Bishop of Prague, was summoned to Avignon by John XXII. to answer accusations brought against him by Frederic of Schönberg, Canon of Wyschehrad, as a fautor of heresy. The complaint set forth that heretics were so numerous that they had an archbishop and seven bishops, each of whom had three hundred disciples. The description of their faith would seem to indicate that there were both Waldenses and Luciferans--the latter forming part of the sect which we have seen described about this time as flourishing in Austria, where they are said to have been introduced by missionaries from Bohemia--and that their doctrines have been commingled. They are described as considering oaths unlawful; confession and absolution could be administered indifferently by layman or priest; rebaptism was allowed; the divine unity and the resurrection of the dead were denied; Jesus had only a phantasmic body; and Lucifer was expected finally to reign. Of course there were also the customary accusations of sexual excesses committed in nocturnal assemblies held in caverns, which only proves that there was sufficient dread of persecution to prevent the congregations from meeting openly. The good bishop, it appears, only permitted these wretches to be arraigned by his inquisitors after repeated pressure from John of Luxembourg, the king. Fourteen of them were convicted and handed over to the secular arm, but the bishop interfered, to the great disgust of the king, and forcibly released them, except a physician named Richard, who was imprisoned; the bishop, moreover, discharged the inquisitors, who evidently were his own officials and not papal appointees. These were serious offences on the part of a prelate, and he expiated his lenity by a confinement of several years in Avignon. Possibly his hostility to the Franciscans may have rendered him an object of attack.[473]

Papal attention being thus called to the existence of heresy in the east of Europe, and to the inefficiency of the local machinery for its extermination, steps were immediately taken for the introduction of the Inquisition. In 1318 John XXII. commissioned the Dominican Peregrine of Oppolza and the Franciscan Nicholas of Cracow as inquisitors in the dioceses of Cracow and Breslau, while Bohemia and Poland were intrusted to the Dominican Colda and the Franciscan Hartmann. As usual, the secular and ecclesiastical powers were commanded to afford them assistance whenever called upon. Poland, doubtless, was as much in need as Bohemia of inquisitorial supervision, for John Muscata, the Bishop of Cracow, was as negligent as his brother of Prague, and drew upon himself in 1319 severe reprehension from John XXII. for the sloth and neglect which had rendered heresy bold and aggressive in his diocese. This does not seem to have accomplished much, for in 1327 John found himself obliged to order the Dominican Provincial of Poland to appoint inquisitors to stem the flood of heresy which was infecting the people from regions farther west. Germany and Bohemia apparently were sending missionaries, whose labors met with much acceptance among the people. King Ladislas was especially asked to lend his aid to the inquisitors; he promptly responded by ordering the governors of his cities to support them with the civil power, and their vigorous action was rewarded with abundant success.[474]

Among these heretics there may have been Brethren of the Free Spirit, but they were probably for the most part Waldenses, who at this time had a thoroughly organized Church in Bohemia, whence emissaries were sent to Moravia, Saxony, Silesia, and Poland. They regarded Lombardy as their headquarters, to which they sent their youth for instruction, together with moneys collected for the support of the parent Church. All this could not be concealed from the vigilance of the inquisitors appointed by John XXII. No doubt active measures of repression were carried out with little intermission, though chance has only preserved an indication of inquisitorial proceedings about the year 1330. Saaz and Laun are mentioned as the cities in which heresy was most prevalent. With the open rupture between the papacy and Louis of Bavaria its repression became more difficult, although Bohemia under John of Luxembourg remained faithful to the Holy See. Heretics increased in Prague and its neighborhood; after a brief period of activity the Inquisition seems to have disappeared; John of Drasic, whose tolerance we have seen, was still Bishop of Prague, and fresh efforts were necessary. In 1335 Benedict XII. accordingly appointed the Franciscan Peter Naczeracz as inquisitor in the diocese of Olmütz and the Dominican Gall of Neuburg for that of Prague. As usual, all prelates were commanded to lend their aid, and King John was specially reminded that he held the temporal sword for the purpose of subduing the enemies of the faith. His son, the future Emperor Charles IV., at that time in charge of the kingdom, was similarly appealed to.[475]

In the subject province of Silesia, about the same period, a bold heresiarch known as John of Pirna made a deep impression. He was probably a Fraticello, as he taught that the pope was Antichrist and Rome the Whore of Babylon and a synagogue of Satan. In Breslau the magistrates and people espoused his doctrines, which were openly preached in the streets. Breslau was ecclesiastically subject to Poland, and in 1341 John of Schweidnitz was commissioned from Cracow as inquisitor to suppress the growing heresy. The people, however, arose, drove out their bishop and slew the inquisitor, for which they were subsequently subjected to humiliating penance, and John of Pirna's bones were exhumed and burned. The unsatisfied vengeance of Heaven added to their punishment by a conflagration which destroyed nearly the whole city, during which a pious woman saw an angel with a drawn sword casting fiery coals among the houses.[476]

Bohemia and its subject provinces were thus thoroughly infected with heresy, mostly Waldensian, when several changes took place which increased the prominence of the kingdom and stimulated vastly its intellectual activity. In 1344 Prague was separated from its far-off metropolis of Mainz and was erected into an archbishopric, for which the piety of Charles, then Margrave of Bohemia, provided a zealous and enlightened prelate in the person of Arnest of Pardubitz. Two years later, in 1346, Charles was elected King of the Romans by the Electors of Trèves and Cologne in opposition to Louis of Bavaria, as the supporter of the papacy; and a month later he succeeded to the throne of Bohemia through the knightly death of the blind King John at Crécy. Still more influential and far-reaching in its results was the founding in 1347 of the University of Prague, to which the combined favor of pope and emperor gave immediate lustre. Archbishop Arnest assumed its chancellorship, learned schoolmen filled its chairs; students flocked to it from every quarter, and it soon rivalled in numbers and reputation its elder sisters of Oxford, Paris, and Bologna.[477]

During the latter half of the century, Bohemia, under these auspices, was one of the most flourishing kingdoms of Europe. Its mines of the precious metals gave it wealth; the freedom enjoyed by its peasantry raised them mentally and morally above the level of the serfs of other lands; culture and enlightenment were diffused from its university. It was renowned throughout the Continent for the splendor of its churches, which in size and number were nowhere exceeded. At the monastery of Königsaal, where the Bohemian kings lay buried, around the walls of the garden the whole of the Scriptures, from Genesis to Revelations, was engraved, with letters enlarging in size with their distance from the ground, so that all could be easily read. In the bitter struggles of after generations the reign of King Charles was fondly looked back upon as the golden age of Bohemia. Wealth and culture, however, were accompanied with corruption. Nowhere were the clergy more worldly and depraved. Concubinage was well-nigh universal, and simony pervaded the Church in all its ranks, the sacraments were sold and penitence compounded for. All the abuses for which clerical immunity furnished opportunity nourished, and the land was overrun by vagrants whose tonsure gave them charter to rob and brawl, and dice and drink. The influences from above which moulded the Bohemian Church may be estimated from a single instance. In 1344 Clement VI. wrote to Arnest, then simple Bishop of Prague, calling attention to the numerous cases in his diocese wherein preferment had been procured for minors either by force or simony. The horror which the good pope expresses at this abuse is significantly illustrated by his having not long before issued dispensations to five members of one family in France, aged respectively seven, eight, nine, ten, and eleven years, to hold canonries and other benefices. Apparently the Bohemians had not taken the proper means to obtain the sanction of the curia for such infraction of the canons, so Clement ordered Arnest to dispossess the incumbents in all such cases, and to impose due penance on them. But he was also instructed, in conjunction with the papal collector, to force them to compound with the papal camera for all the revenues which they had thus illegally received, and after they had undergone this squeezing process he was authorized to reinstate them.[478]

Such unblushing exhibitions of rapacious simony did not tend either to the purity of the Bohemian Church, or to enhance its respect for the Holy See, especially as the frequently recurring papal exactions strained to the last degree the relations between the papacy and the German churches. When, in 1354, Innocent VI., to carry on his Italian wars, suddenly demanded a tenth of all the ecclesiastical revenues of the empire, it threw, for several years, the whole German Church into an uproar of rage and indignation. Some prelates refused to pay, and, when legal proceedings were commenced against them, formulated appeals which were contemptuously rejected as frivolous. The Bishops of Camin and Brandenburg were only compelled to yield by the direct threat of excommunication. Others pleaded poverty, and were mockingly reminded of the large sums which they had succeeded in exacting from their miserable subjects; others made the best bargain they could, and compounded for yearly payments; others banded together and formed associations mutually pledged to resist to the last. Frederic, Bishop of Ratisbon, took the audacious step of seizing the papal collector and conveying him away to a convenient castle. An ambush was laid for the Bishop of Cavaillon, the papal nuncio charged with the business, and his life, and that of his assistant, Henry, Archdeacon of Liége, were only saved by the active interposition of William, Archbishop of Cologne. When, in 1372, the levy was repeated by Gregory XI., the same spirit of resistance was aroused. The clergy of Mainz bound themselves to each other in a solemn engagement not to pay it, and Frederic, Archbishop of Cologne, promised his clergy to give them all the assistance he safely could in their refusal to submit. Trifling incidents such as these afford us a valuable insight into the complex relations between the Holy See and the churches of Christendom. On the one hand, there was the superstitious awe generated by five centuries of unquestioned domination as the representative of Christ, and there was, moreover, the dread of the material consequences of unsuccessful revolt. On the other, there was the indignation born of lawless oppression ever exciting to rebellion, and the clear-sighted recognition of the venality and corruption which rendered the Roman curia a source of contagion for all Europe. There was ample inflammable material, which the increasing friction might at any moment kindle into flame.[479]

Bohemia was peculiarly dangerous soil, for it was thoroughly interpenetrated with the leaven of heresy. We hear nothing of papal inquisitors after those commissioned by Benedict XII. in 1335, and it is presumable that for a while the heretics had peace. Archbishop Arnest, however, soon after his accession, set resolutely to work to purify the morals of his Church and to uproot heresy. He held synods frequently, he instituted a body of Correctors whose duty it was to visit all portions of the province and punish all transgressions, and he organized an episcopal Inquisition for the purpose of tracking out and suppressing heresy. In the fragmentary remains of his synodal acts, the frequency and earnestness with which this latter duty is insisted upon serve as a measure of its importance, and of the numbers of those who had forsaken the Church. In the earliest synod whose proceedings have reached us the first place is given to this subject; the archdeacons were directed to make diligent perquisition in their respective districts, both personally and through the deans and parish priests, without exciting suspicion, and all who were found guilty or suspect of heresy were to be forthwith denounced to the archbishop or the inquisitor. Similar instructions were issued in 1355; and after Arnest's death, in 1364, his successor, John Ocko, was equally vigilant, as appears from the acts of his synods in 1366 and 1371. The neighborhood of Pisek was especially contaminated, and from the acts of the Consistory of 1381 it appears that a priest named Johl, of Pisek, could not be ordained because both his father and grandfather had been heretics. What was this heresy that thus descended from generation to generation is not stated, but it was doubtless Waldensian. In this same year Archbishop John, as papal legate for his own province and for the dioceses of Ratisbon, Bamberg, and Misnia, held a council at Prague, in which he mournfully described the spread of the Waldenses and Sarabites--the latter probably Beghards. He sharply reproved the bishops who, through sloth or parsimony, had not appointed inquisitors, and threatened that if they did not do so forthwith, he would do it himself. When, ten years later, the Church took the alarm and acted vigorously, the Waldenses of Brandenburg, who were prosecuted, declared that their teachers came from Bohemia.[480]

In all this activity for the suppression of heresy it is worthy of note that the episcopal Inquisition alone is referred to. In fact there was no papal Inquisition in Bohemia. The bull of Gregory XI., in 1372, ordering the appointment of five inquisitors for Germany, confines their jurisdiction to the provinces of Cologne, Mainz, Utrecht, Magdeburg, Salzburg, and Bremen, and pointedly omits that of Prague, although the zeal of Charles IV. might have been expected to secure the blessings of the institution for his hereditary realm.[481] This is the more curious, moreover, since the intellectual movement started by the University of Prague was producing a number of men distinguished not only for learning and piety, but for their bold attacks on the corruptions of the Church, and their questioning of some of its most profitable dogmas. The appearance of these precursors of Huss is one of the most remarkable indications of the tendencies of the age in Bohemia, and shows how the Waldensian spirit of revolt had unconsciously spread among the population.

Conrad of Waldhausen, who died in 1369, is reckoned the earliest of these. He maintained strict orthodoxy, but his denunciation in his sermons of the vices of the clergy, and especially of the Mendicants, created a deep sensation. More prominent in every way was Milicz of Kremsier, who, in 1363, resigned the office of private secretary to the emperor, the function of Corrector intrusted to him by Archbishop Arnest, and several rich preferments, in order to devote himself exclusively to preaching. His sermons in Czech, German, and Latin were filled with audacious attacks on the sins and crimes of clergy and laity, and the evils of the time led him to prophesy the advent of Antichrist between 1365 and 1367. In the latter year he went to Rome in order to lay before Urban V. his views on the present and future of the Church. While awaiting Urban's advent from Avignon, he affixed on the portal of St. Peter's an announcement of a sermon on the subject, which led the Inquisition to throw him into prison, but in October, on the arrival of the pope, he was released and treated with distinction. On his return to Prague he preached with greater violence than ever. To get rid of him the priesthood accused him to the emperor and archbishop, but in vain. Then they formulated twelve articles of accusation against him to the pope, and obtained, in January, 1374, from Gregory XI., bulls denouncing him as a persistent heresiarch who had filled all Bohemia, Poland, Silesia, and the neighboring lands with his errors. According to them, he taught not only that Antichrist had come, that the Church was extinct, that pope, cardinals, bishops and prelates showed no light of truth, but he permitted to his followers the unlimited gratification of their passions. Milicz undauntedly pursued his course until an inquisitorial prosecution was commenced against him, when he appealed to the pope. In Lent, 1374, he went to Avignon, where he readily proved his innocence, and on May 21 was admitted to preach before the cardinals, but he died June 29, before the formal decision of his case was published. It is highly probable that he was a Joachite--one of those who, as we shall see hereafter, reverenced the memory and believed in the apocalyptic prophecies of the Abbot Joachim of Flora.[482]

The spirit of indignation and disquiet did not confine itself to denunciations of clerical abuses. Men were growing bolder, and began to question some of the cherished dogmas which gave rise to those abuses. In the synod of 1384 one of the subjects discussed was whether the saints were cognizant of the prayers addressed to them, and whether the worshipper was benefited by their suffrages--the mere raising of such a question showing how dangerously bold had become the spirit of inquiry. The man who most fitly represented this tendency was Mathias of Janow, whom the Archbishop John of Jenzenstein utilized in his efforts to reform the incurable disorders of the clergy. Mathias was led to trace the troubles to their causes, and to teach heresies from the consequences of which even the protection of the archbishop could not wholly defend him. In the synod of 1389 he was forced to make public recantation of his errors in holding that the images of Christ and the saints gave rise to idolatry, and that they ought to be banished from the churches and burned; that relics were of no service, and the intercession of saints was useless; while his teaching that every one should be urged to take communion daily foreshadowed the eucharistic troubles which play so large a part in the Hussite excitement. Yet he was allowed to escape with six months' suspension from preaching and hearing confessions outside of his own parochial church, a mistaken lenity which he repaid by continuing to teach the same errors more audaciously than ever, and even urging that the laity be admitted to communion in both elements. Mathias was not alone in his heterodoxy, for in the same synod of 1389 a priest named Andreas was obliged to revoke the same heresy respecting images, and another named Jacob was suspended from preaching for ten years for a still more offensive expression of similar beliefs, with the addition that suffrages for the dead were useless, that the Virgin could not help her devotees, and that the archbishop had erred in granting an indulgence to those who adored her image, and that the utterances of the holy doctors of the Church are not to be received.[483]

Other earnest men who prepared the way for what was to follow were Henry of Oyta, Thomas of Stitny, John of Stekno, and Matthew of Cracow. Step by step the progress of free thought advanced, and when, in 1393, a papal indulgence was preached in Prague, Wenceslas Rohle, pastor of St. Martin's in the Altstadt, ventured to denounce it as a fraud, though only under his breath, for fear of the Pharisees. All this, it is evident, could only be favorable to the growth of Waldensianism, as is seen in the activity of the sectaries. It was missionaries from Bohemia who founded the communities in Brandenburg and Pomerania; and, as we have seen, a well-informed writer, in 1395, asserts that they were numbered by thousands in Thuringia, Misnia, Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, and Hungary, notwithstanding that a thousand of them had been converted within two years in the districts extending from Thuringia to Moravia.[484]

While Bohemia was thus the scene of an agitation the outcome of which no man could foretell, a similar movement was running a still more rapid course in England, which was destined to exercise a decisive influence on the result. The assaults of John Wickliff were the most serious danger encountered by the hierarchy since the Hildebrandine theocracy had been established. For the first time a trained scholastic intellect of remarkable force and clearness, informed with all the philosophy and theology of the schools, was led to question the domination which the Church had acquired over the life, here and hereafter, of its members. It was not the poor peasant or artisan who found the Scriptures in contradiction to the teaching of the pulpit and the confessional, and with the practical examples set by the sacerdotal class; but it was a man who stood in learning and argumentative power on a level with the foremost schoolmen of the Middle Ages; who could quote not only Christ and the apostles, but the fathers and doctors of the Church, the decretals and the canons, Aristotle and his commentators; who could weave all these into the dialectics so dear to students and masters of theology, and who could frame a system of philosophy suited to the intellectual wants of the age. It is true that William of Ockham had been bold in his attacks on the overgrown papal system, but he was a partisan of Louis of Bavaria, and, with Marsiglio of Padua, his aim had merely been to set the State above the Church. With the subjection of the empire to the papacy the works of both had perished and their labors had been forgotten. The infidelity of the Averrhoists had never taken root among the people, and had been wisely treated by the Church with the leniency of contempt. It was the secret of Wickliff's influence that he had worked out his conclusions in single-hearted efforts to search for truth; his views developed gradually as he was led from one point to another; he spared neither prince nor prelate; he labored to instruct the poor more zealously perhaps than to influence the great, and men of all ranks, from the peasant to the schoolman, recognized in him a leader who sought to make them better, stronger, more valiant in the struggle with Apollyon. It is no wonder that his work proved not merely ephemeral; that his fame as a heresiarch filled all the schools and became everywhere synonymous with rebellion against the sacerdotal system; that simple Waldenses in Spain and Germany became thereafter known as Wickliffites. Yet the endurance of his teachings was due to his Bohemian disciples; at home, after a brief period of rapid development, they were virtually crushed out by the combined power of Church and State.

As the heresy of Huss was in nearly all details copied from his master, Wickliff, it is necessary, in order to understand the nature of the Hussite movement, to cast a brief glance at the views of the English reformer. About four years after his death, in 1388 and 1389, twenty-five articles of accusation were brought against his followers, whose reply gives, in the most vigorous English, a summary of his tenets. Few documents of the period are more interesting as a picture of the worldliness and corruption of the Church, and of the wrathful indignation aroused by the hideous contrast between the teaching of Christ and the lives of those who claimed to represent him. It is observable that the only purely speculative error admitted is that concerning the Eucharist; all the others relate to the doctrines which gave to the Church control over the souls and purses of the faithful, or to the abuses arising from the worldly and sensual character of the clergy. It was an essentially practical reform, inspired for the most part with rare common-sense and with wonderfully little exaggeration, considering the magnitude of the evils which pressed so heavily upon Christendom.

The document in question shows the Wickliffite belief to be that the popes of the period were Antichrist; all the hierarchy, from the pope down, were accursed by reason of their greed, their simony, their cruelty, their lust of power, and their evil lives. Unless they give satisfaction "thai schul be depper dampned then Judas Scarioth." The pope was not to be obeyed, his decretals were naught, and his excommunication and that of his bishops were to be disregarded. The indulgences so freely proffered in return for money or for the services of crusaders in slaying Christians were false and fraudulent. Yet the power of the keys in pious hands was not denied--"Certes, as holy prestis of lyvynge and cunnynge of holy writte han keyes of heven and bene vicaris of Jesus Crist, so viciouse prestis, unkonnynge of holy writte, ful of pride and covetise, han keyes of helle and bene vicaris of Sathanas." Though auricular confession might be useful, it was not necessary, for men should trust in Christ. Image-worship was unlawful, and representations of the Trinity were forbidden--"Hit semes that this offrynge ymages is a sotile cast of Antichriste and his clerkis for to drawe almes fro pore men.... Certis, these ymages of hemselfe may do nouther gode nor yvel to mennis soules, but thai myghtten warme a man's body in colde if thai were sette upon a fire." The invocation of saints was useless; the best of them could do nothing but what God ordained, and many of those customarily invoked were in hell, for in modern times sinners stood a better chance of canonization than holy men. It was the same with their feast-days; those of the apostles and early saints might be observed, but not the rest. Song was not to be used in divine service, and prayer was as efficient anywhere as in church, for the churches were not holy--"all suche chirches bene gretely poluted and cursud of God, nomely for sellynge of leccherie and fals swering upon bokus. Sithen tho chirches bene dunnus of thefis and habitacionis of fendis." Ecclesiastics must not live in luxury and pomp, but as poor men "gyvynge ensaumple of holynes by ther conversacion." The Church must be deprived of all its temporalities, and whatever was necessary for the support of its members must be held in common. Tithes and offerings were not to be given to sinful priests; it was simony for a priest to receive payment for his spiritual ministrations, though he might sell his labor in honest vocations, such as teaching and the binding of books, and though no one was forbidden to make an oblation at mass, provided he did not seek to obtain more than his share in the sacrifice. All parish priests and vicars who did not perform their functions were to be removed, and especially all who were non-resident. All priests and deacons, moreover, were to preach zealously, for which no special license or commission was required.

All these tenets of which they were accused the Wickliffites admitted and defended in the most incisive fashion, but there were two articles which they denied. Wickliff's teaching so closely resembled that of the Waldenses that it was natural that the orthodox should attribute to him the two Waldensian errors which regarded all oaths as unlawful, and held that priests in mortal sin could not administer the sacraments. To the former, his followers replied that, though they rejected all unnecessary swearing, they admitted that "If hit be nedeful for to swere for a spedful treuthe men mowe wele swere as God did in the olde lawe." As to the latter, they said that the sinful priest can give sacraments efficient to those who worthily receive them, though he receive damnation unto himself. The prominence of the Fraticelli also suggested the imputation that the Wickliffites believed the entire renunciation of property to be essential to salvation; but this they denied, saying that a man might make lawful gains and hold them, but that he must use them well.[485]

All these antisacerdotal teachings flowed directly from the resoluteness with which Wickliff carried out to its logical conclusion the Augustinian doctrine of predestination, thus necessarily striking at the root of all human mediation, the suffrages of the saints, justification by works, and all the machinery of the Church for the purchase and sale of salvation. In this, as in the rest, Huss followed him, though the distinction between his principles and the orthodox ones of the Thomists and other schoolmen was too subtle to render this point one which the Church could easily condemn.[486]

The one serious speculative error of Wickliff lay in his effort to reconcile the mystery of the Eucharist with the stubborn fact that after consecration the bread remained bread and the wine continued to be wine. He did not deny conversion into the body and blood of Christ; they were really present in the sacrifice, but his reason refused to acknowledge transubstantiation, and he invented a theory of the remanence of the substance coexisting with the divine elements. Into these dangerous subtleties Huss refused to follow his master. It was the one point on which he declined to accept the reasoning of the Englishman, and yet, as we shall see, it served as a principal excuse for hurrying him to the stake.

Wickliff's career as a heresiarch was unexampled, and its peculiarities serve to explain much that would otherwise be incomprehensible in the growth and tolerance of his doctrines in Bohemia, and in the simplicity with which Huss refused to believe that he could himself be regarded as a heretic. Although, as early as 1377, the assistance which Wickliff rendered to Edward III. in diminishing the papal revenues moved Gregory XI. to command his immediate prosecution as a heretic, yet the political situation was such as to render ineffectual all efforts to carry out these instructions; he was never even excommunicated, and was allowed to die peacefully in his rectory of Lutterworth on the last day of the year 1384. No further action was taken by Rome until the question of his heresy was raised in Prague. Although, in 1409, Alexander V. ordered Archbishop Zbinco not to permit his errors to be taught or his books to be read, yet when, in 1410, John XXIII. referred his writings to a commission of four cardinals, who convoked an assembly of theologians for their examination, a majority decided that Archbishop Zbinko had not been justified in burning them. It was not until the Council of Rome, in 1413, that there was a formal and authoritative condemnation pronounced, and it was left for the Council of Constance, in 1415, to proclaim Wickliff as a heresiarch, to order his bones exhumed, and to define his errors with the authority of the Church Universal. Huss might well, to the last, believe in the authenticity of the spurious letters of the University of Oxford, brought to Prague about 1403, in which Wickliff was declared perfectly orthodox, and might conscientiously assert that his books continued to be read and taught there.[487]

The marriage of Anne of Luxembourg, sister of Wenceslas of Bohemia, to Richard II., in 1382, led to considerable intercourse between the kingdoms until her death, in 1394. Many Bohemians visited England during the excitement caused by Wickliff's controversies, and his writings were carried to Prague, where they found great acceptance. Huss tells us that about 1390 they commenced to be read in the University of Prague, and that they continued thenceforth to be studied. No orthodox Bohemian had hitherto ventured as far as the daring Englishman, but there were many who had entered on the same path, to say nothing of the secret Waldensian heretics, and the general feeling excited throughout Germany by the reckless simony and sale of indulgences which marked the later years of Boniface IX. Thus the movement which had been in progress since the middle of the century received a fresh impulsion from the circumstances under which the works of Wickliff were perused and scattered abroad in innumerable copies. All of his treatises were eagerly sought for. A MS. in the Hofbliothek of Vienna gives a catalogue of ninety of them which were known in Bohemia, and it is to those regions that we must look for the remains of his voluminous labors, the greater part of which were successfully suppressed at home. In time he came to be reverenced as the fifth Evangelist, and a fragment of stone from his tomb was venerated at Prague as a relic. Still more suggestive of his commanding influence is the fidelity with which Huss followed his reasoning, and oftentimes the arrangement, and even the words, of his treatises.[488]

John of Husinec, commonly known as Huss, who became the leading exponent and protomartyr of Wickliffitism in Bohemia, is supposed to have been born in 1369, of parents whose poverty forced him to earn his own livelihood. In 1393 he obtained the degree of bachelor of arts; in 1394 that of bachelor of theology; in 1396 that of master of arts; but the doctorate he never attained, though in 1398 he was already lecturing in the university; in 1401 he was dean of the philosophical faculty, and rector in 1402. Curiously enough, he embraced the Realist philosophy, and won great applause in his combats with the Nominalists. So little promise did his early years give of his career as a reformer that, in 1392, he spent his last four groschen for an indulgence, when he had only dry crusts for food. In 1400 he was ordained as priest, and two years later he was appointed preacher to the Bethlehem chapel, where his earnest eloquence soon rendered him the spiritual leader of the people. The study of Wickliff's writings, begun shortly after this, quickened his appreciation of the evils of a corrupted Church, and when Archbishop Zbinco of Hasenburg, shortly after his consecration in 1403, appointed him as preacher to the annual synods, Huss improved the opportunity to address to the assembled clergy a series of terrible invectives against their worldliness and filthiness of living, which excited general popular hatred and contempt for them. After one of peculiar vigor, in October, 1407, the clamor among the ecclesiastics grew so strong that they presented a formal complaint against him to Archbishop Zbinco, and he was deprived of the position. By this time he was recognized as the leader in the effort to purify the Church, and to reduce it to its ancient simplicity, with such men as Stephen Palecz, Stanislas of Znaim, John of Jessinetz, Jerome of Prague, and many others eminent for learning and piety as his collaborators. To some of these he was inferior in intellectual gifts, but his fearless temper, his unbending rectitude, his blameless life, and his kindly nature won for him the affectionate veneration of the people and rendered him its idol.[489]

Discussion grew hot and passions became embittered. Old jealousies and hatreds between the Teutonic and Czech races contributed to render the religious quarrel unappeasable. The vices and oppression of the clergy had alienated from them popular respect, and the fiery diatribes of the Bethlehem chapel were listened to eagerly, while the Wickliffite doctrines, which taught the baselessness of the whole sacerdotal system, were welcomed as a revelation, and spread rapidly through all classes. King Wenceslas was inclined to give them such support as his indolence and self-indulgence would permit, and his queen, Sophia, was even more favorably disposed. Yet the clergy and their friends could not submit quietly to the spoliation of their privileges and wealth, although the Great Schism, in weakening the influence of the Roman curia, rendered its support less efficient. Preachers who assailed their vices were thrown into prison as heretics and were exiled, and the writings of Wickliff, which formed the key of the position, were fiercely assaulted and desperately defended. The weak point in them was the substitution of remanence for transubstantiation; and although this was discarded by Huss and his followers, it served as an unguarded point through which the whole position might be carried. The synod of 1405 asserted the doctrine of transubstantiation in its most absolute shape; any one teaching otherwise was pronounced a heretic, and was ordered to be reported to the archbishop for punishment. In 1406 this was repeated in a still more threatening form, showing that the Wickliffite views had obstinate defenders; as, indeed, is to be seen by a tract of Thomas of Stitny, written in 1400. Already, in 1403, a series of forty-five articles extracted from Wickliff's works was formally condemned by the university. Around these the battle raged with fury; the condemnation was repeated in 1408, and in 1410 Archbishop Zbinco solemnly burned in the courtyard of his palace two hundred of the forbidden books, while the populace revenged itself by singing through the streets rude rhymes, in which the prelate is said to have burned books which he could not read; for his ignorance was notorious, and he was reported to have first acquired the alphabet after his elevation.[490]

In the strife between rival popes it suited the policy of King Wenceslas, in 1408, to maintain neutrality, and he induced the university to send envoys to the cardinals who had renounced allegiance to both Benedict XIII. and Gregory XII. In this mission were included Stephen Palecz and Stanislas of Znaim, but the whole party fell, in Bologna, into the hands of Balthasar Cossa, the papal legate (afterwards John XXIII.), who threw them all in prison as suspect of heresy, and it required no little effort to secure their release. This adventure cooled the zeal of Stephen and Stanislas; they gradually changed sides, and from the warmest friends of Huss they became, as we shall see, his most dangerous and implacable enemies.[491]

In this affair the university had not seconded the wishes of the king with the alacrity which he had expected, and Huss took advantage of the royal displeasure to effect a revolution in that institution, which had hitherto proved the chief obstacle in the progress of reform. It was divided, in the ordinary manner, into four "nations." As each of these nations had a vote, the Bohemians constantly found themselves outnumbered by the foreigners. It was now proposed to adopt the constitution of the University of Paris, where the French nation had three votes, and all the foreign nations collectively but one. The vacillation of Wenceslas delayed decision, but in January, 1409, he signed the decree which ordered the change. The German students and professors bound themselves by a vow to procure the revocation of the decree or to leave the university. Failing in the former alternative, they abandoned the city in vast numbers, founding the University of Leipsic, and spreading throughout Europe the report that Bohemia was a nest of heretics. The dyke was broken down, and the flood of Wickliffitism poured over the land with little to check its progress. In vain did Alexander V. and John XXIII. command Archbishop Zbinco to suppress the heresy, and in vain did the struggling prelate hold assemblies and issue comminatory decrees. The tide bore all before it, and Zbinco at last, in 1411, abandoned his ungrateful see to appeal to Wenceslas's brother Sigismund, then recently elected King of the Romans, but died on the journey.[492]

This removed the last obstacle. The new archbishop, Albik of Unicow, previously physician to Wenceslas, was old and weak, and more given to accumulating money than to defending the faith. He was said to carry the key of his wine-cellar himself, to have only a wretched old crone for a cook, and to sell habitually all presents made to him. Thoroughly unfitted for the crisis, he resigned in 1413, and was succeeded by Conrad of Vechta, who, after some hesitation, cast his lot with the followers of Huss. Yet, during these troubles, the papal Inquisition seems to have been established in Prague, and, strangely enough, to have seen nothing in the Hussite movement to call for its interference, though it could act against Waldenses and other recognized heretics. When, in 1408, the king ordered Archbishop Zbinco to make a thorough perquisition after heresy, Nicholas of Vilemonic, known as Abraham, priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit in Prague, was tried before the inquisitors Moritz and Jaroslav for Waldensianism, and was thrown into prison for asserting that he could preach under authority from Christ without that of the archbishop. Huss interposed in his favor, but his liberation was postponed through his refusal to repeat, on the Gospels, an oath which he had already sworn by God. One of the accusations brought against Huss at Constance was the favor which he showed to Waldensian and other heretics; and yet, when he was about to depart on his fateful journey to Constance, the papal inquisitor Nicholas, Bishop of Nazareth, gave him a formal certificate, attested by a notarial act, to the effect that he had long known him intimately, and had never heard an heretical expression from him, and that no one had ever accused him of heresy before the tribunal. The Hussite and Waldensian movements were too nearly akin for Huss not to sympathize with the acknowledged heretics, and in the virtual spiritual anarchy of these tumultuous years Waldensian influence must have made itself more and more felt, and the sectaries must have been emboldened to show themselves ever more openly.[493]

Everything thus conspired to accelerate the progress of the revolution. Huss, who had hitherto, for the most part, confined himself to assaults upon the local ecclesiastical establishment, began to direct his attacks at the papacy itself, and in the writings of Wickliff he found ample store of arguments, which he used with great effect. He also made use of another of Wickliff's methods by the employment of itinerant priests. This was peculiarly well adapted to accomplish the object in view, for the Bohemians were given to listening to sermons, and the unlicensed preaching for which the negligence of the established clergy gave opportunity had been a frequent source of complaint since the year 1371. The repetition of the prohibitions shows their ineffectiveness; the popular craving for spiritual instruction, which the Church could have turned to such good account, was abandoned to the agitators; the people flocked in crowds to hear them, in spite of priestly anathemas, and the great mass of the nation, from nobles to peasants, eagerly adopted the new doctrines, and were prepared to support them to the death.[494]

Matters were rapidly tending to an open rupture with Rome. In 1410 John XXIII., soon after his accession, referred to Cardinal Otto Colonna the complaints which came to Rome against Huss. On September 20 Colonna summoned him to appear in person. He sent deputies, who appealed from the cardinal to the pope, but they were thrown into prison and severely handled; and while the appeal was pending, in February, 1411, Colonna excommunicated him. On March 15 the excommunication was published in all the churches of Prague save two; the people stood by Huss, and an interdict was extended over the city, which was generally disregarded, and Huss continued to preach. While affairs were in this threatening position a new cause of trouble led to an explosion. Just as Wickliff had been stirred to fresh hostility against the papacy by the crusade which, under orders from Urban VI., the Bishop of Norwich had preached against France for its support of the rival pope Clement VII.; just as Luther was to be aroused from his obscurity by the indulgence-selling of Tetzel when Leo X. wanted money, so the Bohemians were stimulated to active opposition when John XXIII., towards the close of 1411, proclaimed a crusade with Holy Land indulgences against Ladislas of Naples, who upheld the claims of Gregory XII. Stephen Palecz, till then associated with Huss, was dean of the theological faculty. His experience of the Bolognese prison rendered him timorous about withstanding John XXIII., and he declared that there was no authority to prevent the publication of the indulgence. Huss was bolder, and a controversy arose between them which converted their former friendship into an enmity destined to bear bitter fruits. June 16, 1412, he held in the Carolinum a disputation which was a very powerful and eloquent attack upon the power of the keys, which lay at the foundation of the whole papal system. Absolution was dependent on the subjective condition of the penitent; as many popes who concede indulgences are damned, how can they defend their pardons before God? the sellers of indulgences are thieves, who take by cunning lies that which they cannot seize by violence; the pope and the whole Church Militant often err, and an unjust papal excommunication is to be disregarded. This was followed by other tracts and sermons which aroused popular enthusiasm to a lofty pitch. Wenceslas Tiem, the Dean of Passau, to whom the preaching of the crusade in Bohemia was confided, farmed out the indulgences to the highest bidders, and their sale to the people was accompanied by the usual scandals, which were well calculated to excite indignation.[495]

A few days after the disputation a crowd led by Wok of Waldstein, a favorite of King Wenceslas, carried the papal bulls of indulgence to the pillory and publicly burned them. The well-known legend attributes to Jerome of Prague a leading part in this, and relates that the bulls were strung around the neck of a strumpet mounted on a cart, who solicited the favor of the mob with lascivious gestures. No punishment was inflicted on the participants, and Wok of Waldstein continued to enjoy the royal favor. The defiance of the pope was complete, and the temper of the people was shown on July 12, when in three several churches three young mechanics named Martin, John, and Stanislas, interrupted the preachers proclaiming the indulgences, and declared them to be a lie. They were arrested and beheaded in spite of Huss's intercession; many others were imprisoned, and some were exposed to torture. Then the people assumed a threatening aspect; the three who had been executed were reverenced as martyrs; tumults occurred, and the prisoners were released. Soon afterwards a Carmelite was begging at the doors of his church with an array of relics displayed upon a table, with the indulgences attached to them to excite the liberality of the pious. A disciple of Huss denounced the affair as a fraud and kicked over the table, and when he was seized by the friars a band of armed men broke into the house and released him, not without bloodshed.[496]

John XXIII. could not avoid taking up the gage of battle thus thrown down. The Bohemian clergy appealed to him piteously, representing the oppression to which they were subjected, and stating that many of them had been slain. He promptly responded. The major excommunication, to be published in all its awful solemnity in Prague, was pronounced against Huss; the Bethlehem chapel was ordered to be levelled with the earth; his followers were excommunicated, and all who would not within thirty days abjure heresy were summoned to answer in person before the Roman curia. In spite of this Huss continued to preach, and when an attempt was made to arrest him in the pulpit the threatening aspect of the congregation prevented its execution. He appealed to a general council, and then to God, in a protest which, in lofty terms, asserted the nullity of the sentence pronounced against him. In his treatise "De Ecclesia," which followed not long after, he attacked the papacy in unmeasured language borrowed from Wickliff. The pope is not a pope and a true successor of Peter unless he imitates Peter; a pope given to avarice is the vicar of Judas Iscariot. So of the cardinals; if they enter save by the door of Christ they are thieves and robbers. Yet the clergy, for the most part gladly, obeyed the bull of excommunication, and Huss's presence in Prague led to a cessation of all church observances; divine service was suspended, the new-born were not baptized, and the dead lay unburied. At the request of the king, to relieve the situation of its tension, Huss left Prague and retired to Kosi hradek, whence he directed the movements of his adherents in the city and busied himself in active controversial writing, the chief product of which was the "De Ecclesia," which was publicly read in the Bethlehem chapel on July 8, 1413.[497]

King Wenceslas had vainly tried to bring about a pacification of the troubles in which passions were daily growing wilder, complicated by the race hatred between Teuton and Czech. A confused series of disputations and conferences and controversial tracts occupied the first half of the year 1413, which only embittered those who took part in them and rendered harmony more distant than ever. In fact there was no possible middle term, no compromise in which the disputants could unite. It was no longer a question of reforming the morals of the clergy, as to the necessity of which all were agreed. The controversy had drifted to the causes of clerical corruption, springing, as Wickliff and Huss and their disciples clearly saw, from the very principles on which the whole structure of Latin Christianity was based. Either the power of the keys was a truth vital to the salvation of mankind, or it was a lie cunningly invented and boldly utilized to gratify the lust of power and the greed of avarice. Between these two antagonistic postulates dialectic subtlety was powerless to frame a project of reconciliation, and argument only hardened each side in its belief. One or the other must triumph utterly, and force alone could decide the controversy. Wearied at last with his unavailing efforts, Wenceslas finally cut the matter short by banishing the leaders of the conservatives, Stephen Palecz, Stanislas of Znaim, Peter of Znaim, and John Elias. Stanislas retired to Moravia, where, after incredible industry in controversial writing, he died on the road to the Council of Constance; Stephen survived him and revenged them both.[498]

Huss and his adherents were now masters of the field; and though he abstained from returning to Prague, except an occasional visit incognito, until his departure for Constance, he could truly say, when he stood up in the council to meet his accusers, "I came hither of my own free will. Had I refused to come neither the king nor the emperor could have forced me, so numerous are the Bohemian lords who love me and who would have afforded me protection." And when the Cardinal Peter d'Ailly indignantly exclaimed, "See the impudence of the man," and a murmur ran around the whole assembly, John of Chlum calmly arose and said, "He speaks the truth, for though I have little power compared with others in Bohemia, I could easily defend him for a year against the whole strength of both monarchs. Judge, then, how much more could they whose forces are greater and whose castles are stronger than mine."[499]

* * * * *

While thus in Bohemia the upholders of the old order of things were silenced and reformation in the morals of the clergy was enforced with no gentle hand, the news spread around Christendom that the long-desired general council was to be convoked at last for the settlement of the Great Schism, the reformation of the Church from its head downwards, and the suppression of heresy. Many strivings had there been to effect this, but the policy of the Italian popes, as at Pisa, had thus far successfully eluded the dreaded decision. The pressure grew, however, until it became overwhelming. With the rival vicars of Christ each showering perdition upon the adherents of the others, the spiritual condition of the faithful was most anxious and a solution of the tremendous question was the most pressing necessity for all who believed what the Latin Church had assiduously taught for a thousand years. The politics of Europe, moreover, were hopelessly complicated by the strife, and no peace was to be expected while so dangerous an element of discord continued to exist. This was especially the case in Germany, where independent princes and prelates each selected for himself the pope of his preference, leading to bitter and intricate quarrels. Second only in importance to this was the reform of the abuses and corruption, the venality and license of the clergy, which made themselves felt everywhere, from the courts of the pontiffs to the meanest hamlet. Heresy likewise was to be met and suppressed, for though England could deal single-handed with the Lollardry within her shores, the aspect of matters in Bohemia was threatening, and Sigismund, the emperor-elect, as the heir of his childless brother Wenceslas, was deeply concerned in the pacification of the kingdom. In vain John XXIII. endeavored to have the council held in Italy, where he could control it. The nations insisted on some place where the free parliament of Christendom could convene unshackled and debate unchecked. Sigismund selected the episcopal city of Constance; John, hard pressed by Ladislas of Naples and driven from Rome, was forced to yield, and, December 9, 1413, issued his bull convoking the assemblage for the first of the following November. Not only were all prelates and religious corporations ordered to be represented, but all princes and rulers were commanded to be there in person or by deputy. Imperial letters from Sigismund, which accompanied the bull, gave assurance that the powers of State and Church would be combined to reach the result desired by all.[500]

No such assemblage had been seen in Christendom since Innocent III., two centuries before, in the plenitude of his power, had summoned the representatives of Latin Christianity to sit with him in the Lateran. The later council might boast fewer mitred heads than the earlier, but it was a far more important body. Called primarily to sit in judgment on the claims of rival popes, its mere convocation was a recognition of its supremacy over the successor of Peter. From its decision there could be no appeal, and the questions to be submitted to it were far more weighty than those which had tasked the consciences of the Lateran fathers. From every part of Europe the Church sent its best and worthiest to take counsel together in this crisis of its fate--men like Chancellor Gerson and Cardinal Peter d'Ailly of Cambrai, as earnest for reform and as sensible of existing wrongs as Wickliff or Huss themselves. The universities poured forth their ablest doctors of theology and canon law. Princes and potentates were there in person or by their representatives, and crowds of every rank in life, from the noble to the juggler. The mere magnitude of the assemblage produced a powerful effect on the minds of all contemporaries, and the wildest estimates were current of the numbers present. One chronicler assures us that there were, besides members of the council, sixty thousand five hundred persons present, of whom sixteen thousand were of gentle blood, from knights and squires up to princes. The same authority informs us that there were four hundred and fifty public women, but an official census of the council, carefully taken, reports that the number was not less than seven hundred, and even _succubi_ were popularly said to have joined in the nefarious trade. Thus the strength and the weakness, the virtue and the vice of the fifteenth century were gathered together to find relief as best they might for the troubles which threatened to overwhelm the Church. After many doubts and much hesitation John XXIII. fulfilled his promise to be present, relying upon his stores of gold to win a triumph over his adversaries and over the council itself.[501]

It was inevitable that Huss should tempt his fate at Constance. To both Sigismund and Wenceslas it was of the utmost importance that some authoritative decision should put an end to the strife within the Bohemian Church. The reformers had always professed their desire to submit their demands to a free general council, and Huss himself had appealed to such a council from the papal sentence of excommunication. To hesitate now would be to abandon his life's work, to admit that he dared not face the assembled piety and learning of the Church, and to confess himself a heretic. The host of adversaries in the Bohemian clergy whom his bitter invectives had inflamed and whose preferment had been forfeited through the agitation which he had led would surely be there to blacken him and to misrepresent his cause, and all would be lost if he were not present to defend it in person. They had long jeered him for not daring to present himself to the Holy See in obedience to its summons, and had pronounced blasphemous his appeal to Christ from its excommunication. To hesitate to submit his cause to the council would give his adversaries an inestimable advantage. Besides, incredible as it may seem in view of the violence of his assaults upon the doctrine which rendered the high places in the hierarchy profitable, and his persistent denial of the validity of his excommunication, he believed himself to be in full communion with the Church, that he would find the council in sympathy with his views, and that certain sermons which he had prepared would, when delivered before the assembled prelates, be efficient in bringing about the reforms which he advocated. In his singleness of mind he could not comprehend that men who had thundered as vehemently as himself against current abuses and corruptions, but who had not dared to assail the principles from which those evils sprang, would shrink back aghast from his bolder doctrinal aberrations, and would regard him as a heretic subject to the inquisitorial rule prescribing the naked alternative of recantation or the stake.[502]

When, therefore, the imperial and royal wishes for his presence at Constance were signified to him, with a promise of safe-conduct and full security, he willingly assented, and so anxious was he to be present at the opening of the council that he did not even wait for the promised safe-conduct, which reached him only after his arrival there. That some discussion took place among his friends as to the danger to be incurred there can be no doubt. Jerome of Prague, when on his trial, asserted that he had persuaded Huss to go, and Huss in one of his letters from prison alludes to the warnings which he had received. He himself was evidently not wholly without misgivings. A sealed letter left with his disciple, Master Martin, not to be opened till news should be received of his death, alludes to the persecution which he had suffered for restraining the inordinate lives of the clergy, and his expectation that it would soon reach its consummation. He makes disposition of his slender effects--his gray gown, his white gown, and sixty grossi, which comprise the whole of his worldly gear--and expresses his remorse for the time wasted before his ordination, when he used to play chess to the loss of his own temper and that of others. The unaffected simplicity and pure-heartedness of the man shine like a divine light through the brief words of his last request. A letter in the vernacular to his disciples also announces his fear that his enemies may seek in the council to take his life by false testimony. He asks the prayers of his friends that he may have eloquence to uphold the truth and constancy to endure to the last. Still, he did not wholly neglect precautions. Not only did he procure from the inquisitor Nicholas, Bishop of Nazareth, the certificate of his orthodoxy already alluded to, but he posted, August 26, throughout Prague a notice in Latin and Bohemian that he would appear before the archbishop, then holding a convocation of the Bohemian clergy, and challenged all who impugned his faith to come forward and accuse him either there or at Constance, asserting his readiness to submit to the punishment of heresy in case he was convicted, but that accusers who failed should be subjected to the talio. When John of Jessinetz, his representative, presented himself the next day at the door of the convocation, he was refused admission on the pretext that the body was deliberating on national affairs, and he was told to come back another time. In the assembly of nobles, however, Huss obtained an audience of the archbishop, who was also papal legate, and who declared that he knew of nothing to render Huss guilty except that he ought to purge himself of the excommunication. Of this a certified notarial instrument was sent to Sigismund by Huss with the statement that under the imperial safe-conduct he was ready to go to Constance to defend publicly the faith for which he was prepared, if necessary, to die.[503]

Huss set out, October 11, 1414, under the escort and protection of John and Henry of Chlum and Wenceslas of Duba, all his friends, and delegated for the purpose by Sigismund. The cavalcade consisted of more than thirty horse and two carriages. It was preceded, a day in advance, by the Bishop of Lubec, who announced that Huss was being carried in chains to Constance, and warned the people not to look at him, as he could read men's minds. Already his name had filled all Germany, and this advertisement was an additional incentive for crowds to gather and gaze on him as he passed. His reception served to foster the fatal illusions which he nursed. Everywhere, he wrote to his friends, he was treated as an honored guest and not as an excommunicate; no interdict was proclaimed where he stopped to rest, and he held discussions with magistrates and ecclesiastics. In all cities he posted notices on the church-doors that he was on his way to Constance to defend his faith, and that any one who desired to assail it was invited to do so before the council. On reaching Nuremburg, October 19, in place of deflecting to seek King Sigismund and obtain the promised safe-conduct, he proceeded direct to Constance, while Wenceslas of Duba went to the court and brought the document to him there a few days after his arrival. It was dated October 18.[504]

On November 2 Huss reached Constance, to be greeted by a crowd of twelve thousand men assembled to look upon the dreaded reforming heretic. The council had not yet been opened. On the 10th a letter from one of the party states that as yet no ambassadors from any of the kings had arrived, and though John XXIII. was there with his cardinals, no representatives from his rivals, Gregory XII. and Benedict XIII., had presented themselves. What to do with the Bohemian Wickliffite was a problem which puzzled pope and cardinal, and after much discussion it was determined to suspend his excommunication, and permit him to frequent the churches freely, at the same time requesting him not to be present at the solemnities of the council, lest it might lead to disorder. Considerable apprehension, moreover, was felt as to a sermon to the clergy which he was understood to propose delivering. Huss himself was utterly blind as to the position which he occupied. On November 4, the day before the council was opened, he wrote to his friends at home that overtures had been made to him to settle matters quietly, but that he expected to win a great victory after a great fight. On the 16th he mentioned that when the pope was celebrating mass every one but himself had assigned to him some function in the ceremony, and he characterized the omission as neglect, evidently considering that his position entitled him to recognition and distinction.[505]

He knew that his opponents had not been idle, but he did not fear them. He had been preceded in Constance by two of his bitterest enemies--Michael of Deutschbrod, known as de Causis, and Wenceslas Tiem, Dean of Passau--and these, in a few days, were reinforced by a more formidable antagonist, Stephen Palecz, fully equipped with most dangerous extracts from Huss's writings. Wenceslas Tiem had been the bearer to Prague of the bull offering indulgences for the crusade against Ladislas of Naples, and his profitable trade had been broken up by Huss. Michael de Causis had been priest of the Church of St. Adalbert in the Neustadt of Prague; he had gained the confidence of King Wenceslas by pretending that he could render profitable some abandoned gold-mines near Iglau, and the king had intrusted him with a considerable sum of money for the purpose. After working a few days at the mines he decamped to Rome with the funds, which enabled him to purchase a commission as papal procurator "_de causis fidei_," whence his appellation. He had already, in 1412, sent to Rome charges against Huss, which the latter pronounced to be lies. The day after Huss's arrival in Constance, Michael posted on the church-doors that he would accuse him to the council as an excommunicate and suspect of heresy, but Huss treated the matter very lightly, and adopted the advice of his friends to take no notice of it until the arrival of Sigismund, who was not expected until Christmas. Meanwhile Huss himself gave ample cause for adverse comment. So perfect was his sense of innocence and security that he could not be content with prudent obscurity. Almost immediately on his arrival he began to celebrate mass in his lodgings. This attracted the people in crowds, and was necessarily a cause of scandal. Otto, Bishop of Constance, sent John Tenger, his vicar, and Conrad Helye, his official, to request Huss to cease, as he had long been under papal excommunication; but he refused, saying that he did not consider himself excommunicated, and that he would celebrate mass as often as he pleased. Although thus defied, the bishop, to avoid disturbance, contented himself with forbidding the people from attendance. Soon after this Huss placed himself, with some provisions, in a covered forage-wagon which was to be sent for hay. When the knights who were responsible for him could not find him, Henry of Lastenbock (Chlum) rushed to the burgomaster and demanded that he be searched for. The city was in an uproar; the gates were closed, horse and foot were sent in every direction to find him, and the circumstance was easily magnified into an attempt to escape.[506]

The sturdy Bohemian was evidently a troublesome subject to deal with. In the eyes of the faithful it was quite scandal enough to see at liberty a priest who had openly defied a papal excommunication, and had defended the recognized errors of Wickliff; there was, moreover, every probability that he would carry out his audacious design of preaching to the clergy a sermon in which the vices of the papal court and the shortcomings of the whole ecclesiastical body would be pitilessly and eloquently exposed, and it would be proved from Scripture that the whole system had no warrant in the law of Christ. The path which the pope and his cardinals had to tread in managing the council was likely to be tortuous and thorny enough without this additional element of disturbance and turbulence. It was far safer to disarm him at once, to anticipate his attacks by treating him legally as one accused of heresy and awaiting trial. Stephen Palecz and Michael de Causis, and a crowd of other Bohemian doctors and priests whom Huss had roughly handled, had already furnished ample material for his indictment, and in the inquisitorial process the first step was to make sure that the accused should not escape. Even had the case been one in which bail could be taken, Huss had the whole kingdom of Bohemia at his back; bail to any amount would be furnished and forfeited, and, once safe at home, he would have laughed to scorn a condemnation for contumacy. Such might reasonably be the arguments of the cardinals when the resolve was taken to arrest him, but the execution of the design was either inexcusably insidious, or the manifestation of irresolution which reached its conclusion only by degrees. On November 28 the cardinals, in consistory with the pope, sent to Huss's lodgings the Bishops of Augsburg and Trent, with Henry of Ulm, the burgomaster of Constance, to summon him at once before them to defend his faith. The envoys greeted him kindly, and though both he and John of Chlum protested that the summons was a violation of the safe-conduct, he immediately consented to go, although he said he had come to Constance to appear openly in the council, and not secretly before the cardinals. He added that he could not be imprisoned because he had a safe-conduct. John of Chlum and some friends accompanied him to the palace occupied by the pope. When the cardinals told him he was accused of disseminating many heresies, he replied that he would rather die than be convicted of a single one; he had come with alacrity to Constance, and if he was found in error he would willingly abjure. To this the cardinals said, "You have answered well." No further examination was had, but John XXIII., whose policy was to embroil the council with Sigismund, took occasion to ask John of Chlum whether Huss had an imperial safe-conduct, to which Chlum replied, "Holy father, you know that he has." Again the pope asked the question and received the same answer, but none of the cardinals requested to see the document. When the morning session was over, guards were placed over Huss and John of Chlum. The weary afternoon wore away in suspense, while the cardinals held another session in which Stephen Palecz and Michael de Causis were busy. The tedium of detention was only broken by a simple-looking Franciscan, who accosted Huss and asked for instruction on the subject of transubstantiation, and, on being satisfactorily answered, inquired about the union of humanity and divinity in Christ. Huss recognized that he was no simple inquirer, for he had asked the most difficult question in theology; he declined further colloquy, and on the retiring of the friar was informed by the guards that he was Master Didaco, renowned as the subtlest theologian of Lombardy. About nightfall John of Chlum was allowed to depart, while Huss was detained, and soon after Stephen and Michael came exultingly and told him that he was now in their power, and should not escape till he had paid the last penny. He was taken under guard to the house of the precentor of the cathedral, in charge of the Bishop of Lausanne, regent of the apostolic chamber, and after eight days was transferred to the Dominican convent on the Rhine. Here he was confined in a cell adjoining the latrines, where a fever soon caused his life to be despaired of. His sudden death would have been a most untoward event, and the pope sent his own physicians to restore him. It was in vain that his friends in Prague procured from Archbishop Conrad a declaration affirming that he had never found Huss to vary from the faith in a single word. His fate had already been virtually decided.[507]

John of Chlum's first thought on regaining his liberty was to hasten to the pope and to expostulate with him. When the safe-conduct had reached Constance, Chlum had at once exhibited it to John XXIII., who is reported to have declared, on reading it, that if his own brother had been slain by Huss the latter should be safe while in Constance so far as he was concerned. Now he disclaimed all responsibility and threw the blame on the cardinals.[508] This question as to the safe-conduct and its violation has been the subject of so warm a discussion, and it illustrates so completely a phase of the relations between the Church and heretics, that its brief consideration here is not out of place.

The imperial safe-conduct issued to Huss was in the ordinary form, without limitation or condition. It was addressed to all the princes and subjects of the empire, ecclesiastical and secular, and to all nobles and magistrates and officials, informing them that Huss was taken into the protection of the king and of the empire, and ordering that he be permitted to pass, remain, and return without impediment, and that all help which he might require should be extended to him. Thus it was not a simple _viaticum_ for protection during the journey from Bohemia, and it was not so regarded by any one. That it was intended as a safeguard during the council and the return home is shown by its issue, October 18, after Huss's departure from Prague, and its reaching him in Constance after his arrival there. That his imprisonment was at once looked upon as a gross violation of the imperial pledge is seen in the protests which John of Chlum affixed to the church doors on December 15, probably as soon as Sigismund could be heard from, and again on the 24th, when the king was near Constance and was to arrive the next day. This paper recited that Huss had come under the imperial protection and safe-conduct to answer in public audience all who might question his faith. That, in the absence of Sigismund, who would not have permitted it, and in contempt of his safe-conduct, Huss had been thrown into prison. That the imperial ambassadors had vainly demanded his release, and that when Sigismund comes he should plainly make known to all men his grief and indignation at this violation of the imperial pledge.[509]

The suggestion that the safe-conduct was a mere passport designedly insufficient to protect Huss is a recent discovery which would not have been left to the ingenuity of modern times if it could have been alleged during the warm debate which raged over the question at Constance. That nobody thought of it then is sufficient proof that such an excuse is untenable. Such an assertion would have been all-sufficient when, May 13, 1415, the Bohemians in Constance presented a memorial to the council in which they referred to the treatment of Huss as a violation of the safe-conduct. Yet in its answer the council had no thought of making such an allegation, while at the same time Sigismund's services in the quarrel with John XXIII. were too recent, and still too necessary, for the good fathers to inflict on him the disgrace of publicly declaring that they had righteously overruled his attempt to protect a heretic. They therefore had recourse to a lie manufactured for the occasion, by asserting, in spite of the notorious existence of the safe-conduct in Constance at the time of Huss's arrest, that witnesses worthy of credit had proved that it had not been procured until fifteen days after that occurrence, and therefore that no public faith had been violated in the proceedings. This argument, which Sigismund himself asserted to be false in the public session of June 7, is an admission that the public faith was violated. A single fact such as this outweighs all the special pleadings of modern apologists.[510]

Sigismund at first fully justified the confidence reposed in him by Huss and John of Chlum. He made no attempt to say that his letters were not intended to protect Huss from prosecution, but treated them as having been wrongfully violated. As soon as he had heard of the arrest he had ordered Huss's release with a threat to break open the prisons in case of refusal. On his arrival at Constance, on Christmas Day, his indignation was boundless and there was consequently great excitement. He protested that he would leave Constance, and, in fact, made a show of doing so; he even threatened to withdraw the imperial protection from the council, but was plainly told by the cardinals that they would themselves break it up unless he yielded. The hopes of Christendom had been raised to too high a pitch as to the results expected from the assemblage for him to venture on such a risk. Naturally faithless, his insistence was a matter of pride, and self-interest easily won the day. We have better materials for estimating his character than that of any other prince of the century, and from first to last we find fully justified the opinion of his contemporaries that he was wholly unworthy of trust. During the long negotiations between the Council of Basle and the Hussites, in which he took part, we see him endeavoring impartially to deceive both sides, making solemn engagements with no intention of fulfilling them, and regarded by all parties as utterly devoid of honor. Unfortunate in war and chronically impecunious, he was ever ready to adopt any temporary expedient to evade a difficulty, and to sacrifice his plighted word to obtain an advantage.[511]

It cost him little, therefore, to withdraw from the assertion of his own honor, and the matter was so speedily arranged that when on January 1, 1415, the council formally asked him that free course of justice be allowed in the case of Huss, in spite of the pretext of safe-conduct, he at once issued a decree declaring the council free in all matters of faith and capable of proceeding against all who were defamed for heresy; moreover, he pledged himself to set at naught the threats which were freely uttered of defending Huss at all hazards. Yet the discussion still continued during January, and the pressure on him from Bohemia was so strong that for a while he still fluctuated irresolutely, but, April 8, he formally revoked all letters of safe-conduct. Huss himself had no hesitation in declaring that he had been betrayed and that Sigismund had promised his safe return. His friends took the same position. In February an assembly of the magnates of Bohemia and Moravia, gathered at Mezeritz, sent an address to Sigismund pointing out in language more forcible than courtly the disgrace and humiliation attendant upon the disregard of the imperial faith. Again, in May, after the flight of John XXIII. had inspired new hopes as to the action of the council, two similar assemblages held at Brünn and Prague approached him with even stronger representations. It was all in vain. Sigismund had finally taken his position, and he redeemed his hesitation with great show of zeal. When, on June 7, Huss had his second hearing before the council, Sigismund thanked the prelates for their consideration for him as shown in their leniency to Huss, whom he sternly advised to submit, for he could look for no human help; "We will never protect you in your errors and pertinacity. Rather, indeed, than do so we will prepare the fire for you with our own hands." In the final session of July 6, Huss declared, "I came freely to the council under the public faith promised by the emperor, here present, that I should be free from all constraint, to bear witness to my innocence and to answer for my faith to all who call it in question." With this he fixed his eyes on Sigismund, who blushed deeply. The impression made in Bohemia by Sigismund's calculated faithlessness was ineffaceable. When, in 1433, the legates of the Council of Basle sought to throw the responsibility of the result at Constance on the false witnesses, John Rokyzana pertinently asked them how, if the council was inspired by the Holy Ghost, it could have been misled by perjurers, and he alluded to the violation of the safe-conduct in terms showing that it had been neither forgotten nor forgiven. This had been practically manifested a year earlier, in September, 1432, when the Council of Basle was eager to have Hussite deputies come to it, and the Bohemians would not stir without the most exaggerated provisions to guarantee their safety. Three safe-conducts had been furnished them--one from Sigismund, one from the council, and one from the city of Eger, but they still required others, from the city of Basle, the Margrave of Brandenburg, and the Counts Palatine Dukes of Bavaria, one of whom was the protector of the council. These were very different from that which had satisfied the simplicity of Huss. Thus Frederic of Brandenburg and John of Bavaria pledged themselves to furnish sufficient troops to conduct the Bohemians safely to Basle, to guard them while there, and to bring them back to any designated place in Bohemia. The princes, moreover, guaranteed the safe-conducts of Sigismund and the council, and agreed to forfeit honors and lands, to be entered upon and taken in possession by the Bohemians in case of any unredressed violation of the pledge. These precautions were superfluous, for the envoys had at their back the terrible Bohemian levies which could enforce respect for plighted faith; but when reconciliation had taken place and Sigismund was seated on the throne of his fathers, his guarantees were again regarded as valueless. In April, 1437, he urged John Rokyzana to visit the council, and on the latter alleging fear that he might be treated as was Huss at Constance, the emperor was greatly moved and exclaimed, "Do you think that for you or for this city I would do aught against mine honor? I have given a safe-conduct and so also has the council;" but Rokyzana was not to be tempted by this appeal to the forfeited imperial honor, and steadfastly refused to go.[512]

The explanation of the controversy over the violation of the safe-conduct is perfectly simple. Germany and especially Bohemia knew so little about the Inquisition and the systematic persecution of heresy that surprise and indignation were excited by the application to the case of Huss of the recognized principles of the canon law. The council could not have done otherwise than it did without surrendering those principles. To allow a heresiarch who had become conspicuous to all Christendom, like Huss, to evade the punishment due to his crimes on so flimsy a pretext as that of his having confided himself to them on a promise of safety to which the public faith was pledged, would have seemed to the most conscientious jurists of the council the most absurd of solecisms. In point of fact, the best men who were there--the Gersons, the Peter d'Aillys, the Zabarellas--were as unflinching as the worst creatures of the curia. It had been, as we have seen, too long a principle of inquisitorial practice that the heretic had no rights, and that the man accused of heresy by sufficient witnesses was to be treated as a heretic until he could clear himself, for any one to hesitate about putting it in force in this case. When Sigismund complained that he was dishonored by the imprisonment of Huss, the canonists of the council promptly assured him, in the words of a contemporary orthodox burgher of Constance, that "it could not and might not be in any law that a heretic could enjoy a safe-conduct," and though this was prejudging the case, we have seen how customary that was in all inquisitorial trials. These words Sigismund himself virtually repeated in his address to Huss in the session of June 7: "Many say that we cannot, under the law, protect a heretic or one suspect of heresy." When Huss's execution aroused the wildest indignation throughout Bohemia, expressed to the council in missives of scant courtesy, the council asserted its position in a decree formally adopted September 23, 1415, that no safe-conduct from any secular potentate could work prejudice to the Catholic faith, or could prevent any competent tribunal from trying, judging, and condemning a heretic or suspected heretic, even though, if trusting to the safe-conduct, he had come to the place of judgment and would not have come without it. So thoroughly did the council cause this to be recognized that, in 1432, in the Convention of Eger, stipulating the bases of negotiation between the Hussites and the Council of Basle, it was expressly agreed that no canons or decretals should be alleged to derogate, infringe, or annul the safe-conducts under which the Bohemian envoys were to appear before the council.[513]

The trial of Huss has been the subject of much indignant eloquence. It is the most conspicuous instance of an inquisitorial process on record, and to those unacquainted with the system of procedure which had grown up in the development of the Holy Office, its practical denial of justice has seemed a wilful perversity on the part of the council, while the sublimely pathetic figure of the sufferer has necessarily awakened the warmest sympathy. Yet, in fact, the only deviations of the council from the ordinary course of such affairs were special marks of lenity towards the accused. He was not subjected to the torture, as in the customary practice in such cases he should have been, and, at the instance of Sigismund, he was thrice permitted to appear before the whole body and defend himself in public session. When, therefore, we see how inevitable was his condemnation, how he could have saved himself only at the cost of burdening his soul with perjury and converting his remaining years into a living lie, we obtain a measure of the infamy of the system, and can in some degree estimate the innumerable wrongs inflicted on countless thousands of obscure and forgotten victims. In this aspect the trial is worthy of examination, for though it presents no novel points of procedure, except the concessions made to Huss, it affords an instructive example of the manner in which the inquisitorial process described in preceding chapters was practically applied.

The case against Huss was rendered stronger, almost at the outset, by the action of his friends at home. It must have been shortly after his arrival in Constance that Jacobel of Mies, who had succeeded Michael de Causis in the Church of St. Adalbert, commenced to administer communion in both elements to the laity, and thus gave rise to the most distinguishing and obstinate feature of Bohemian heresy. Zeal for the Eucharist had long been a marked peculiarity of religious devotion in Bohemia. The synod of 1390 promised an indulgence of forty days to all who bent the knee on the elevation of the host; and the frequent partaking of the sacrament was repeatedly and strenuously urged by those who have been classed as the precursors of Huss. Mathias of Janow had even ventured to recommend that the cup should be restored to the laity, but the question had never reappeared during the stormy years in which Huss and his friends had been battling for the Wickliffite doctrines. According to Æneas Sylvius, a certain Peter of Dresden, infected with Waldensian errors, had left Prague with the other Germans in 1409, but was driven from home on account of his heresy and took refuge again in Prague, where he supported himself as a teacher of children. He it was who suggested to Jacobel the return to the ancient practice of the Church; the heretics, delighted to find a question in which they were clearly in the right, eagerly embraced it. The custom spread to the churches of St. Michael, St. Martin, the Bethlehem Chapel, and elsewhere, in spite of the opposition of King Wenceslas and Archbishop Conrad, who vainly threatened secular punishments and ecclesiastical interdicts. Huss was speedily communicated with. He approved of the custom, as indeed he could not well help doing, and his tract in its favor, when conveyed to the disciples, gave a fresh impetus to the movement. It was in vain that on June 15, 1415, the council condemned the use of the cup by the laity, pronounced heretics all priests so administering the sacrament, ordered them to be handed over to the secular arm, and commanded all prelates and inquisitors to prosecute as heretics those who denied the propriety of communion in one element. For more than a century the Utraquists, or Calixtins, as they called themselves, were the ruling party in Bohemia. The consciousness of being in the wrong and of having to justify itself by all manner of trivial excuses rendered the council additionally eager to crush the insubordination of which Huss was the representative. [514]

We have seen that Huss was arrested November 28, 1414. Michael de Causis, Stephen Palecz, and others of his enemies had presented formal articles of accusation against him. These, drawn up in the name of Michael, accused him of maintaining the remanence of the substance in the Eucharist after consecration, of asserting the vitiation of the sacraments in the hands of sinful priests and denying the power of the keys under the same conditions, of holding that the Church should have no temporal possessions, of disregarding excommunication, of granting the cup to the laity, of defending the forty-five condemned articles of Wickliff, of exciting the people against the clergy, so that if he were allowed to return to Prague there would be a persecution such as had not been seen since the days of Constantine, and of other errors and offences. This was more than sufficient to justify his trial, and the process was commenced without delay by the appointment, December 1, of commissioners to examine him. These commissioners were, in fact, inquisitors, and the council at large served as the assembly of experts in which, as it will be remembered, final assent was given to the judgment. One of the commissioners at least, Bernardo, Bishop of Città di Castello, was already familiar with the matter, for only the year before, as papal nuncio in Poland, he had assisted in driving away Jerome of Prague. In addition to the articles of Michael de Causis there was a kind of indictment against Huss presented to the commissioners by the procurators and promoters of the council, reciting the troubles at Prague, his excommunication, and his teaching of Wickliffite heresies.[515]

At first the proceedings were pushed with a vigor which seemed to promise a speedy termination of the case. As soon as Huss recovered from his first sickness there was submitted to him a series of forty-two errors extracted from his writings by Palecz. To these he replied _seriatim_ in writing, explaining the false constructions which he asserted had been placed on some passages, defending some, and limiting and conditioning others. As he was denied the use of books, even of the treatises which were the source of the charges, these answers manifest a wonderful retentiveness of memory and quickness and clearness of intellect. Sometimes he was visited in his prison by the commissioners and personally interrogated. A Carthusian, writing from Constance, May 19, relates that the day before he had been present at such an examination and had never seen so bold and audacious a scoundrel or one who could so cautiously conceal the truth. On the other hand, we have his own account of one of these interviews. The commissioners were accompanied by Michael and Stephen to prompt them. Each article was read to him and he was asked if such was his belief; he replied, explaining the sense in which he held it. Then he would be asked if he would defend it, and he would answer no, but that he would stand to the decision of the council. Nothing could well seem more submissive or more orthodox, and under any other system of jurisprudence conviction might well appear impossible. Heresy, however, as we have seen, was a crime; once committed, even through ignorance, a simple return to the Church was not enough; belief in the errors must be admitted and then abjured, before the criminal could be considered as penitent and entitled to the substitution of perpetual imprisonment for the death-penalty. Huss was condemned on heresies which he had not held rather than those which he had taught.[516]

Thousands of miserable wretches had been convicted on a tithe of the evidence now brought against him. Stephen Palecz, a man of the highest repute, swore before the commissioners that since the birth of Christ there had been no more dangerous heretics than Wickliff and Huss, and that all who customarily attended the sermons of the latter believed in the remanence of the substance of bread in the Eucharist. What Palecz testified there were scores of others to substantiate and amplify. Witnesses were there in abundance to prove that he believed in the remanence of the bread, that the sacraments were vitiated in the hands of sinful priests, that indulgences were of no avail, that the Church of Rome was the synagogue of Satan, that heresy was to be overcome by disputation and not by force, that a papal excommunication was to be disregarded. Many of these errors he indignantly denied having entertained, but it was in vain. In vain he wrote out in prison, as early as March 5, 1415, his tract, "_De Sacramento Corporis et Sanguinis_," in which he declared that full transubstantiation took place; that God worked the miracle irrespective of the merits of the celebrant; that the body and blood of Christ were both in the bread and in the wine, and that he had taught this doctrine since 1401, before he was a priest. In vain, shortly before his execution, his devotion burst forth in a hymn in which he exclaimed:

"O quam sanctus panis iste, Tu es solus Jesu Christe, Caro, cibus, sacramentum, Quo non majus est inventum!"

In vain during his public audience of June 8 he disputed earnestly in favor of the same belief. The witnesses swore to the contrary. He had no right to call rebutting testimony, and could only appeal to God and his conscience. He was proved a heretic who must confess and abjure or be burned.[517]

His only possible line of defence, as has been shown above (Vol. I. p. 446) would have lain in disabling the witnesses for mortal enmity--for enmity such as would lead them to seek his life--and even this would not have been available against the errors which the commissioners had extracted, falsely, as he asserted, from his writings. As regards the witnesses, the commissioners made an unusual concession to him when, during his sickness in December, some fifteen of them were taken to his cell that he might see them sworn. Some of them, it is said, declared that they knew nothing; others were bitterly hostile to him. To this extent he knew some of the names, and others he was acquainted with because they were attached to depositions taken in advance at Prague for Michael de Causis, which by some means had fallen into the hands of Huss before he started for Constance. Some of these names, probably on this account, were attached to the article on the subject of remanence presented in the hearing of June 7, but in the final sentence no names are mentioned; the witnesses to each article are designated simply by titles, such as a canon of Prague, a priest of Litomysl, a master of arts, a doctor of theology, etc., and when Huss asked the name of one of them it was refused. This was strictly in accordance with rule.[518]

Yet the hostility of those who testified against him was notorious. At the place of execution he declared that he was convicted of errors which he did not entertain, on the evidence of false witnesses. The Bohemians in Constance, in their memorial of May 31, 1415, to the council, declared that the testimony against him was given by those who were his mortal enemies. At one time he or his friends thought of disabling them on this account, but when he asked the commissioners to permit him to employ an advocate who could take the necessary exceptions to the evidence, although they at first assented they finally refused, saying that it was against the law for any one to defend a suspected heretic. This, as we have seen, was strictly true, and if the maintenance of the rule may seem harsh, we must remember on the other hand that the friends of Huss were allowed unexampled liberty in working in his behalf. Their repeated memorials to the council and their efforts with Sigismund made them guilty of the crime of fautorship, and if there had been any disposition to enforce the law they could have been reduced to instant silence and have been grievously punished.[519]

It had not taken long to secure evidence more than ample for Huss's conviction, and if his burning had been the object desired it might have been speedily accomplished. We have seen, however, how much the Inquisition preferred a penitent convert to a cremated heretic, and in this case, perhaps more than in any other on record, confession and submission were supremely desirable. Huss, as a self-confessed heresiarch, would be deprived of all importance, and his disciples might be expected to follow his example: as a martyr, there was no predicting whether the result would be terror or exasperation. The milder customary methods of the Inquisition were therefore brought to bear to break down his stubborn obstinacy by procrastination, solitude, and despair. Had his judges desired to be harsh they could have had recourse to torture, which was the ordinary mode of dealing with similar cases. In this they would have been fully justified by law and custom. The less violent but equally efficient device of prolonged starvation could likewise have been employed, but was mercifully forborne. Yet the slower but not less wearing torture of indefinite imprisonment was not spared him. He was kept in the Dominican convent until March 24. Although his petition to be allowed to see his friends was refused, they were permitted to furnish him with writing materials, and he employed his enforced leisure in composing a number of tracts which, written without the aid of books, show his extensive and accurate acquaintance with Scripture and the Fathers. His sweet temper won the good-will of all who were brought in contact with him, and he gratefully alludes to the kindness with which he was treated both by his guards and by the clerks of the papal chamber. The winning nature of the man, as well as the gold of his friends, probably explains the correspondence which at this period he was able to maintain with them, though all communication with him was forbidden. Letters were conveyed back and forth clandestinely, sometimes carried in food, in spite of the vigilance of his enemies. Michael de Causis hovered around the gate, saying, "By the grace of God we shall burn that heretic who has cost me so many florins," and procuring that the wives of the guards, whom he suspected as letter-carriers, should be excluded. All this ceased when the quarrel between pope and council culminated. On March 20 John XXIII. secretly fled from Constance, when the guards placed over Huss delivered the keys to Sigismund and followed their master. The council then handed Huss over to the custody of the Bishop of Constance, who carried him in chains by night to the castle of Gottlieben, some miles from the city across the Rhine. His friends had requested that he should have a more airy prison, and the request was more than granted, for he was now confined in a room at the top of a tall tower. Though his feet were fettered he was able to move about during the day, but at night his arm was chained to the wall. As escape was impossible, the confinement was evidently intended to be punitive. Here he was completely isolated from all intercourse with his fellow-beings and left to his own dreary introspection. Disease added to the harshness of his prison. From the foul Dominican cell to the windy turret-room of Gottlieben, he was exposed to every variety of unwholesome conditions. Stone, an affection hitherto unknown to him, tormented him greatly. Toothache and headache combined to increase his sufferings. On one occasion a severe attack of fever, accompanied by excessive vomiting, so prostrated him that his guards carried him out of his cell thinking him about to die. Yet throughout all his letters from prison the beautiful patience of the man shines forth. For the enemies who were pursuing him to the death there is only forgiveness; for the trials with which God has seen fit to test his servant there is only submission. He overflows with gratitude for the steadfast affection of his friends, and sends touching requests of remembrance to them all; he teaches charity and gently points out the way to moral and spiritual improvement. There is neither the pride of martyrdom nor the desire for retribution; all is pious resignation and love and humility. Since Christ, no man has left behind him a more affecting example of the true Christian spirit than John Huss, while fearlessly awaiting the time when he should suffer for what he believed to be truth. He was one of the chosen few who exalt and glorify humanity. Yet he was but human, and the final victory was not won without the agony of self-conquest; while at times he comforted himself with dreams that God would not suffer him to perish, but that like Daniel and Jonah and Susannah he would be rescued when all help seemed vain.[520]

Hope seemed justified when the rupture occurred between the pope and the council. No sooner was Huss made aware of the flight of John XXIII. than he begged his friends to see Sigismund instantly and procure his liberation. The answer was his transfer to the tower of Gottlieben. When the pope was brought back a prisoner to the same castle of Gottlieben, and the council proceeded to try and condemn him as a simonist and dilapidator who was ruining the Church, while his personal vices and crimes, unfit for description, were a scandal to Christendom, such confirmation of all that the Wickliffites had urged might well seem to justifiy the expectation that Huss would be released with honor. John XXIII., however, with the wisdom of the children of the world, essayed no defence; he confessed all that was laid to his charge, submitted to the council, and was eventually, after a few years of imprisonment, rewarded by Martin V. with the lofty post of Dean of the Sacred College. Huss, with the constancy of the children of light, refused to perjure himself by confession, and there could be no escape for him.[521]

The council had been assembled to reform the Church, and was performing its duty in its own way, but nothing could be further from the thoughts of its most zealous members than the revolutionary reform of Wickliff and Huss, which would reduce the Church to apostolic poverty and deprive it of all temporal power. Besides the doctrinal errors, attested by abundant witnesses, there was ample material in Huss's writings to prove him a most dangerous enemy of the whole ecclesiastical system. He had written his tract "_De Ablatione Bonorum_" in defence of one of the forty-five condemned Wickliffite articles which asserted that the temporal lord could at will deprive of their temporalities ecclesiastics who were habitual delinquents. His tract "_De Decimis_" defended another of the articles, contending that no one in mortal sin could be a temporal lord, a prelate, or a bishop. John Gerson, one of the leading members of the council, had, as Chancellor of the University of Paris, before coming to Constance, drawn up a series of twenty such dangerous errors, extracted from Huss's treatise "_De Ecclesia_," and had urged Archbishop Conrad of Prague to extirpate the Wickliffite heresy by calling in the secular arm. Huss, in his deductions from the Wickliffite doctrines of predestination, had overthrown the very foundations of the hierarchical system. Among the cardinals in the council, Ottone Colonna had fulminated the papal excommunication which Huss had disregarded; Zabarella and Brancazio had been actively concerned in the proceedings against him before the curia--all of these and many others were thoroughly familiar with his revolutionary doctrines. What was to become of the theocracy founded by Hildebrand if such teachings were to pass unreproved, if their assertor was to be allowed to defend them and was only to be adjudged a heretic when overcome in scholastic disputation? The whole structure of sacerdotalism would be undermined and the whole body of canon law would be disregarded if so monstrous a proposition should be conceded. To the fathers of the council nothing could well seem more preposterous. Then Michael de Causis had intercepted a letter, written by Huss from prison, in which the ministers of the council were alluded to as the servants of Antichrist, and when this was brought to him by the commissioners he acknowledged its authenticity. Besides all this, he had remained under excommunication for suspicion of heresy during long years, during which he had constantly performed divine service, and he had called the pope an Antichrist whose anathema was to be disregarded. This of itself, as we have seen, constituted him a self-convicted heretic.[522]

It thus was idle to suppose that the council, because it had deposed John XXIII., would set free so contumacious a heretic, whose very virtues only rendered him the more dangerous. The inquisitorial process must go on to the end. Even during the bitterest and most doubtful portion of the contest, before the pope had been brought back to Constance, the successive steps of the trial received due attention. On April 17 four new commissioners were appointed to replace the previous ones, whose commissions from the pope were held to have expired, and the new commission was expressly granted power to proceed to final sentence. The only doubt arising was whether the condemnation of Wickliff, with which the case of Huss was inextricably related, should be uttered in the name of the pope or in that of the council, and its publication, May 4, in the latter form, showed that the assembly had no hesitation as to its duty in stamping out the heresy of the master and of the disciple. The active measures also, which during this period were taken against Jerome of Prague, were an indication not to be mistaken of the purposes of the council. Yet how little the friends of Huss understood the real position of affairs, and how false hopes had been excited by the rupture with the pope, is seen in their efforts at this juncture to press the trial to a conclusion. Under the procrastinating policy of the Inquisition it is quite possible that Huss would have been left to his solitary musings for a time indefinitely longer, in hopes that his resolution would at last give way, but for the efforts of his friends, who hoped to secure his release. On May 13 they presented a memorial complaining of his treatment, imprisoned in irons and perishing of hunger and thirst, without trial or conviction, in violation of the safe-conduct and of the pledged faith of the empire. They also remonstrated against the stories which were circulated to prejudice the case, that in Bohemia the blood of Christ was carried around in bottles, and that cobblers heard confession and celebrated mass. On May 16 the council replied to the effect that as far back as 1411 Huss had had a hearing before the Holy See and had been excommunicated, and had since then not only proved himself a heretic, but a heresiarch, by remaining under excommunication and preaching forbidden doctrines, even in Constance itself. As for the safe-conduct, we have seen how it was pretended to have been procured after the arrest. This elusive answer might have shown how the case was already prejudged by those who were to decide it; yet again, on May 18, the Bohemians presented a rejoinder urging promptitude. It was fully expected in Constance that a session would be held on the 22d, at which Huss would be condemned; but about this time attention was engrossed by the trial of John XXIII., who was at length deposed, May 29, and notified of his deposition on the 31st. Sigismund was now preparing for the voyage to Spain, which was expected to take place in June, and if anything was to be done with Huss before his departure further delay was inadmissible. Probably the Bohemians imagined that in some indefinable way he would yet save their leader. On May 31, therefore, they presented another memorial, reiterating their complaints about the safe-conduct and asking for a speedy public hearing. Sigismund entered during the discussion and strenuously urged the public audience, which was finally promised. Huss's friends further urged that he should be brought from his prison and be allowed a few days to recover from his harsh incarceration, and a show was made of complying with the request. On the same day John of Chlum had the satisfaction of forwarding to Gottlieben an order for the transmission of Huss to Constance. The next day, June 1, a special deputation from the council followed and presented to him the thirty articles which had been proved against him. They reported that he submitted himself to the council; but he maintained that he only agreed to do so on such points as he could be proved to have taught erroneously. At last he was brought to Constance in chains and confined in the Franciscan convent.[523]

In the routine of the inquisitorial process there was no necessity for further parley with the accused. The articles of heresy were proved against him, and if he continued obstinately to deny them delivery to the secular arm was a matter of course. There had been no intention of permitting such an innovation on the regular procedure as a public audience, but Sigismund could see, if the council could not, that its denial would have a most unfortunate influence on public opinion in Bohemia, where, in the prevailing ignorance as to the inquisitorial rules, it would be claimed that the council was afraid to face their champion and was forced to condemn him unheard. It could, in reality, have no influence on the result, for the case was already virtually decided, but Huss's friends could not recognize this, and an attempt was made, without success, to speculate on their eagerness, by a demand for two thousand florins to defray the alleged expenses. The audiences which followed were thus wholly irregular, and may be briefly dismissed as in no sense entitled to the importance which has commonly been ascribed to them.[524]

On June 5 a congregation of the council was held in the Franciscan convent. At first the intention was to carry out the ordinary inquisitorial procedure by considering, in the absence of Huss, the articles proved against him, but Peter Mladenowic hastened to John of Chlum and Wenceslas of Duba, who forthwith appealed to Sigismund. The latter at once sent the Palsgrave Louis and Frederic Burggrave of Nuremberg to the council, with orders that nothing should be done until Huss was present and his books were before them for verification. At length, therefore, he had the long-desired opportunity of meeting his adversaries, and defending himself in public debate. The books from which his errors had been extracted were laid before him--his treatise "_De Ecclesia_" and his tracts against Stephen Palecz and Stanislaus of Znaim--and he acknowledged them to be his. The articles were taken up in succession. He was required to answer to each a simple yea or nay, and when he desired to explain anything a scene of indescribable confusion arose. When he asked to be taught wherein he had erred he was told that he must first recant his heresies, which was strictly in accordance with the law. The day wore away in the discussion, and it had to be renewed on the 7th, and again on the 8th--Sigismund being present on these latter occasions. Huss defended himself gallantly, with wonderful quickness of thought and dialectical skill, but nothing could be more unlike the free debate which he had deluded himself into anticipating when he left Prague. Although the Cardinal of Ostia, who presided, endeavored to show fairness, the assembly at times became a howling mob with shouts of "Burn him! Burn him!" Interruptions were incessant, he was baited on all sides with questions, and frequently his replies were drowned in clamor. As a judicial act it was a mockery, but it served the purpose desired by Sigismund, and the Church had shown itself not afraid of public discussion with the heresiarch. At the end of the third day of this tumultuous wrangling Huss was exhausted almost to fainting. The night before toothache had deprived him of sleep, an attack of fever supervened, and six months of harsh imprisonment had left him little physical endurance. The proceedings terminated with the cardinals urging him to recant and promising him merciful treatment if he would throw himself upon the mercy of the council. He asked for another hearing, saying that he would submit if his arguments and authorities were insufficient. To this Cardinal Peter d'Ailly replied that the unanimous decision of the doctors was that he must confess his error in publishing the articles ascribed to him, he must swear never in future to believe or teach them, and must recant them publicly. Huss begged the council for the love of God not to force him to wrong his conscience, for abjuration meant the renunciation of an error previously entertained, and many of those brought against him he had never held. Sigismund asked him why he could not renounce errors which he said had been ascribed to him through perjury, and Huss had to explain to him the technical meaning of abjuration. One member of the council even objected to the accused being admitted to recantation, because he was not to be trusted, but this would have been wholly illegal. Even in the case of relapse the heretic always had a right to confess and recant, and the council was not to be betrayed into so manifest a denial of justice. It was impossible, in such a crowd of eager persecutors, to maintain the legal forms in all strictness, and there followed a number of volunteer accusations by individuals, on which an irregular discussion could not be repressed. Finally, as Huss was withdrawn, John of Chlum succeeded in giving him a friendly grasp of the hand and a word of sympathy. To the forlorn and despised heretic that touch and voice were a solace which nerved him for the yet harder trials of the succeeding weeks.[525]

His conscientious endurance was now to be tested to the uttermost. The wise general policy of the Inquisition, which preferred a confessed penitent to a martyr, was specially applicable in this case, for though Sigismund and the council underestimated the Bohemian fervor and obstinacy, the dullest could see that Huss confessing to having taught heresy and humbly seeking reconciliation would dispirit his followers, while no one could guess the extent of the conflagration which might spread from his pyre. Accordingly efforts were redoubled to induce him to confess and recant. Sigismund had prepared the way by assuring him during the public audience that no mercy would be shown him and that persistent denial would bring him to the stake, while he was not notified that behind the bland promises of mercy for submission there lay a sentence, which, while expressing joy at his humbly seeking absolution, pronounced him to be pernicious, scandalous, and seditious, and condemned him to degradation from the priesthood and to perpetual imprisonment. The council could do no otherwise, for this, as we have seen, was the punishment provided by the canons for repentant heretics, and yet in estimating the noble firmness of Huss we must bear in mind that no intimation of it seems to have been made to him.[526]

The obstacle in the way of Huss's abjuration lay not so much in the heresies which he had taught, as in those which he had not taught. On legal testimony his judges had found him guilty of all, but the worst of them, such as the remanence of the substance and the vitiation of the sacraments in polluted hands, he denied energetically ever to have held or expressed. Many of the errors extracted from his works, moreover, he repudiated, asserting that the passages had been garbled and perverted. In the eye of the law this denial was mere contumacy which only aggravated his guilt. The first condition of reconciliation was confessing under oath that he was guilty of having held these errors and then abjuring them. This was committing perjury to God in the most solemn fashion, and to a tender conscience like that of Huss it was worse than death. From this dilemma there was no escape. On the one hand lay the legal system, contrived with Satanic ingenuity and unalterable; on the other lay the purity of character which led Huss to reject without hesitation all the specious subterfuges suggested to beguile him.[527]

For a month the struggle continued, and no human soul ever bore itself with loftier fortitude or sweeter or humbler charity. He asked for a confessor, and intimated that he would prefer Stephen Palecz, the enemy who had hounded him to the death. Palecz came and heard his confession, and then urged him to abjure, saying that he ought not to mind the humiliation. "The humiliation of condemnation and burning is greater," replied Huss, "how then can I fear humiliation? But advise me: what would you do if you knew for certain that you did not hold the errors imputed to you? Would you abjure?" Palecz burst into tears and could only stammer, "It is difficult." He wept again freely when Huss begged his pardon for harsh words used in the heat of strife, and especially for calling him a falsifier. Another confessor was sent to him, who listened to him kindly and gave him absolution without insisting on preliminary abjuration, which was a most irregular concession--indeed, almost incredible. Many others were allowed to visit him in the hope of persuading him to confess and recant. One learned doctor urged his submission, saying, "If the council told me I had but one eye, I would confess it to be so, though I know I have two," but Huss was impervious to such example. An Englishman adduced the precedent of the English doctors who had, without exception, abjured the heresies of Wickliff when required to do so; but when Huss offered to swear that he had never held or taught the heresies imputed to him, and that he would never hold or teach them, his baffled advisers withdrew.[528]

The most formidable effort, however, was of an official character. At the final hearing of June 8, Cardinal Zabarella had promised him that a recantation in a form strictly limited would be submitted to him, and the promise was fulfilled in a paper skilfully drawn up, so as to satisfy his scruples. It represented him as protesting anew that much had been imputed to him which he had never believed, but that nevertheless he submitted himself in everything to the correction and orders of the council in abjuring, revoking, and retracting, and in accepting whatever merciful penance the council might prescribe for his salvation. Carefully as this was phrased to elude the difficulty, Huss rejected it without hesitation. In some matters, he said, he would be denying the truth, in others he would be perjuring himself. It were better to die than to fall into the hands of the Lord in the effort to escape momentary suffering. Then one of the fathers of the council--supposed to be the Cardinal of Ostia, the highest in rank of the Sacred College--addressed him as his "dearest and most cherished brother," with the most honeyed persuasiveness, begging him not to confide too absolutely in his own judgment. In making the abjuration it will not be he that condemns truth, but the council; as for perjury, if perjury there be, it will fall on the heads of those who exact it. Yet Huss was not to be enticed with such allurements; he could not quiet his conscience with casuistry such as this, and he deliberately chose death. In daily expectation of the dreadful sentence, he quietly put his simple affairs in order. Peter Mladenowic, the notary, had rendered him zealous service and should be paid out of his sixty grossi. His little debts were to be settled, and his books, apparently his only other property, were to be distributed. Kind remembrances were sent to his numerous friends, and they were told if they had learned any good of him to hold fast to it; if they had seen in him aught reprehensible to cast it aside. It was not that he was insensible, for he describes in moving terms the mental conflicts and agony which he endured in his hopeless prison, expecting each day to be led forth to an agonizing death, but the spirit rose superior to the flesh and remained victor in the struggle. Solicitous to retain the good opinion of his disciples, he managed to transmit to them, on June 18, a copy of the articles proved against him, together with a report of what his defence had been. Of those drawn from his writings he retracted none, although many he declared to be false and garbled. Those alleged against him by witnesses he mostly asserted to be lies, and he pathetically concluded, "It only remains for me to abjure and revoke and undergo fearful penance or to burn. May the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost grant me the spirit of wisdom and fortitude to persevere to the end and to escape the snares of Satan!"[529]

In hope of his weakening, the end was postponed until the approaching departure of Sigismund rendered further delay impossible. Yet effort was not abandoned till the last. On July 1 a deputation of prelates endeavored to persuade him that he could reasonably recant, but he handed them a written confession calling God to witness that he had never taught many of the articles; as for the rest, if there were error in them he detested it, but he could not abjure any of them. Puzzled by his unexpected tenacity of purpose, and earnestly desirous of avoiding the catastrophe, a final and unprecedented concession was agreed upon. On July 5 Zabarella and Peter d'Ailly sent for him and offered to let him deny the heresies proved by witnesses if he would abjure those extracted from his books. This was, in fact, an abandonment of all inquisitorial precedent, but Huss had persistently declared that most of the latter were fraudulently drawn, so as to attribute to him errors which he had never held, and he was immovable. As a last resource, later in the same day, Sigismund sent his friends John of Chlum and Wenceslas of Duba, with four bishops, to ask him whether he would persevere or recant, but his answer was as firm as ever. To the friendly adjuration of John of Chlum he replied with tears that he would willingly revoke anything in which he could be proved to have erred. The bishops pronounced him obstinate in error and left him.[530]

Thus the extraordinary efforts of the council to save itself and him were vain, and nothing remained but the inevitable final act of the tragedy. The next day, July 6, saw the most gorgeous _auto de fé_ on record. The cathedral of Constance was crowded with Sigismund and his nobles, the great officers of the empire with their insignia, the prelates in their splendid robes. While mass was sung, Huss, as an excommunicate, was kept waiting at the door; when brought in he was placed on an elevated bench by a table on which stood a coffer containing priestly vestments. After some preliminaries, including a sermon by the Bishop of Lodi, in which he assured Sigismund that the events of that day would confer on him immortal glory, the articles of which Huss was convicted were recited. In vain he protested that he believed in transubstantiation and in the validity of the sacrament in polluted hands. He was ordered to hold his tongue, and on his persisting the beadles were told to silence him, but in spite of this he continued to utter protests. The sentence was then read in the name of the council, condemning him both for his written errors and those which had been proved by witnesses. He was declared a pertinacious and incorrigible heretic who did not desire to return to the Church; his books were ordered to be burned, and himself to be degraded from the priesthood and abandoned to the secular court. Seven bishops arrayed him in priestly garb and warned him to recant while yet there was time. He turned to the crowd, and with broken voice declared that he could not confess the errors which he had never entertained, lest he should lie to God, when the bishops interrupted him, crying that they had waited long enough, for he was obstinate in his heresy. He was degraded in the usual manner, stripped of his sacerdotal vestments, his fingers scraped; but when the tonsure was to be disposed of an absurd quarrel arose among the bishops as to whether the head should be shaved with a razor or the tonsure be destroyed with scissors. Scissors won the day, and a cross was cut in his hair. Then on his head was placed a conical paper cap, a cubit in height, adorned with painted devils and the inscription, "This is the heresiarch." In accordance with the universal custom no proceedings by the secular authorities were regarded as necessary. As soon as the ecclesiastical court had pronounced him a heretic and handed him over, the laws against heresy operated of themselves. Sigismund, it is true, might have delayed the execution for six days, but this would have been so unusual as to have excited most unfavorable comment. There had already been afforded ample opportunity for resipiscence, and the convict could always still recant up to the lighting of the fagots. Nothing could reasonably be hoped from further postponement, and Sigismund's approaching departure counselled promptitude. He therefore briefly ordered the Palsgrave Louis to take charge of the culprit and to do to him as to a heretic. Louis called to Hans Hazen, the imperial vogt of Constance, "Vogt, take him as judged of both of us and burn him as a heretic." Then he was led forth, and the council calmly turned to other business, unconscious that it had performed the most momentous act of the century.[531]

The place of execution was a meadow near the river, to which he was conducted by two thousand armed men, with Palsgrave Louis at their head, and a vast crowd, including many nobles, prelates, and cardinals. The route followed was circuitous, in order that he might be carried past the episcopal palace, in front of which his books were burning, whereat he smiled. Pity from man there was none to look for, but he sought comfort on high, repeating to himself, "Christ Jesus, Son of the living God, have mercy upon me!" and when he came in sight of the stake he fell on his knees and prayed. He was asked if he wished to confess, and said that he would gladly do so if there were space. A wide circle was formed, and Ulrich Schorand, who, according to custom, had been providently empowered to take advantage of any final weakening, came forward, saying, "Dear sir and master, if you will recant your unbelief of heresy, for which you must suffer, I will willingly hear your confession; but if you will not, you know right well that, according to canon law, no one can administer the sacrament to a heretic." To this Huss answered, "It is not necessary: I am no mortal sinner." His paper crown fell off and he smiled as his guards replaced it. He desired to take leave of his keepers, and when they were brought to him he thanked them for their kindness, saying that they had been to him rather brothers than jailers. Then he commenced to address the crowd in German, telling them that he suffered for errors which he did not hold, sworn to by perjured witnesses; but this could not be permitted, and he was cut short. When bound to the stake and two cartloads of fagots and straw were piled up around him the palsgrave and vogt for the last time adjured him to abjure. Even yet he could have saved himself, but he only repeated that he had been convicted by false witnesses of errors never entertained by him. They clapped their hands and then withdrew, and the executioners applied the fire. Twice Huss was heard to exclaim, "Christ Jesus, Son of the living God, have mercy upon me!" then a wind springing up and blowing the flames and smoke into his face checked further utterance, but his head was seen to shake and his lips to move while one might twice or thrice recite a paternoster. The tragedy was over; the sorely-tried soul had escaped from its tormentors, and the bitterest enemies of the reformer could not refuse to him the praise that no philosopher of old had faced death with more composure than he had shown in his dreadful extremity. No faltering of the voice had betrayed an internal struggle. Palsgrave Louis, seeing Huss's mantle on the arm of one of the executioners, ordered it thrown into the flames lest it should be reverenced as a relic, and promised the man to compensate him. With the same view the body was carefully reduced to ashes and thrown into the Rhine, and even the earth around the stake was dug up and carted off; yet the Bohemians long hovered around the spot and carried home fragments of the neighboring clay, which they reverenced as relics of their martyr. The next day thanks were returned to God, in a solemn procession in which figured Sigismund and his queen, the princes and nobles, nineteen cardinals, two patriarchs, seventy-seven bishops, and all the clergy of the council. A few days later Sigismund, who had delayed his departure for Spain to see the matter concluded, left Constance, feeling that his work was done.[532]

The long-continued teaching of the Church, that persistent heresy was the one crime for which there could be no pardon or excuse, seemed to deprive even the wisest and purest of all power of reasoning where it was concerned. There was no hesitation in admitting that the pestilent heresy of the Hussites was caused by the simoniacal corruptions of the Roman curia, whereby many Christian souls were led to eternal perdition, and that it could not be eradicated until a thorough reformation was effected. Yet in place of drawing from this the necessary deduction, the feeling of the council is reflected by its historian in the blasphemous representation of Christ as recording with satisfaction the hideous details of the execution, and as saying that the wicked soul of the heretic commenced in temporal flame the torment which it would suffer through eternity in hell. The trial, in fact, had been conducted in accordance with the universally received practice in such cases, the only exceptions being in favor of the accused. If the result was inevitable, it was the fault of the system and not of the judges, and their consciences might well feel satisfied.[533]

Great was the disgust of the orthodox when they learned that this pious view of the matter was not entertained in Prague, and it required the most positive assurances of eye-witnesses to make them believe the incredible fact that, from king to peasant in Bohemia, there was practical unanimity in the belief that he who had been condemned and executed as a heretic was a martyr; that the popular songs sung in the streets represented him as one who had shed his blood for Christ, and that he was inserted in the calendar of saints, with his feast on July 6, the day of his execution. The good fathers, however, were not long in finding, from indubitable evidence, that they had made a grave mistake as to the Bohemian temper, and that they had only succeeded in inflaming the disease which they had sought to eradicate. As soon as the defiance excited in Bohemia could be learned in Constance, the council made haste to write, July 26, to the authorities there, protesting that Huss and Jerome of Prague had been treated with all tenderness, that the persistent heresy of the former had forced his delivery to the secular court for judgment, and that all similar heretics would be treated in the same manner. The Bohemians were exhorted to justify, by similar persecution, the good opinion of their orthodoxy which the council had formed from the report of the Bishop of Litomysl, whose popular name of Iron John sufficiently indicates his inflexibility. This good opinion was not sustained when a protest was received from the barons of Bohemia and Moravia, hastily drawn up as soon as the news of the execution had reached them--a protest which the council promptly ordered to be burned. Its letter of July 26 led to the convocation of a national assembly, in which an address was framed and received the signatures of nearly five hundred barons, knights, and gentlemen. In this they asserted their belief in Huss's purity and orthodoxy; that he had unjustly been put to death without confession or lawful conviction; that Jerome they supposed had shared the same fate; that the defamation of the kingdom for heresy was the work of liars, and that any one who asserted it, saving Sigismund, lied in his throat, was the vilest of traitors and the worst of heretics, and as such they would prosecute him before the future pope. A more dangerous symptom of rebellion was a pledge signed by the magnates, agreeing that all priests should be allowed to preach freely the truths of Scripture, that no bishop should be permitted to interfere with them unless they taught errors, and that no excommunications or interdicts from abroad should be received or observed.[534]

This was firing at long range with no result but mutual exacerbation, and it was probably the stimulus of Bohemian disaffection which led the council about this time to act vigorously in the case of Jerome of Prague, whom the Bohemian nobles had erroneously believed to have shared the fate of Huss.

Jerome of Prague stands before us as one of those meteoric natures which would be dismissed by the student as half mythical, if the substantial facts which are on record did not fix the details of his career with an exactness leaving no room for doubt. Born at Prague, his early training was received at a time when men's minds were beginning to waver in the confusion of the Great Schism, and under the impulsion of the Wickliffite writings. About the year 1400 he was brought under the influence of Huss, and thereafter he continued to be the steadfast adherent and supporter of the great protestant against the corruptions of the Church. Already, at Paris, Cologne, Heidelberg, and Cracow--at all of which he had been decorated with the honors of the universities--he had disturbed the philosophic calm of the schools with his subtleties on the theory of universals; at Paris, indeed, the disturbance had gone so far that John Gerson, the chancellor of the university, had driven him forth, perhaps retaining a grudge which explains his zeal in the prosecution of his old antagonist. His restless spirit left scarce a region of the known civilized world unvisited. At Oxford, attracted by the reputation of Wickliff, he had copied with his own hand the Dialogus and the Trialogus, and had carried those outpourings of revolt to Prague, where they added fresh fuel to the rapidly rising fires of Bohemian insubordination. On a second visit he had been seized as a heretic, and had escaped through the intervention of the University of Prague. In Palestine he had trodden in the footsteps of the Saviour and had bent in reverence at the Holy Sepulchre. In Lithuania he had sought to convert the heathen. In Russia he had endeavored to win over the schismatic Greek. In Poland and Hungary he had scattered the doctrines of Wickliff and Huss. Driven out of Hungary, in 1410, he was arrested and thrown in prison in Vienna, by the papal inquisitor and episcopal official, for teaching Hussitism and infecting with it the university of that city. His trial was commenced and a day was set for its hearing, prior to which he was allowed his liberty on his oath not to leave the city, under pain of excommunication. Claiming that an extorted oath was of no force, he escaped, and from Olmütz wrote a free-and-easy letter to the Bishop of Passau, suggesting that the prosecutors and witnesses may be sent to Prague, where the trial can be finished. The excommunication, indeed, followed him to Prague, but in the tumultuous condition of Bohemia it gave him no trouble, though the University of Vienna wrote to the University of Prague that by remaining more than a year under the excommunication he had incurred the guilt of heresy, for which he ought to be condemned; and meanwhile the converts whom he had made in Vienna continued to give occupation to the Inquisition, and the university which interfered in their behalf incurred the suspicion of heresy. In the stirring events which followed, his restless and aggressive spirit would not allow him to be inactive, and the popular impression of his reckless audacity is shown in the story of his hanging the papal bulls of indulgence around the neck of a strumpet and carrying her to the place where they were to be burned. In 1413 he again visited Poland, where in a short time he succeeded in causing an unprecedented excitement, and was speedily sent back to Prague. His whole life had been spent in intellectual digladiation, from his youthful philosophic contests to the maturer struggles with the overwhelming forces of the hierarchy. A layman, not in holy orders and unfurnished with priestly gown and tonsure, he had preached to admiring crowds of Majjars, Poles, and Czechs; nor was he wholly unskilled in the use of the arms of the flesh. On his trial he admitted that he had once been drawn into a quarrel with some monks in a monastery, when two of them attacked him with swords, and he defended himself successfully with a weapon hastily snatched from the hand of a bystander. His enemies, indeed, accused him of having, on another occasion, drawn a dagger on a Dominican friar, and of having been only prevented by force from stabbing him to the death. All of his contemporaries bear testimony to his wonderful powers. His commanding presence, his glittering eyes, his sable hair and flowing beard, his deep and impressive voice, his persuasive accents, enabled him to throw his influence over all with whom he came in contact; while his miraculous stores of learning, his unmatched readiness, and the subtlety of his intellect, rendered him an enemy of the Church only one degree less dangerous than the steadfast and irreproachable Huss.[535]

Jerome had watched from Prague the fate of his friend with daily increasing anxiety, and when the rupture between pope and council seemed to promise immunity for the opponents of hierarchical corruption he could not resist the temptation to aid in his rescue, and to assist in what appeared to be the approaching overthrow of the evils which he had so long combated. April 4, 1415, he came secretly to Constance, but speedily found how groundless were his hopes and how dangerous was the atmosphere of the place. Christann of Prachaticz, one of Huss's chief disciples, had recently ventured to visit Constance, had been arrested, and articles of accusation had been presented against him, when on the intervention of the Bohemian ambassadors he had been liberated under oath to present himself when summoned--an oath which he had forfeited by promptly escaping to Bohemia. Jerome contented himself with posting a notice on the walls affirming the orthodoxy of Huss; he withdrew at once to Ueberlingen and asked for a safe-conduct. The response was ambiguous, but, like a moth hovering around the fatal candle-flame, he returned to Constance, where, April 7, he affixed another notice on the church doors addressed to Sigismund and the council. It stated that he had come of his own free will to answer all accusations of heresy, and if convicted he was ready to endure the penalty, but he asked a safe-conduct in coming and going, and if incarcerated or treated with violence during his stay the council would be committing injustice of which he could not suspect so many learned and wise men. This senseless bravado is only to be explained by his erratic temperament, and it did not prevent him from taking precautions as to his safety. He suddenly changed his mind, and on April 9, after obtaining from the Bohemians at Constance testimonial letters, he escaped from the city, none too soon, for the officials were in search of his lodgings, which they discovered a few days after at the Gutjar, in St. Paul Street, where in his haste he had left behind him the significant memento of a sword. This time he no longer trifled with fate, but travelled rapidly towards Bohemia. At Hirsau, however, his impetuous temper led him into a discussion in which he stigmatized the council as a synagogue of Satan. He was seized April 24, and the papers found upon him betrayed him. John of Bavaria threw him into the castle of Sulzbach, notified the council of his capture, and in obedience to its commands he was forthwith carried thither in chains.[536]

Meanwhile the council had responded to his appeal by publishing, April 18, a formal inquisitorial citation summoning him, as a suspected and defamed heretic, the suppression of whom was its chief duty, to appear for trial within fifteen days, in default of which he would be proceeded against in contumacy. A safe-conduct was offered him, but it was expressly declared subject to the exigencies of the faith. Unaware of his capture, on May 2 a new citation was published and his trial as contumacious was ordered, and this was repeated on the 4th. On May 24 his captors brought him to the city loaded with chains, and took him to the Franciscan convent, where a tumultuous congregation of the council greeted his arrival. Here Gerson gratified his rancor against his old opponent, loudly berating him for having taught falsely at Paris, Heidelberg, and Cologne, and the rectors of the two latter universities corroborated the accusations. His replies were sharp and ready, but were drowned in the roar of fresh charges, mingled with shouts of "Burn him! Burn him!" Thence he was carried to a dungeon in the Cemetery of St. Paul, where he was chained hand and foot to a bench too high for him to sit on, and for two days he was fed on bread and water, until his friends ascertained his place of imprisonment and made interest with the jailer to give him better food. He soon fell dangerously sick and asked for a confessor, after which he was less rigorously fettered, but he never left the prison except for audience and execution.[537]

Stephen Palecz, Michael de Causis, and the rest were ready with their accusations, nor could there be difficulty in accumulating a mass of testimony sufficient to convict twenty such men as Jerome. His trial proceeded according to the regular inquisitorial process, the commissioners finding him much more learned and skilful than Huss; but, brilliant as was his defence when under examination, his nervous temperament unfitted him to bear, like Huss, the long-protracted agony. Sometimes with dialectic subtlety he turned his examiners to ridicule, at others he vacillated between obduracy and submission. Finally he weakened under the strain, while the rebellious attitude of the Bohemians doubtless led the council to increase the pressure. On September 11 he was brought before the assembly, where he read a long and elaborate recantation. Huss's sweetness of temper, he said, had attracted him, and his earnest exposition of Scripture truths had led him to believe that such a man could not teach heresy. He could not believe that the thirty articles condemned by the council were really Huss's, until he had obtained a book in Huss's own hand-writing, and on comparing them article by article he found them to be so. He therefore spontaneously and of free will condemned them, some of them as heretical, others as erroneous, others as scandalous. He also condemned the forty-five articles of Wickliff; he submitted himself wholly to the council, he condemned whatever it condemned, and he asked for fitting penance to be assigned him. He did not even shrink from a deeper degradation. He wrote to Bohemia that Huss had been justly executed, that he had become convinced of his friend's errors and could not defend them.[538]

This was not a strictly formal abjuration such as was customarily required of prisoners of the Inquisition, yet it might have sufficed. It was read before a private congregation of the council, and some more public humiliation was needed. At the next general session, therefore, September 23, Jerome was placed in the pulpit, where he repeated his recantation, with an explanation of an expression in it, adding a recantation of his theory of Universals, and winding up by a solemn oath of abjuration in which he invoked an eternal anathema on all who wandered from the faith and on himself if he should do so. He had been told that he would not be allowed to return to Bohemia, but might select some Swabian monastery in which to reside, on condition that he should write home, over his hand and seal, that his teaching and that of Huss were false and not to be followed. This he promised to do, as, indeed, he had already done, but he was remanded to his prison, though his treatment was somewhat less harsh than before.[539]

Had the council been wise, it would have treated him as leniently as possible. A dishonored apostate, his power of evil was gone, and generosity would have been policy. The canons, however, prescribed harsh prison for converted heretics, whose conversion was always regarded as doubtful, and the assembled fathers were too bigoted to be wise. The zealots converted the apostate to a martyr, whose steadfast constancy redeemed his temporary weakness, and regained for him the forfeited influence over the imagination of his disciples.

His remorse was not long in showing itself. Stephen Palecz, Michael de Causis, and his other enemies who were still hovering around his prison, soon got wind of his self-accusation. John Gerson, whose hostility seems to have been insatiable, readily made himself their mouthpiece, and in a learned dissertation on the essentials of revocations called the attention of the council, October 29, to the unsatisfactory character of that of Jerome. Some Carmelites, apparently arriving from Prague, furnished new accusations, and demands were made that he be required to answer additional articles. Some of the Cardinals, Zabarella, Pierre d'Ailly, Giordano Orsini, Antonio da Aquileia, on the other hand, labored with the council to procure his liberation, but on being actively opposed by the Germans and Bohemians and accused of receiving bribes from the heretics and King Wenceslas, they abandoned the hopeless defence. Accordingly, February 24, 1416, a new commission was appointed to hold an inquisition on him. The whole ground was gone over again in examining him, from the Wickliffite heresies to his exciting rebellion in Prague and contumaciously enduring the excommunication incurred in Vienna. April 27 the commissioners made their report, and the _Promotor Hæreticæ Pravitatis_, or prosecutor for heresy, accompanied it with a long indictment enumerating his offences. Jerome, resolved on death, had recovered his audacity; he not only, in spite of his recantation, denied that he was a heretic, but complained of unjust imprisonment and claimed to be indemnified for expenses and damages. His marvellous dialectical dexterity had evidently nonplussed the slower intellects of his examiners, who had found themselves unable to cope with his subtlety, for the council was asked, in conclusion, to diminish the diet on which he was described as feasting gluttonously, and by judicious starvation, the proper torment of heretics, to bring him to submission. Moreover, authority was asked to use torture and to force him to answer definitely yes or no to all questions as to his belief. If then he continues contumaciously to deny what has been or may be proved against him, he is to be handed over to the secular arm, in accordance with the canon law, as a pertinacious and incorrigible heretic. Thus with Jerome, as with Huss, the invariable principle of inquisitorial procedure was applied, that the denial of heretical opinions was simply an evidence and an aggravation of guilt.[540]

In this case, more than in that of Huss, the council seems to have taken upon itself the part of an inquisitorial tribunal, with its commissioners simply as examiners to take testimony, possibly because Jerome had refused to accept them as judges on account of enmity towards him. There is no evidence that it consented to the superfluous infamy of torturing, or even of starving its victim. The commissioners were left to their own devices as to extracting a confession, and May 9 they made another report of the whole case from beginning to end, for what object is not apparent, unless to demonstrate their helplessness. Having thus wearied them out, Jerome finally promised to answer categorically before the council. Perhaps it was curiosity to hear him, perhaps the precedent set in the case of Huss weighed with the fathers. The concession was made to him, and at a general session held May 23 he was brought in and the oath was offered to him. He refused to take it, saying that he would do so if he would be allowed to speak freely, but if he was only to say yes or no he would not. As the articles were read over he remained silent as to a portion, while to the rest he answered affirmatively or negatively, occasionally making a distinction, and answering with admirable readiness the clamors and interruptions which assailed him from all sides. The day wore away in this, and the completion of the hearing was adjourned till the 26th. Again the same scene occurred till the series of articles was exhausted, when the chief of the commissioners, John, Patriarch of Constantinople, summed up, saying that Jerome was convicted of fourfold heresy; but as he had repeatedly asked to be heard he should be allowed to speak, in order to silence absurd reflections on the council; moreover, if he was prepared to confess and repent, he still would be received to mercy, but if obdurate, justice must take its course.[541]

Of the scene which followed we have a vivid account in a letter to Leonardo Aretino from Poggio Bracciolini, who attended the council as apostolic secretary. Poggio had already been profoundly impressed with the quickness and readiness of a man who for three hundred and forty days had lain in the filth and squalor of a noisome dungeon, but now he breaks forth in unqualified admiration--"He stood fearless, undaunted, not merely despising death, but longing for it, like another Cato. O man worthy of eternal remembrance among men! If he held beliefs contrary to the rules of the Church I do not praise him, but I admire his learning, his knowledge of so many things, his eloquence, and the subtlety of his answers." In the midst of that turbulent and noisy crowd, his eloquence was so great that Poggio evidently thinks he would have been acquitted had he not courted death.[542]

His address was a most skilful vindication, gliding with seemingly careless negligence over the dangerous spots in his career--for his whole life had been made the subject of indictment--and giving most plausible explanations of that which could not be suppressed, as though the Bohemian troubles had been solely due to political differences. As for his recantation, his judges had promised him kindly treatment if he would throw himself on the mercy of the council. He was but a man, with a human dread of a dreadful death by fire; he had weakly yielded to persuasion, he had abjured, he had written to Bohemia as required, he had condemned the teaching of John Huss. Here he rose to the full height of his manly and self-devoted eloquence. Huss was a just and holy man, to whom he would cleave to the last; no sin that he had ever committed so weighed upon his conscience as his cowardly abjuration, which now he solemnly revoked. Wickliff had written with a profounder truth than any man before him, and dread of the stake alone could have induced him to condemn such a master, saving only the doctrine on the sacrament, of which he could not approve. Then he burst forth into a ringing invective on the vices of the clergy, and especially of the Roman curia, which had stimulated Wickliff and Huss to their efforts for reform. The good fathers of the council might be stunned for a moment by the fierce self-sacrifice of the man who thus deliberately threw away his life, but they soon recovered themselves, and quietly assigned the following Saturday for his definite sentence. Although, as a self-confessed relapsed, he was entitled to no further consideration, they proposed, with unusual mercy, to give him four days to reconsider and repent, but he had been addressing an audience far beyond the narrow walls of the Cathedral of Constance, and his words were seeds which sprouted forth in armed warriors.[543]

On May 30 the final acts of the tragedy were hurried through; the council assembled early, and by ten o'clock Jerome was at the stake. After the mass, the Bishop of Lodi preached a sermon. He had been selected to perform the same office at the condemnation of Huss, and the brutality of his triumph over the unfortunate prisoner on this occasion even exceeded his former effort. The charity and tenderness with which Jerome had been treated ought to have softened his heart, even had the recollection of his crimes failed to do so. A comparison was drawn between the favor shown him and the severity customary with suspected heretics. "You were not tortured--I wish you had been, for it would have forced you to vomit forth all your errors; such treatment would have opened your eyes, which guilt had closed." The nobles present were called upon to mark how Huss and Jerome, two base-born men, plebeians of the lowest rank and unknown origin, had dared to trouble the noble kingdom of Bohemia, and what evils had sprung from the presumption of those two peasants. Then Jerome in a few dignified sentences replied, asserting his conscientiousness and deploring his condemnation of Wickliff and Huss. Cardinal Zabarella, he said, was winning him over when his judges were changed and he would not plead to new ones. His abjuration was read to him; he acknowledged it; he said it had been extorted by the dread of fire. Then the prosecutor asked for a definite sentence in writing against him, and the head commissioner, John of Constantinople, read a long one condemning him as a supporter of Wickliff and Huss, and ending with the declaration that he was a relapsed heretic and anathematized excommunicate. To this the council unanimously responded "_Placet_." There was no pretence of asking mercy for him. He was handed over to the secular power with a command that it should do its duty under the sentence rendered. Not being in orders, there was no ceremony of degradation to be performed, but a tall paper crown with painted devils was brought. He tossed his cap among the prelates and put on the crown, saying, "Our Lord Jesus Christ, when about to die for me, wore a crown of thorns. In place of that, I gladly bear this for his sake," and with this he was hurried off to execution on the same spot where Huss had suffered.[544]

The details of the execution were much the same, except that Jerome was stripped and a cloth tied around his loins. He sang the Creed and a litany, and when his voice could no longer be heard in the flames his lips were still seen to move as though praying to himself; after his beard was burned off, a blister the size of an egg was seen to form itself, showing that he still was alive, and his agony was unusually prolonged, through his extraordinary strength and vitality. One eye-witness says that he shrieked awfully, but other unfriendly witnesses declare that he continued praying till his voice was checked by the fire, and Poggio, who was present, was much impressed with his cheerful courage to the last. When bound to the stake, the executioner offered to light the fire from behind, where he could not see it, but he refused: "Come forward," he said, "and light the fire where I can see it. Had I feared this, I would not have been here." Æneas Sylvius likewise couples him with Huss for the unsurpassed constancy of his death. After it was over, his bedding, shoes, cap, and all his personal effects were brought from his dungeon and thrown upon the pile, that no relic of him might be left, and the ashes were cast into the Rhine.[545]

It only remained to secure the submission of John of Chlum, the courageous defender of Huss. He had remained in Constance and was in the power of the council. What means were adopted for his abasement do not appear, but, on July 1, he swore to maintain the faith, admitted that Huss and Jerome had suffered justly, and desired letters of his declaration to be made, that he might send them to Bohemia.[546]