A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume II

by Henry Charles Lea

Nothing, probably, could have averted an eventual explosion; but, for the moment, it seemed that Sigismund was about to enter on peaceable possession of his kingdom, and any subsequent rebellion would have been attempted under great disadvantages. Suddenly, however, an act of inconsiderate and gratuitous fanaticism set all Bohemia aflame. Some trouble in Silesia had called Sigismund to Breslau, where he was joined by a papal legate armed by Martin V. with power to proclaim a crusade with Holy Land indulgences. John Krasa, a merchant of Prague, who chanced to be there, talked over boldly about the innocence of Huss; he was arrested, persisted in his faith, and was condemned by the legate and prelates who were with Sigismund to be dragged by the heels at a horse’s tail to the place of execution and burned. While lying in prison he was joined by Nicholas of Bethlehem, a student of Prague, who had been sent by the city to Sigismund to offer to receive him if he would not interfere with the use of the cup to the laity. In place of listening to him he was tried as a heretic and thrown into prison to await the result. Krasa encouraged him to endure to the last, and both were brought forth on March 15, 1420, to undergo the punishment. As the feet of Nicholas were about to be attached to the horse, his courage gave way and he recanted. Krasa was undaunted; the legate followed him, as he was dragged to the place of execution, exhorting him to repent, but in vain; he was attached half-dead to the stake and duly burned. Two days later, March 17, the legate proclaimed the crusade. The die was cast; the Church so willed it, and a new Albigensian war was inevitable.[556]

There was wavering no longer in Bohemia. The events at Breslau united all, with the exception of a few barons and such Germans as were left, in resistance against Sigismund. The preachers thundered against him as the Red Dragon of the Apocalypse. By April 3 the citizens of Utraquist Prague had bound themselves by a solemn oath with the Taborites to defend themselves against him to the last, and were busy in preparations to sustain a siege. Sigismund’s forces were wholly inadequate for the conquest of a virtually united kingdom. After an advance to Kuttenberg he was forced to withdraw and await the assembling of the crusade, which took long to organize, and did not burst in its fury over Bohemia until the following year, 1421. It was on a scale to crush all resistance. In its mass of one hundred and fifty thousand men all Europe was represented, from Russia to Spain and from Sicily to England. The reunited Church aroused all Christendom to stamp out the revolt, and the treasures of salvation were poured lavishly forth to exterminate those who dared to maintain the innocence of Huss and Jerome, and to take the Eucharist as all Christians had done until within two hundred years. The war was waged with desperation. Five times during 1421 the crusaders invaded Bohemia, and five times they were beaten back disastrously. The gain to the faith was scarce perceptible, for Sigismund stripped the churches of all their precious ornaments, declaring that he was not impelled by lack of reverence, but by a prudent desire to prevent their falling into the hands of the Hussites. Both sides perpetrated cruelties happily unknown save in the ferocity of religious wars. During the siege of Prague all Bohemians captured were burned as heretics whether they used the cup or not; and on July 19 the besieged demanded of the magistrates sixteen German prisoners, whom they took outside of the walls and burned in hogsheads in full sight of the invading army. We can estimate the mercilessness of the strife when it was reckoned among the good deeds of George, Bishop of Passau, who accompanied Albert of Austria, that by his intercession he saved the lives of many Bohemian captives.[557]

It is not our province to follow in detail this bloody struggle, in which for ten years the Hussites successfully defied all the forces that Martin and Sigismund could raise against them. When the crusaders came they presented a united front, but within the line of common defence they were torn with dissensions, bitter in proportion to their exaltation of religious feeling. The right of private judgment when once established, by admitting the doctrines of Wickliff and Huss, was not easily restrained, nor could it be expected that those who were persecuted would learn from persecution the lesson of tolerance. In the wild tumult, intellectual, moral, and social, which convulsed Bohemia, no doctrines were too extravagant to lack believers.

In 1418 it is related that forty Pikardi with their wives and children came to Prague, where they were hospitably received and cared for by Queen Sophia and other persons of rank. They had no priest, but one of their number used to read to them out of certain little books, and they took communion in one element. They vanish from view without leaving a trace of their influence, and were doubtless Beghards driven from their homes and seeking a refuge beyond the reach of orthodoxy. Yet their name remained, and was long used in Bohemia as a term of the bitterest contempt for those who denied transubstantiation. Subsequently, however, there was a more portentous demonstration of the Brethren of the Free Spirit. A stranger, said to come from Flanders, whose name, “Pichardus,” shows evidently that he was a Beghard, disseminated the doctrine of the Brethren, and among other things that nakedness was essential to purity, which we have seen was one of the extravagances of the sect. The practice was one which in a more settled state of society could not have been ventured on, but in Bohemia he found little difficulty in obtaining quite a large following of both sexes, with whom he settled on an island in the river Luznic, and dignified them with the name of Adamites. Perhaps they might have flourished undisturbed had not fanaticism, or possibly retaliation for aggression, led them to make a foray on the mainland and slay some two hundred peasants, whom they styled children of the devil. Ziska’s attention being thus drawn to them, he captured the island and exterminated them. Fifty of them, men and women, were burned at Klokot, and those who escaped were hunted down and gradually shared the same fate, which they met with undaunted cheerfulness, laughing and singing as they went to the stake.[558]

In the sudden removal of ecclesiastical repression of free thought it was inevitable that unbalanced minds should riot in extravagant speculation. Among the zealots who subsequently developed into the sect of the Taborites there was at first a strong tendency to apocalyptic prophecy suited to the times. First, there was to be a period of unsparing vengeance, during which safety could be found only in five specified cities of refuge, after which would follow the second advent of Christ, and the reign of peace and love among the elect, and earth would become a paradise. At first, the destruction of the wicked was to be the work of God, but as passions became fiercer it was held to be the duty of the righteous to cut them off without sparing. These Chiliasts or Millenarians had for their leader Martin Huska, surnamed Loquis, on account of his eloquence, and numbered among them Coranda and other prominent Taborite priests. Waldensian influence is visible in some features of their faith, and they rendered themselves peculiarly obnoxious by the denial of transubstantiation. For this they were exposed to pitiless persecution wherever their adversaries could exercise it. One of their leading members, a cobbler of Prague, named Wenceslas, was burned in a hogshead, July 23, 1421, for refusing to rise at the elevation of the host, and soon afterwards three priests shared the same fate because they refused to light candles before the sacrament. Martin Loquis himself was arrested in February of the same year, but was released at the intercession of the Taborites, and set out with a companion to seek Procopius in Moravia. At Chrudim, however, the travellers were arrested, and were burned at Hradisch after two months of torture vainly inflicted to wean them from their errors and force them to reveal the names of their associates. As a distinct sect the Chiliasts speedily disappear from view, but their members remained a portion of the Taborites, the development of whose opinions they profoundly influenced. In the delegation sent to Basle, in 1433, Peter of Zatce, who represented the Orphans, had been a Chiliast.[559]

Thus these minor sects vanished as parties organized themselves in a permanent form, and the Bohemian reformers are found divided into two camps—the moderates, known as Calixtins or Utraquists, from their chief characteristic, the administration of the cup to the laity, and the extremists, or Taborites.

The Calixtins virtually regarded the teachings of Huss and Jacobel of Mies, as a finality. When, after the death of Wenceslas, the necessity of some definite declaration of principles was felt, the University of Prague, on August 1, 1420, adopted, with but one dissenting voice, four articles which became for more than a century the distinguishing platform of their sect. As concisely enunciated by the University they appeared simple enough: I. Free preaching of the Word of God; II. Communion in both elements for the laity; III. The clergy to be deprived of all dominion over temporal possessions, and to be reduced to the evangelical life of Christ and the apostles; IV. All offences against divine law to be punished without exception of person or condition. These four articles were speedily accepted by the strongly Calixtin community of Prague, and were proclaimed to the world in various forms which added to their completeness and rendered their purport definite. Any one was declared a heretic who did not accept the Apostles’’, Athanasian, and Nicene creeds, the seven sacraments of the Church, and the existence of purgatory. Offences against the law of God were declared to be worthy of death, both of the offender and those who connived at them, and were defined to be, among the people, fornication, banqueting, theft, homicide, perjury, lying, arts superfluous, deceitful, and superstitious, avarice, usury, etc.: among the clergy, simoniacal exactions, such as fees for administering the sacraments, for preaching, burying, bell-ringing, consecration of churches and altars, as well as the sale of preferment; also concubinage and fornication, quarrels, vexing and spoiling the people with frivolous citations, greedy exactions of tribute, etc.[560]

Upon this basis the Calixtin Church proceeded to organize itself in a council held at Prague in 1421. Four leading doctors, John of Przibram, Procopius of Pilsen, Jacobel of Mies, and John of Neuberg, were made supreme governors of the clergy throughout the kingdom, with absolute power of punishment. No one was to teach any new doctrine without first submitting it to them or to a provincial synod. Transubstantiation was emphatically affirmed as well as the seven sacraments. The daily use of the Eucharist was recommended to all, including infants and the sick. The canon of the mass was simplified and restored to primitive usage. Auricular confession was prescribed, as well as the use of the chrism and of holy water in baptism. Clerks were to be distinguished by tonsure, vestments, and conduct. Every priest was to possess a copy of the Scriptures, or at least of the New Testament, and stringent regulations were adopted for the preservation of priestly morality, including the prohibition of their protection by any layman after conviction.[561]

Thus the Calixtin Church kept as close as possible to the old lines. It accepted all Catholic dogmas, even the power of the keys in sacramental penance, and only was a protest and revolt against the abuses which had grown out of the worldly aspirations of the clergy. It was a Puritan reform, and it founded a Puritan society. When, after the reconciliation effected at Basle, on the basis of the four articles, Sigismund, in 1436, held his court in Prague, the Bohemians speedily complained that the city was becoming a Sodom with dicing, tavern-haunting, and public women. It must have sounded strange to them to be coolly told by a Christian prelate, the Bishop of Coutances, who was the legate of the council empowered to enforce the settlement, that it would be well if public sins could be eradicated, but that strumpets must be tolerated to prevent greater evils.[562]

The Calixtins thus sought to keep themselves strictly within the pale of orthodoxy, and deemed themselves greatly injured and insulted by the appellation of heretic. After the reconciliation of 1436 one of their most constant causes of complaint was that they were still stigmatized as heretics, and that the Council of Basle would not issue letters proclaiming to Christendom that they were regarded as faithful sons of the Church. In 1464, after successive popes had repeatedly refused to ratify the pacification of Basle and had excommunicated as hardened heretics George Podiebrad and all who acknowledged him as king, when George sent an embassy to Louis XI. of France, Kostka of Postubitz, the envoy, and his attendants were more than once surprised and annoyed to find that the people of the towns through which they passed were disposed to regard them as heretics. The position of the Bohemian Calixtins was an anomalous one which has no parallel in the history of mediæval Christendom.[563]