VIII. THE HUSSITES

VIII. THE HUSSITES

The Council of Constance, after eighteen months of labor, had disposed of Huss and Jerome. The methods employed had been the only ones known to the Church, the only ones possible to the council. Two centuries earlier the corruptions of the Church were recognized as the cause and excuse of the revolt of the Albigenses and Waldenses, but the revolt was ruthlessly put down without an effective effort to remove the cause. Now again unchecked corruption had produced another revolt and the same policy was followed--to leave untouched the profitable abuses and punish those who refused to tolerate them, and who rejected the principles out of which such abuses inevitably sprang. The council could do no otherwise; the traditions of procedure established in the subjugation of the Albigenses and the succeeding heresies furnished the only precedent and machinery through which it could act. Again a religious revolt had been provoked, and again that revolt was nursed and intensified till its only recognized cure lay in the sword of the crusader.

The prelates and doctors assembled in Constance could not hesitate for a moment as to their duty. Canon law and inquisitorial practice had long established the principle that the only way to meet heresy--and opposition to the constituted authorities of the Church was heresy--was by force, as soon as argument was found ineffective. The disobedient son of the Church who would not submit was to be cast out, after due admonition, and casting out meant that he should have in this world a wholesome foretaste of the wrath to come, in order to serve as an edifying example. Accordingly the council addressed itself, as a matter of course, to the task of widening the breach with Bohemia, of consolidating and intensifying the indignation caused by the execution of Huss and Jerome, and to stigmatizing as heresy the belief which was now professed by the majority of Bohemians.

The council had proposed to follow up the execution of Huss by an immediate application of inquisitorial methods to the whole Bohemian kingdom, but, at the instance of John, Bishop of Litomysl, it had commenced by the expedient of giving notice in its letter of July 26, 1415. This, as we have seen, only added to the exasperation of Bohemia, and on August 31 it issued to Bishop John letters commissioning him with inquisitorial powers to suppress all heresy in Bohemia; if he could not perform his office in safety elsewhere he was authorized to summon all suspect to his episcopal seat at Litomysl. Wenceslas dutifully issued to him a safe-conduct, but the irate Bohemians were already ravaging his territories, and he consulted prudence in not venturing his person there. The canons evidently could not be enforced amid a people so exasperated; so, on September 23, after listening to the recantation of Jerome, the council tried a further expedient, by a decree appointing John, Patriarch of Constantinople, and John, Bishop of Senlis, as commissioners (or, rather, inquisitors) to try all Hussite heretics. They were empowered to summon all heretics or suspects to appear before them in the Roman curia by public edict, to be posted in the places frequented by such heretics, or in the neighboring territories if it were dangerous to attempt it at the residences of the accused, and such edicts might be either general in character or special. This was strictly according to rule, and if the object had been to secure the legal condemnation in absentia of the mass of the Bohemian nation, it was well adapted for the purpose; but as the nation was seething in revolt, and was venerating Huss and Jerome with as much ardor as was shown in Rome to St. Peter and St. Paul, its only effect was to strengthen the hands of the extremists. This was seen when, on December 30, 1415, an address was delivered to the council, signed by four hundred and fifty Bohemian nobles, reiterating their complaints of the execution of Huss, and withdrawing themselves from all obedience. This hardy challenge was accepted February 20, 1416, by citing all the signers and other supporters of Huss and Wickliff to appear before the council within fifty days and answer to the charge of heresy, in default of which they were to be proceeded against as contumacious. As it was not safe to serve this citation on them personally, or, indeed, anywhere in Bohemia, it was ordered to be affixed on the church doors at Constance, Ratisbon, Vienna, and Passau. This was followed up with all the legal forms; the citations were affixed to the church doors, and record made in Constance May 5, in Passau May 3, in Vienna May 10, and in Ratisbon June 14, 21, and 24. On June 3 the offenders were declared to be in contumacy, and on September 4 the further prosecution of the matter was intrusted to John of Constantinople.[547]

Here the affair seems to have dropped, for it had long been evident that the inquisitorial methods were of no avail when the accused constituted the great body of a nation. As early as March 27, 1416, the council had, without waiting to see the result of its judicial proceedings, resolved to appeal to force, if yet there was sufficient zeal for orthodoxy in Bohemia to render such appeal successful. The fanatic John of Litomysl was armed with legatine powers, and despatched with letters to the lords of Hazemburg, John of Michaelsburg, and other barons known as opponents of the popular cause. The council recited in moving terms its patience and tenderness in dealing with Huss, who had perished merely through his own hardness of heart. In spite of this, his followers had addressed to the council libellous and defamatory letters, affording a spectacle at once horrible and ludicrous. Heresy is constantly spreading and contaminating the land, priests and monks are despoiled, expelled, beaten, and slain. The barons are therefore summoned, in conjunction with the legate, to banish and exterminate all these persecutors, regardless of friendship and kinship. Bishop John’s mission was a failure, in spite of letters written by Sigismund, March 21 and 30, in which he thanked the Catholic nobles for their devotion, and warned the Hussite magnates that, if they persisted, Christendom would be banded against them in a crusade. The University of Prague responded, May 23, with a public declaration, certifying to the unblemished orthodoxy and supereminent merits of Huss. His whole life spent among them had been without a flaw; his learning and eloquence had been equalled by his charity and humility; he was in all things a man of surpassing sanctity, who sought to restore the Church to its primitive virtue and simplicity. Jerome, also, whom the university seems to have supposed already executed, was similarly lauded for his learning and strict Catholic orthodoxy, and was declared to have in death triumphed gloriously over his enemies. In this the university represented with moderation the prevailing opinion in Bohemia. The more earnest disciples did not hesitate to declare that the Passion of Christ was the only martyrdom fit to be compared with that of Huss.[548]

There was evidently no middle term which could reconcile conflicting opinions so firmly entertained; and, as the Catholic nobles of Bohemia could not be stimulated to undertake a devastating civil war, the council naturally turned to Sigismund. In December, 1416, a doleful epistle was addressed to him, complaining that the execution of Huss and Jerome, in place of repressing heresy, had rendered it more violent than ever. As though men condemned to Satan by the Church were the chosen of God, the two heretics were venerated as saints and martyrs, their pictures shrined in the churches, and their names invoked in masses. The faithful clergy were driven out, and their lot rendered more miserable than that of Jews. The barons and nobles refuse obedience to the mandates of the council, and will not allow them to be published. Communion in both elements is taught to be necessary to salvation, and is everywhere practised. Sigismund is therefore requested to do his duty, and reduce by force these rebellious heretics. Sigismund replied that he had forwarded the document to Wenceslas, and that if the latter had not power to suppress the heretics he would assist him with all his force. Sigismund was in no position to undertake the task, but after waiting for nine months he saw an opportunity of attacking his brother, who had been utterly powerless to control the storm. In a circular letter of September 3, 1417, addressed to the faithful in Bohemia, he drew a moving picture of the excesses committed on the Bohemian clergy, compelled by Neronian tortures to abjure their faith. His brother was suspected of favoring the heretics, as no one could conceive that such wickedness could be committed under so powerful a king without his connivance, and the council had decided to proceed against him, but had consented to delay at the instance of Sigismund, who for three years had been strenuously endeavoring to avert the prosecution. He warns every one, in conclusion, not to aid the heresy, but to exert themselves for its suppression.[549]

Shortly after this, November 11, 1417, the weary schism was closed by the election to the papacy of Martin V. Under the impulsion of a capable and resolute pontiff, who, as Cardinal Ottone Colonna, had, in 1411, condemned and excommunicated Huss, the reunited Church pressed eagerly forward to render the conflict inevitable. In February, 1418, the council published a series of twenty-four articles as its ultimatum. King Wenceslas must swear to suppress the heresy of Wickliff and Huss. Minute directions were given to restore the old order of things throughout Bohemia; priests and Catholics who had been driven out were to be reinstated and compensated; image and relic worship to be resumed, and the rites of the Church observed. All infected with heresy were to abjure it, while their leading doctors, John Jessenitz, Jacobel of Mies, Simon of Rokyzana, and six others, were to betake themselves to Rome for trial. Communion in both elements was to be specially abjured, and all who held the doctrines of Wickliff and Huss, or regarded Huss and Jerome as holy men, were to be burned as relapsed heretics; that is, without opportunity of recantation or hope of pardon. Finally, every one was required to lend assistance to the episcopal officials when called upon, under pain of punishment as fautors of heresy. It was simply the application of existing laws, as we have so many times already seen them brought to bear on offending communities. To enforce it, Sigismund promised to visit the rebellious region with four bishops and an inquisitor, and to burn all who would not recant.[550]

This was speedily followed, February 22, 1418, by a bull of Martin V., addressed to the prelates and inquisitors, not only of Bohemia and Moravia, but of the surrounding territories, Passau, Salzburg, Ratisbon, Bamberg, Misnia, Silesia, and Poland. The pope expressed his grief and surprise that the heretics had not been brought to repentance by the miserable deaths of Huss and Jerome, but had been excited by the devil to yet greater sins. The prelates and inquisitors were ordered to track them out and deliver them to the secular arm; and such as proved themselves remiss in the work were to be removed, and replaced with more energetic successors. Secular potentates were commanded to seize and hold in chains all heretics, and to punish them duly when convicted, and a long series of instructions was given as to trials, penalties, and confiscations, in strict accordance with the inquisitorial practice which had so long been current. If this was intended to give countenance to Sigismund’s promised expedition it proved useless, for the royal promise ended as Sigismund’s were wont to do, and the next we hear of him is a letter of December, 1418, to Wenceslas, threatening that unlucky monarch with a crusade if he shall not suppress heresy.[551]

The glimpse into the condition of Bohemia afforded by these documents is, perhaps, somewhat highly colored, yet on the whole not incorrect. The kingdom was almost wholly withdrawn from obedience to the Church, although the German miners in the mountains of Kuttenberg were already slaying the native heretics. The Wickliffite doctrines adopted by Huss were triumphant, and the pressure of central authority being removed, men were naturally using the unaccustomed liberty to develop further and further the ruling hostility to the sacerdotal system. Utraquism, or communion in both elements, had been received with a frenzy of welcome which seems almost inexplicable; it aroused universal enthusiasm, which was only stimulated by the interdict pronounced on it by Archbishop Conrad, November 1, 1415, and repeated February 1, 1416. When, in 1417, the University of Prague issued a solemn declaration in its favor and pronounced void any human ordinance modifying the command of Christ and the custom of the early Church, it speedily became the distinguishing mark which separated the Hussite from the Catholic. Other innovations had already been introduced, and it was impossible that all should agree on the bounds to be set between conservatism and progress. As early as 1416 Christann of Prachatitz remonstrated with Wenceslas Coranda for denying purgatory and the utility of prayers for the dead and the suffrages of saints, for refusing adoration to the Virgin, for casting out relics and images, for administering the Eucharist to newly-baptized infants, for discarding all rites and ceremonies, and reducing the Church to the simplicity of primitive times. Others taught that divine service could be celebrated anywhere as well as in consecrated churches; that baptism could be performed by laymen in ponds and running streams. Already there was forming the sect which, in carrying out the views of Wickliff, came to be known as Taborites. The more conservative element, which adopted the name of Calixtins, or Utraquists, satisfied with what had been acquired, endeavored to set bounds to the zeal which threatened to remove all the ancient landmarks. Parties were beginning to range themselves, and on January 25, 1417, probably not long before its declaration in favor of Utraquism, the University issued a letter reciting that there were frequent disputes as to the existence of purgatory and the use of benedictions and other church observances; to put an end to these it pronounced obligatory on all to believe in purgatory and in the utility of suffrages, prayers, and alms for the dead, of images of Christ and the saints, of incensing, aspersions, bell-ringing, the kiss of peace, of benediction of the holy font, salt, water, wax, fire, palms, eggs, cheese, and other eatables. Any one teaching otherwise was not to be listened to until he should prove the truth of his doctrine to the satisfaction of the University. In September, 1418, it was obliged to renew the declaration, with the addition of condemning the doctrines which pronounced against all oaths, judicial executions, and sacraments administered by sinful priests, showing that Waldensian tenets were making rapid progress among the Taborites.[552]

All this indicates the questions which were occupying men’s minds and the differences which were establishing themselves. Opinions were too strongly held, and mutual toleration was too little understood for peaceful discussion, and excitement daily grew higher, leading to tumults and bloodshed. In the spirit of unrest which was abroad, men and women of the more advanced views from all parts of the kingdom began assembling on a mountain near Bechin, to which they gave the name of Tabor, where they received the sacrament in both kinds. These assemblages were larger on feast days, and on the day of Mary Magdalen, July 22, 1419, the multitude was computed at forty thousand. Numbers gave courage, and there was even talk of deposing King Wenceslas and replacing him with Nicholas Lord of Hussinetz, whose popularity had been increased by his banishment for advocating their cause with the monarch. From this they were dissuaded by their chief spiritual leader, the priest Wenceslas Coranda, who pointed out that as the king was an indolent drunkard, permitting them to do what they liked, they would scarce benefit themselves by a change. The abandonment of this project, however, did not assure peace. On July 30 there was a tumult in the Neustadt of Prague; at command of the king, the authorities endeavored to prevent the progress of a procession bearing the sacrament; the people rose, and under the lead of John Ziska, whose fiery zeal and cool audacity were rapidly bringing him to the front, they rushed into the town-hall and cast out of the windows such of the magistrates as they found there, who were promptly slain by the mob below. The agitation and alarm caused by this affair brought on King Wenceslas an attack of paralysis, of which he died August 15.[553]

Feeble as had been the royal authority, it yet had served as a restraint upon the hostile sects eager to tear each other to pieces. With the death of the king the untamable passions burst forth. Two days afterwards the churches and convents were mobbed, the images and organs were broken, and those in which the cup had been refused to the laity were the objects of special vengeance. Priests and monks were taken prisoners, and within a few days the Dominican and Carthusian convents were burned. Queen Sophia endeavored, in vain, to maintain order with such of the barons as remained loyal; civil war broke forth, until, on November 13, the queen concluded with the cities of Prague a truce to last until April 23, 1420, the queen promising to maintain the law of God and communion in both elements, while the citizens pledged themselves to refrain from image-breaking and the destruction of convents. Mutual exasperation, however, was too great to be restrained. Ziska came to Prague and destroyed churches and monasteries in the city and neighborhood; Queen Sophia laid siege to Pilsen; a neighborhood war broke out in which shocking cruelties were perpetrated on both sides; German miners of Caurzim and Kuttenberg threw into abandoned mines all the Calixtins on whom they could lay their hands, and some Bavarians who were coming to the assistance of Rackzo of Ryzmberg tied to a tree and burned the priest Naakvasa, a zealous Calixtin. Ziska was not behindhand in this, and in burning convents not infrequently allowed the monks to share the fate of their buildings. In the desultory war which raged everywhere both sides cut off the hands and feet of prisoners.[554]

Sigismund was now the lawful King of Bohemia, and he came to claim his inheritance. As a preliminary step he sent envoys to Prague offering to leave the use of the cup as it had been under Wenceslas, to call a general assembly of the nation, and after consultation to refer any questions to the Holy See. A meeting of the barons and clergy was held which agreed to accept the terms. On Christmas Day, 1419, he came to Brünn, and thither flocked the magnates and representatives of the cities to tender their allegiance. The envoys of Prague, it is true, persisted in using the cup, and there was an interdict in consequence placed on Brünn during their stay, but when he ordered them to remove the chains from the streets of Prague, and destroy the fortifications which they had raised against the castle, there was no refusal, and on their return, January 3, 1420, his commands were obeyed. His natural faithlessness soon showed itself. He changed all the castellans and officials who were favorable to the Hussites; the Catholics who had fled or been expelled returned and commenced to triumph over their enemies; and a royal edict was issued, in obedience to the decrees of Constance, commanding all those in authority to exterminate the Wickliffites and Hussites and those who used the sacramental cup. Still, the kingdom made no sign of organized opposition to him, except that the provident Ziska and his followers, seeing the wrath to come, diligently set to work to fortify Mount Tabor. Strong by nature, it soon was made virtually impregnable, and for a generation it remained the stronghold of the extremists who became renowned throughout the world as Taborites. Mostly peasant-folk, they showed to the chivalry of Europe what could be done by freemen, animated by religious zeal and race hatred; their rustic wagons made a rampart which the most valiant knights learned not to assail; armed sometimes only with iron-shod flails, the hardy zealots did not hesitate to throw themselves upon the best-appointed troops, and often bore them down with the sheer weight of the attack. Wild and undisciplined, they were often cruel, but their fanatic courage rendered them a terror to all Germany.[555]

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]

In the intellectual and spiritual excitement which stirred Bohemia to the depths, it was impossible that all earnest souls should thus pause on the threshold. The old Waldensian heretics, who had hailed the progress of Wickliffite and Hussite doctrines, would naturally seek to prevent the arrested development of the Calixtins from prevailing, and, as we have seen, there were plenty of zealots who were ready to throw aside all the theology of sacerdotalism. Under the energetic leadership of Ziska, Coranda, Nicholas of Pilgram, and other resolute men, the progressive elements were rapidly moulded into a powerful party, which after sloughing off impracticable enthusiasts presented itself with a definite creed and purpose, and became known as the Taborites. Of late years there has been an active controversy as to whether the Waldenses were the teachers or the disciples of the Taborites. Without denying that the fearless vigor of the latter lent added strength to the development of the former, I cannot but think that the secret Waldensianism of Bohemia had much to do both with the revolt of Huss and with the carrying out of that revolt to its logical consequences. Certain it is that there were close and friendly relations between Waldensian and Taborite, while the very name of the former was regarded by all other Bohemians as a term of reproach--in fact there was so much in common between Wickliffite and Waldensian doctrine that this could scarce be otherwise. I have already alluded to the contributions made to the Hussites in 1432 by the Waldensian churches of Dauphiné, and to the virtual coalescence of Hussitism and Waldensianism throughout Germany. When Procopius the Great, in 1433, was taking leave of the Council of Basle, he had the hardihood to inject into his address a good word for the Waldenses, saying that he had heard them well spoken of for chastity, modesty, and similar virtues. Persecution in 1430 so thinned them out that they had neither bishop nor priests; Nicholas of Pilgram, the Taborite bishop, had enjoyed consecration in the Roman Church, and thus had the right to transmit the apostolic succession, and he, in 1433, in Prague consecrated for the Waldenses as bishops two of their number, Frederic the German, and John the Italian. When, in 1451, Æneas Sylvius passed a night in Mount Tabor, and wrote a picturesque description of what he observed, he states that while all heresies had a refuge there, the Waldenses were held in chief honor as the vicars of Christ and enemies of the Holy See.[564]

When the Calixtins, in 1421, defined their position, the Taborites did the same. Various special Waldensian errors were attracting attention and obtaining currency among the people--the denial of purgatory, the vitiation of the sacrament in sinful hands, the absolute rejection of the death-punishment and of the oath--showing the influences at work. The position assumed by the Taborites was so strikingly similar to the beliefs ascribed in 1395 to the Waldenses in Austria by the Celestinian inquisitor, Peter, that it is impossible not to recognize the connection between them. While the Taborites accepted the four articles of the Calixtins they reduced the Church to a state of the utmost apostolic simplicity. Tradition was wholly thrown aside; all images were to be burned; there was no outward sign of distinction between layman and priest, the latter wearing beards, rejecting the tonsure, and using ordinary garments; all priests, moreover, were bishops, and could perform the rite of consecration; they baptized in running water, without the chrism, celebrated mass anywhere, reciting the simple words of consecration and the Paternoster in a loud voice and in the vernacular, administering the body in fragments of bread and the blood in any vessel which might be handy; all consecrations of sacred vessels, oil, and water was forbidden; purgatory, which Huss had accepted, was denied, and to manifest their contempt for the suffrages of the saints they ate more than usual on fast-days and saints’-days; auricular confession was derided--for venial sins confession to God sufficed, for mortal ones, public confession before the brethren, when the priest would assign a penalty commensurate with the offence. At the same time the rude and uncultured vigor of the Taborites led them to regard all human learning as a snare. Those who studied the liberal arts were regarded as heathen and as sinning against the Gospel, and all writings of the doctors, save what were expressly contained in the Bible, were to be destroyed.[565]

What were their views with respect to the Lord’s Supper cannot be stated with precision. Laurence of Brezowa, a Calixtin bitterly hostile to them, says that they consecrated the elements in a loud voice and in the vulgar tongue, that the people might be assured that they were receiving the real body and the real blood, which infers belief in transubstantiation. In 1431 Procopius the Great and other leaders of the Taborites issued a proclamation defining their position, in which they asserted their disbelief in purgatory, in the intercessory power of the Virgin and saints, in masses for the dead, in absolution through indulgences, etc., but said nothing against transubstantiation. When, in 1436, the legates of the Council of Basle complained of the non-observance of the Compactata, one of their grievances was that Bohemia still sheltered Wickliffites who believed in the remanence of the substance of the bread, but they said nothing about the existence of any worse form of belief. On the other hand, the Taborite Bishop, Nicholas of Pilgram, strongly asserted that Christ was only present spiritually, that no veneration was due to the consecrated elements, and that there was less idolatry in those who of old adored moles and bats and snakes than in Christians who worshipped the host, for those things at least had life. During the negotiations, in January, 1433, the legates of the council presented a series of twenty-eight articles, attributed to the Bohemians, and asked for definite answers, yea or nay. One of these was a denial of transubstantiation, and the Bohemians could never be induced to make the desired reply. Peter Chelcicky reproached the Taborites with concealing their belief on the subject, but it is probable that there was no absolute accord among them. The Chiliast leaven doubtless spread the denial of transubstantiation; others probably adopted the Wickliffite doctrine of remanence; others again may have preserved the orthodox faith, and all resented the appellation of Pikards, with which the Bohemians designated those who disbelieved in the absolute conversion of the elements. Certain it is that the question did not come up with any prominence in the negotiations with the Council of Basle; and in the description which Æneas Sylvius gives, in 1451, of the Taborites of Mount Tabor he simply says that some of them are so foolish that they hold the doctrine of Berenger, that the body of Christ is only figuratively in the sacrament.[566]

It was impossible that harmony could be preserved between Taborite and Calixtin when there was so marked a divergence of religious conviction. They quarrelled and held conferences and persecuted each other, but they presented a united front to the levies of crusaders which Europe repeatedly sent against them, and Sigismund’s hope of reconquering the throne of his fathers grew more and more remote. The death of Ziska, in 1424, made little difference, save that his immediate followers organized themselves into a separate party under the name of Orphans, but continued in all things to co-operate with the Taborites. He was succeeded in the leadership by the warrior-priest Procopius Rasa, or the Great, whose military skill continued to hold banded Europe at bay. Hussitism, moreover, was spreading into the neighboring lands, especially to the south and east, requiring, as we shall see hereafter, the strenuous efforts of the Inquisition to eradicate it from Hungary and the Danubian provinces. In Poland its missionary efforts called forth an edict from King Ladislas V., April 6, 1424, ordering all his subjects to join in exterminating heretics; every Pole who returned from a sojourn in Bohemia was subjected to examination by the inquisitors or episcopal officials, and all who should not return by June 1 were declared heretics, their estates confiscated, and their children subjected to the customary disabilities.[567] The Church was completely baffled. It had triumphed over a similar revolt in Languedoc, and had shown the world, in characters of blood and fire, how it utilized its triumphs. It now had a different problem to solve. Force having failed, it was obliged to discover some formula of reconciliation which should not too nearly peril its claim to infallibility.

To do it justice, it did not yield without compulsion. Tired of standing on the defensive against assaults whose repetition seemed endless, Procopius, in 1427, adopted the policy of aggression. He would win peace by making the coterminous states feel the miseries of war, and in a series of relentlessly destructive raids, continued till 1432, he carried desolation into all the surrounding provinces. Thus in a foray of 1429, which cut a swath through Franconia, Saxony, and the Vogtland, over a hundred castles and fortified towns were captured, and an immense booty was carried back to Bohemia. Misnia, Lusatia, Silesia, Bavaria, Austria, and Hungary in turn felt the weight of the Hussite sword, while the prompt retirement of the invaders in every case showed that retaliation and not conquest was their object. It was no wonder that a general cry for peace went up among those who bore the brunt of the effort to reassert the papal supremacy.[568]

Meanwhile the Church was perplexed with another yet more vexatious question. Christendom never ceased to clamor for the reform of which it had been cheated at Constance. Skilful procrastination had wearied the reforming fathers, and they had consented, in 1418, to the dissolution of the council, hoping that the promises made in the election of Martin V. would be fulfilled. They took the precaution, however, to provide for an endless series of councils, which might be expected to resume and complete their unfinished work, and the plan which they laid out shows how deep-seated was the distrust entertained of the papacy. Another general council was ordered to be held in five years, then one in seven years thereafter, and finally a perpetual succession at intervals of ten years, with careful provisions to nullify the expected evasions of the popes.[569]

As far as relates to Germany, Martin endeavored to perform the two duties for which he had been elected--the suppression of heresy and the reformation of the Church--by sending, in 1422, Cardinal Branda thither as legate. To accomplish the former object the legate was directed to preach another crusade, that of 1421 having ended so disastrously. As regards the latter feature of his mission, the papal commission and the decree issued in conformity with it by Branda describe the vices of the German clergy in terms quite as severe as those employed by Huss and his followers, and furnish a complete justification of the Bohemian revolt. The only wonder is that pope or kaiser could expect the populations to rest satisfied with the ministrations of men who assumed to be gifted with supernatural power and to speak in the name of the Redeemer, while steeped to the lips in every form of greed, uncleanness, and lust. The constitution which Branda issued to cure these evils only prescribed a repetition of remedies which had vainly been applied for centuries. It simply attacked the symptoms and not the cause of the disease, and it consequently remained inoperative.[570]

Five years had elapsed since the ending of the Council of Constance. Nothing had been accomplished to suppress heresy or reform the Church, and when in due time the Council of Siena assembled, in 1423, it remained to be seen whether the unfinished work of Constance could be completed. Under the presidency of four papal legates it was held that the attendance of prelates and princes was too small to permit the work of reformation to be undertaken, but it was sufficient to justify the council in confirming the promises made by Martin of forgiveness of sins for all who should assist in exterminating the heretics. All Christian princes were summoned to lend their aid in the good work without delay if they wished to escape divine vengeance and the penalties provided by law. All commerce of every kind with the heretics was forbidden, especially in victuals, cloth, arms, gunpowder, and lead; every one trading with them, or any prince permitting communication with them over his lands was pronounced subject to the punishments decreed against heresy. Bohemia was to be isolated and starved into submission by a material blockade enforced by spiritual censures.[571]

As for reformation, it was found that all efforts seriously to consider it were skilfully blocked by the legates. This is not surprising, as the Church was to be reformed in its head as well as in its members, and the head was recognized as the chief source of infection. A project presented by the Gallican deputies described in indignant bitterness the abuses of the curia--the sale of preferments and dignities to the highest bidder, irrespective of fitness, with the consequent destruction of benefices and plunder of the people; the papal dispensations which enabled the most incongruous pluralities to be held by individuals, and the other devices whereby Rome was enriched at the cost of religion; the centralizing of all jurisdiction in Rome to the spoliation of the indigent who dwelt at a distance; the papal decrees which set aside the salutary regulations of general councils--showing how nugatory had been the reformatory regulations wherewith Martin, when elected, had parried the attacks of the Council of Constance. The disappointment of the Council of Siena at the baffling of its efforts was leading to a tension of feeling that grew dangerous. A French friar, Guillaume Joselme, preached a sermon in which he demonstrated that the pope was the servant and not the master of the Church. The legates denounced him as a heretic, and ordered the magistrates of Siena to arrest him, but they, unlike Sigismund, replied that they had given a safe-conduct to all the members of the council, and could not go behind it. Finally, finding that under the control of the papacy no reformatory action was possible, the attempt was made to shorten to two or three years the seven years’ interval that was to elapse before the next council. All the several nations had agreed to it when its enactment was prevented by the legates suddenly dissolving the council, March 8, 1424, in spite of a protest intimating very plainly that they had prevented all reformatory legislation. The seven years’ interval was preserved, and the next council was indicated for Basle, in 1431. The reformers consoled themselves by pointing out that, of the four papal representatives concerned in thus strangling the council, three died within a year, of terrible deaths, manifestly the divine vengeance on their wickedness. Martin made a show of supplementing this lack of performance by appointing a commission of three cardinals to carry on the work of reform, and requested all complaints and suggestions to be sent to them--a measure which was as profitless in result as it was intended to be. Equally illusory was a constitution issued shortly after, restraining the ostentation and extravagance of the cardinals, and prohibiting them from assuming the “protection” of any prince or potentate, or asking favors except for the poor or for their own retainers and kindred, thus reducing the importance of the Sacred College as a factor of the Holy See and exalting his own.[572]

The time fixed for the assembling of the Council of Basle, March, 1431, was rapidly drawing nigh without any action on the part of Martin looking to its convocation. He who owed his election to a general council was notorious for abhorring the very name of council. At length, on November 8, 1430, there appeared on the doors of the papal palace, and in the most conspicuous places in Rome, an anonymous notice, purporting to be issued by two Christian kings, reciting the necessity of holding a council in obedience to the decrees of Constance, and appending some conclusions of a threatening character, to the effect that if the pope and cardinals impede it, or even evade promoting it, they are to be held as fautors of heresy; that if the pope does not open the council himself or by his deputies, those who may be present will be compelled by divine law to withdraw obedience from him, and Christendom will be bound to obey them, and that they will be forced to proceed summarily to his deposition and that of the cardinals as fautors of heresy. It was evident that Christendom was determined to have the council, with the pope or without him, and Martin, after holding out till the last moment, was compelled to yield. He had appointed, January 11, 1431, Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini as legate to preach another crusade with plenary indulgences against the Hussites, and to him he issued, February 1, a commission to open and preside at the council. One of those most earnest in bringing this about was the Cardinal of Siena. Had he been able to forecast the future he would have tempered his zeal. Within three weeks Martin was dead, and on March 3 the Cardinal of Siena was elected his successor, taking the name of Eugenius IV.[573]

Cardinal Giuliano went on his double mission and preached the fifth crusade against the Hussites. The Bohemian forays had stimulated Germany to an earnest effort to crush the troublesome rebels, and he found himself at the head of an army variously estimated at from eighty thousand to one hundred and thirty thousand men. The Bohemians applied to the Emperor Sigismund for a safe-conduct to Basle, offering to submit the questions at issue to debate on the basis of Scripture. This was refused, and they were told that they must agree to stand to the decisions of the council without limitation. They preferred the arbitrament of arms, and issued a protest to the Christian world in which, with coarse good sense, they defined their position, attacked the temporal power of the papacy, and ridiculed the indulgences issued for their subjugation. This document was received by the council on August 10, very nearly on the day on which, at Taas, the crusaders fled without striking a blow, on hearing the battle-hymn of the dreaded Hussite troops. As a military leader Cardinal Giuliano was evidently a failure, and it only remained for him to try peaceful measures. The German princes, alarmed and exhausted, showed evident signs of determination to come to terms with their unconquerable neighbors. It was a hard necessity, but there was no alternative, and on October 15 the council resolved to invite the Bohemians to a conference and to give them a safe-conduct, although the letters were not forwarded until November 26.[574]

Meanwhile the inevitable quarrels between pope and council had broken out with bitterness. But three weeks after the invitation to the Bohemians had been despatched, on December 18, Eugenius took the extreme step of dissolving the council and calling another to be held in eighteen months at Bologna, where he would preside in person. At this action Germany was aghast. Sigismund remonstrated energetically, and the council, assured of his support, refused to obey. Cardinal Giuliano was won over and made himself its mouthpiece. He had had an opportunity of observing the condition of men’s minds north of the Alps, and he knew to what a storm the bark of St. Peter would be exposed. It may safely be said that since the papacy became dominant over the Church few popes have received from a subordinate so vigorous a reproof as that in which Giuliano gave his reasons for disobedience, and it contains so vivid a picture of the times that a brief abstract of it cannot well be spared. Clerical wickedness, he says, in Germany is such that the laity are irritated to the last degree against the Church, wherefore it is greatly to be feared that if there is no reformation they will execute their public threats of rising, like the Hussites, against the clergy. This turpitude has given great audacity to the Bohemians and lends color to their heresy, and if the clergy cannot be reformed the suppression of this heresy would lead only to the breaking-out of another. The Bohemians have been invited to the council; they have replied and are expected to come. If the council is dissolved, what will the heretics say? Will not the Church confess herself defeated when she dares not await those whom she has invited? Will not the hand of God be seen in it? A host of warriors has fled before them, and now the Church universal flies! Behold, they cannot be overcome either by arms or arguments! Alas for the wretched clergy wherever they be! Will they not be deemed incorrigible and determined to live in their filth? So many councils have been held in our days from which no reformation has come! From this one the nations have expected some fruit. If it be thus dissolved, we shall be said to laugh at God and man, and when there is no hope of our correction the laity will justly assail us, like the Hussites. Already there are reports of it, already they begin to spit forth the venom which is to destroy us. They will think to offer a welcome sacrifice to God when they slay or despoil us, who will then be odious both to God and man, and whereas now there is little respect for us, there will then be none. The council was some restraint upon them, but when they lose all hope they will persecute us publicly, and the whole blame will be thrown upon the Roman curia, which breaks up the assembly convened to effect reform. Latterly the city of Magdeburg has expelled her archbishop and clergy; the citizens march with wagons like the Bohemians, and are said to have sent for a Hussite captain, and they have, moreover, a league with many other communities of those parts. The people of Passau have driven out their bishop and are besieging one of his castles. Both cities are near to Bohemia, and if, as is to be feared, they unite they will have a following of many other towns. At Bamberg there is fierce discord between the citizens on the one side and the bishop and chapter on the other, which is especially dangerous by reason of the neighborhood of the heretics. If the council is dissolved these quarrels will increase, and many other communities will be drawn in.[575]

Making due allowance for inevitable rhetorical exaggeration this picture is a true one. Hussite ideas were rapidly spreading through Germany, and finding a congenial soil in the aversion born of incurable clerical corruption. About this time Felix Hemmerlin complains of the countless souls seduced to heresy by the emissaries who, every year, come from Bohemia to Berne and Soleure. Numerous executions of heretics are recorded at this period in Flanders, where persecution had been for centuries almost unknown, and we may be sure that Hussite missionaries were busily carrying on an equally successful propaganda elsewhere. If the hopes which were built on the council were destroyed, the Church might well expect a general revolt. Sustained by the united support of Cismontane Christendom, the council resolutely went its way. Sigismund urged it to stand firm, and in November, 1432, he issued an imperial declaration that he would sustain it against all assailants. Eugenius held out until February, 1433, when he assented to its continuance, but in July he again dissolved it, and in September repeated the command. Then the council commenced active proceedings to arraign and try him, and in December he revoked these bulls. In the subsequent quarrel the council decreed his suspension in January, 1439, and his deposition in June, while the election of Amedeo of Savoy as Felix V. was confirmed in November of the same year.[576]

Into the details of the interminable negotiations which followed between the council and the Hussites it is not worth while to enter. The latter carried their point, and, in a conference held at Eger, May 18, 1439, it was agreed that the questions should be debated on the basis of the Scriptures and the writings of the early fathers. The four articles which were the common ground of Calixtins and Taborites were put forward as their demands, and to these they steadily adhered through all the dreary discussions in Basle, Prague, Brünn, Stuhlweissenberg, to the final conference of Iglau in July, 1436. The discussions were ofttimes hot and angry, and the good fathers of Basle were sometimes scandalized at the freedom of speech of the Bohemian delegates. When John of Ragusa alluded to the Hussites as heretics, John Rokyzana, one of the Calixtin delegates, indignantly denied it, and demanded that if any one accused them of heresy he should offer the talio and prove it. Procopius, who represented the Taborites, joined in and declared that he would not have come to Basle had he known that he would be thus insulted. Time and skill were required to pacify the Bohemians, and John of Ragusa and the Archbishop of Lyons were forced to apologize formally. On another occasion the Inquisitor Henry of Coblentz, a Dominican doctor, complained that Ulric of Znaim, a deputy of the Orphans, had said that monks were introduced by the devil. Ulric denied it, and Procopius intervened, saying that he had remarked to the legate that if the bishops came from the apostles, and priests from the seventy-two disciples, the others could have had no other source but the devil. This sally raised a general laugh, which was increased when Rokyzana called to the inquisitor, “Doctor, make Dom Procopius provincial of your order.” These trifles have their significance when compared with the shouts of “Burn him! Burn him!” which assailed Huss at Constance. In fact the Hussites were urged to incorporate themselves with the council, but they were too shrewd to fall into the snare.[577]

By unbending firmness the Bohemians carried their point, and secured the recognition of the four articles, which became celebrated in history as the Compactata--the Magna Charta of the Bohemian Church until swept away by the counter-Reformation. This was agreed to in Prague, November 26, 1433, and confirmed by mutual clasp of hands between the legates of the council and the deputies of the three Bohemian sects, but matters were by no means settled. The four articles were brief and simple declarations which admitted of unlimited diversity of construction. The dialecticians of the council had no difficulty in explaining them away, until they practically amounted to nothing; the Hussites, on the other side, with equal facility, expanded them to cover all that they could possibly wish to claim. Hardly was the handclasping over when it was found that the Bohemians asserted that the permission of communion in both elements meant that they were to continue to administer it to infants, and to force it proscriptively on every one--positions to which the council could by no means assent. This will serve as an illustration of the innumerable questions which kept the negotiators busy during yet thirty dreary months. So far, indeed, was the matter as yet from being settled, that, in April, 1434, the council levied a half-tithe on Christendom for a crusade against the Hussites, which enabled it to stimulate with liberal payments the zeal of the Bohemian Catholic nobles.[578]

It is not likely that any results would have been reached but for events which at first seemed to threaten the continuance of the negotiations. The Taborites could only have consented to treat on the basis, so inadequate to them, of the four articles, in the confidence that the practical application would cover a vastly wider sphere. After the preliminary agreement of November 26, the construction assumed by the legates of the council made them draw back. The affair was reaching a conclusion, and it was necessary to have a definite understanding of that to which they were binding themselves. After the departure of the legates from Prague, in January, 1434, hot discussions arose between them and the Calixtins as to the continuance of the negotiations. There were political as well as religious differences between them. The Taborites were mostly peasants and poor folk; they wanted no nobles or gentlemen in their ranks, and seem to have had republican tendencies, as they desired to add to the four articles two others, providing for the independence of Bohemia and for the retention of all confiscated property. Both parties became exasperated, and flew to arms for a contest decisive as to their respective mastery. The Taborites had for some time been besieging Pilsen, a city which held out for Sigismund. Learning that their friends in the Neustadt of Prague had been slaughtered without distinction of age or sex, to the number, it is said, of twenty-two thousand, they raised the siege, May 9, to take vengeance on the city, but after a demonstration before it, they withdrew towards Moravia. Meanwhile the Calixtins had formed an alliance with the Catholic barons, who had been liberally subsidized by the council, and followed them with a formidable force. The shock came at Lipan, on Sunday, May 30. All day and night the battle raged, and until the third hour of Monday morning. When it was over, Procopius, Lupus, and thirteen thousand of the bravest Taborites lay dead upon the field, and the murderous nature of the strife is seen in the fact that but seven hundred prisoners were taken, though we may question the claim of the victors that the battle cost them but two hundred men, and we may hope that there is exaggeration in the boast that they burned several thousand of those whom they subsequently captured. The power of the Taborites was utterly broken. It is true that they continued to hold Mount Tabor until finally crushed by George Podiebrad, in 1452; and that in the December following the battle their unconquerable spirit was again contemplating an appeal to arms, but after Lipan they were only a troublesome element of insubordination, and not a factor in the political situation. The congratulatory letters sent by some of the victors to Sigismund, and the effusive joy with which he communicated the news to the council, show that the victory was one for the Catholics.[579]

Even after the virtual elimination of the Taborites there were ample subjects of dispute, and at one time the prospect seemed so unpromising that preliminary arrangements were set on foot, in August, 1434, for organizing a new crusade on the proceeds of the half-tithe levied shortly before. One source of endless trouble sprang from the personal ambition of Rokyzana. Learned, able, a hardy disputant, and a skilled man of affairs, he had determined to be Archbishop of Prague, and this object he pursued with unalterable constancy. He bore a leading part in the negotiations, and made himself as conspicuous as possible, shifting his ground with dexterity, interposing objections and smoothing them as the interest of the moment might dictate. At first he endeavored to have a clause inserted that the people and the clergy should be empowered to elect an archbishop, who should be acknowledged and confirmed by the emperor and the pope. This being rejected, he procured of Sigismund a secret agreement that the election should be held, and that the emperor would do all in his power to secure the confirmation by the pope, without cost for pallium, confirmation, or notarial fees. Although this, when discovered, was protested against by the legates of the council and refused by the council itself, he proceeded, in 1435, to obtain an election by the national assembly of Bohemia, to the great disgust of the orthodox, who reasonably dreaded this example of a return of the primitive methods of selecting prelates. Again Sigismund secretly accepted this, while the legates declared it to be invalid, and that, as an infraction of the Compactata, it must be annulled. On this question the whole negotiation was nearly wrecked, and it was only settled by Sigismund and his son-in-law and heir, Albert of Austria, promising to issue letters recognizing Rokyzana as archbishop, and to compel obedience to him as such. After this it required but a fortnight more of quarrelling to bring the matter to a termination, and signatures to the Compactata were duly exchanged July 5, 1436, amid general rejoicings. Sigismund, restored to the throne of his fathers, made a show of complying with his promise, by writing to the council a letter asking Rokyzana’s confirmation, at the same time explaining to the legates that he considered the council ought to refuse, but that he did not wish to break with his new subjects too suddenly. Of course the confirmation never came, and although Rokyzana called God to witness that he did not wish the archbishopric, the policy of his long life was devoted to obtaining it. With all convenient speed Sigismund forgot the pledge to enforce obedience to him. His position became so dangerous that he secretly fled from Prague, June 16, 1437, and remained in exile until after the deaths of Sigismund and Albert, when he returned in 1440, and speedily became the most powerful man in Bohemia. This position he retained until his death, in 1471, administering the archbishopric, constantly seeking confirmation at the hands of successive popes, and subordinating the policy of the kingdom, internal and external, so far as he dared, to that object--not the least anomalous feature of the anomalous Calixtin Church.[580]

A peace in which all parties distrusted each other and placed radically different interpretations on its conditions was not likely to heal dissensions so profound. The very day after the solemn ratification of the Compactata an ominous disturbance showed how superficial was the reconciliation. In the presence of an immense crowd, at the high altar of the church of Iglau, where the final conferences were held, the Bishop of Coutances, chief of the legation of the council, celebrated mass and returned thanks to God. After this the letters of agreement were read in Bohemian, and Rokyzana commented upon them in the same language, much to the discomfort of the legates. He had been celebrating mass at a side altar, and when the reading was finished he called out, “If any one wishes communion in both elements let him come to this altar and it will be given to him.” The legates rushed over to him and twice forbade him, but he quietly disregarded them and administered the sacrament to eight or ten persons. The incident excited intense feeling on both sides. The Bohemians demanded that a church be assigned to them in Iglau where during their stay they could receive the sacrament in both kinds; the legates refused the request, although urged by the emperor, and finally, after threats of departure, the Bohemians were forced to content themselves with celebrating, as they had previously done, in private houses.[581]

When Sigismund was fairly seated on the throne, there followed an endless series of bickerings, as the rites and ceremonies and usages of the Roman Church were restored, supplanting the simpler worship which had prevailed for twenty years. Consecrations, confirmations, images, relics, holy water, benedictions, were one by one introduced--even the hated religious orders were surreptitiously smuggled in. The canonical hours and chants were renewed in the churches, and every effort was made to accustom the people to a resurrection of the old order of things. On Corpus Christi day, May 30, 1437, a gorgeous procession swept through the streets of Prague bearing the host on high; the legate, the Archbishop of Kalocsa, and the Bishop of Segnia headed it, and were dutifully followed by the emperor and empress, the nobles and a mass of citizens. As a mute protest, Rokyzana met the splendid array, attended only by three priests, and bearing both host and cup. To the stern puritans who had so long struggled against the Scarlet Woman the imposing ceremony must have seemed a bitter mockery, for the Empress Barbara, who occupied a conspicuous position in the ranks, was a woman notorious for shameless licentiousness, and, moreover, was an avowed atheist, who disbelieved in the immortality of the soul.[582]

Within three weeks of this celebration, Rokyzana was a fugitive, seeking the protection of George Podiebrad at Hradecz, not without reason, if Æneas Sylvius is correct in saying that Sigismund was about to arrest him and punish him condignly. Then the process of reaction went on apace. Had Sigismund lived, he might have overcome all resistance, and reduced the land to obedience to Rome. His power was constantly growing. In March the surrender of the Taborite stronghold of Konigingrätz filled the Hussites with consternation. Not long after siege was laid to Zion, the fastness of John Rohacz, a powerful baron who had refused submission. He was finally captured in it, brought to Prague, and hanged in the presence of the emperor with sixty of his followers and a priest. Tradition relates that on that very day Sigismund was attacked with an ulcer which grew constantly worse and ended his days in December. Almost simultaneous with this was the decision by the Council of Basle on the question of communion in both elements, in which it skilfully evaded the inconsistency of the prohibition of the cup, and pronounced it to be the law of the Church, not to be modified without authority. As Albert of Austria, the son-in-law and successor of Sigismund, was a zealous Catholic prince, the council was emboldened in January, 1438, to issue an edict reciting and ordering the strict enforcement of the implacable bull of February 22, 1418, by Martin V., directed against the errors of Wickliff, Huss, and Jerome. This evidence of what they were to expect as the outcome of the Compactata gave the Taborites and the disaffected parties in Bohemia new energy. After a fruitless appeal to the council an alliance was made with Poland, whose boy-king, Casimir, was elected as a competitor. Thus strengthened they offered effective resistance to Albert, who up to his sudden death, October 27, 1439, was unable to occupy the whole of his kingdom. Four months later, Ladislas, his posthumous son, was born, and a long minority, with its accompanying turbulence, enabled the Calixtins again to get the upper hand, over both the Taborites and the Catholics. In 1441 a council held at Kuttenberg organized the national Church on a Calixtin basis. Several conferences were held with the Taborites, and the points at issue were referred to the national diet held in January, 1444. Its emphatic decision in favor of the Calixtin doctrine broke up the Taborite organization. The cities still held by them surrendered one by one, and the members were scattered, for the most part joining the Calixtins. As a separate sect they may be said to have disappeared when, in 1452, George Podiebrad captured Mount Tabor and dispersed their remains.[583]

After the death of Albert what central authority there was in Bohemia was lodged in the hands of two governors, Ptacek representing the Calixtins, and Mainhard of Rosenberg, the victor of Lipan, the Catholics. In October, 1443, we hear of the Emperor Frederic III. as about starting for Bohemia where he expected to receive the regency, but his hopes were frustrated. Ptacek died in 1445, when the choice for his succession fell upon George Podiebrad, a powerful baron, who, though only twenty-four, had acquired a high reputation for military ability and sagacity. He was largely under the influence of Rokyzana, to whom doubtless his election was due. After a long interval, Rome again appeared upon the scene. Nicholas V., who ascended the papal throne in 1447, sent, in 1448, John, Cardinal of Sant’ Angelo, to Prague as legate. The Bohemians earnestly urged him to ratify the Compactata and confirm Rokyzana as archbishop. He promised an answer, but finding the situation embarrassing, he secretly left Prague with Mainhard of Rosenberg. Popular indignation enabled George by a coup d’état, in which there was considerable bloodshed, to render himself master of Prague and to cast Mainhard into prison, where he died soon after. George thus became the undisputed master of Bohemia. When Ladislas, in 1452, was recognized as king, George secured the regency, and when the young monarch died towards the close of 1457, at the early age of eighteen, George’s coronation as king soon followed. Under him, until just before his death in 1471, Rokyzana’s influence was almost unbounded.[584]

The situation of Bohemia, as a member of the Latin Church, was unprecedented. After the first break between Eugenius IV. and the Council of Basle the name of the pope disappears in the negotiations for the restoration of unity. These were carried on by both sides as though the conciliar authority was supreme, and the papal assent or confirmation was a matter of no moment, although a papal legate was present in January, 1436, at the conference at Stuhlweissenberg, where the matter was virtually settled. As the council drew to its weary end, powerless and discredited, the triumphant Eugenius was not disposed to recognize the validity of its acts or to ratify them gratuitously. The Bohemians alleged that he had confirmed the Compactata, but no positive evidence was forthcoming. To purchase the submission of Germany, in 1447, he had ratified a portion of the acts of the council, but the Compactata could not be included in his carefully. guarded decrees. On the accession of Nicholas V., in 1447, the Bohemians sent to him a deputation offering him their allegiance, but we have seen how wary was the legate whom he despatched in return to Prague. It is true that to obtain the abdication of Felix V., Nicholas issued a bull, June 28, 1449, approving all the acts of the council which might strictly be held to confirm the Compactata, but the character of the bull shows that it had in view rather the material interests involved in benefices and preferment. Whatever doubt the Bohemians may have had as to the papal intentions towards them was speedily dissipated.[585]

Rome, in fact, had never proposed to recognize the compromise made by the council. While the latter was busy in endeavoring to win back the Hussites, Eugenius IV. was laboring for their extermination by the usual methods, in such regions as he could reach. The relations between Bohemia and Hungary had long been close, and Hussitism had spread widely throughout the latter kingdom as well as in the Slavic territories to the south. As early as 1413 we hear complaints of Wickliffite doctrines carried into Croatia by students returning from the University of Prague. As Sigismund was King of Hungary, the Compactata were supposed to cover the Hungarian Hussites, and were published in Hungarian as well as in Bohemian, German, and Latin. We have seen, however, how false he was to his Bohemian subjects, and those of Hungary he cheerfully abandoned to Rome. Six weeks after the signature of the Compactata at Iglau, on August 22, 1436, Eugenius commissioned the indefatigable persecutor, Frà Giacomo della Marca, as Inquisitor of Hungary and Austria. He was already on the ground, for in January of that year we catch a glimpse of him as present in the conference at Stuhlweissenberg. Frà Giacomo lost no time. Before the close of the year he had traversed Hungary from end to end, with merciless severity. The Archbishop of Gran, the Chapter of Kalocsa, the Bishop of Waradein, were loud in his praises. Their dioceses, they said, had been infected with heretics so numerous that a rising was anticipated which would have exceeded in horror the Bohemian wars, but this holy man had exterminated them. The numbers whom he put to death are not enumerated, but they must have been considerable from the expressions employed, and from the terror inspired, for his associates declared that in this expedition he had received the submission of fifty-five thousand converts. As the Bishop of Waradein rapturously declared, had the Apostle Paul accompanied him he could not have effected more. Earnestly the Bishops of Csanad and Transylvania appealed to him to visit their dioceses, which abounded in heretics; and as the latter prelate speaks of the Hussites having penetrated to his bishopric from Moldavia, it shows how widely the heresy had been diffused through southeastern Europe.[586]

Suddenly, in 1437, Frà Giacomo’s career was interrupted. He had crushed the Fraticelli of Italy, the wild Cathari of Bosnia, and the fiercer Hussites of Hungary, but when he attacked the orthodox concubinary priests of Fünfkirchen, and strove to force them to abandon the illicit partners who were universally kept, they proved too strong for even his iron will and seasoned nerves, backed though he was by the power of pope and kaiser and the awful authority of the Inquisition. They raised such a storm at this attempted invasion of their accustomed privileges that he was obliged to abandon his work and fly for his life. He appealed to Eugenius, and Eugenius to Sigismund. The latter wrote to Henry, the Bishop of Fünfkirchen, peremptorily ordering him to recall Giacomo and give him every aid, and also to Giacomo, assuring him of support. Thus assailed, Bishop Henry gave instructions that Giacomo should be supplied with all necessaries, but the attempt to enforce chastity on the priesthood seems to have been abandoned. The customary penalty in Hungary for such offences was five marks, and the synods of Gran in 1450 and 1480 complain that the archdeacons not only keep these fines for themselves, but encourage the criminals in order to derive profit from them; in fact, they issued in Hungary, as in many other places, licenses to sin, which may, perhaps, explain the indignation caused by Giacomo’s interference and its lack of success.[587]

He appears to have meddled no longer with the private lives of the orthodox clergy, but to have devoted his energies to the easier work of exterminating heretics. Early in 1437 we hear of him south of the Danube, where the Bishop of Sreim praised his effective work; by putting to death all who could not be converted, he had saved the diocese from a rising of the Hussites, in which all the clergy would have been slain. Eugenius rewarded him by describing him as “a vigorous and most ruthless extirpator of heresy,” and granting him the power of appointing subordinate inquisitors, thus rendering him an inquisitor-general in all the wide region confided to him. It was probably a result of the quarrel over the priestly concubines that led, in 1438, Simon of Bacska, Archdeacon of Fünfkirchen, to excommunicate him; but that official was speedily forced to withdraw the anathema by the Emperor Albert and the Archbishop of Gran. For a while his labors were interrupted by a call to attend the Council of Ferrara, held in 1438 by Eugenius IV., to offset the hostile assemblage at Basle, but he speedily returned to Hungary. It was doubtless owing to his efforts that in Poland the barons and cities entered into a solemn league and covenant to suppress heresy, April 25, 1438--just before Poland intervened in Bohemia to protect the Hussites from the Emperor Albert. In 1439 Giacomo’s zeal received a check on the more immediate fields of his labors. In Sreim he delivered to the secular arm, as convicted heretics, a priest and three associates; their friends assembled in force, broke open the prison and carried off the culprits, and, what is difficult to understand, unless the heresy was merely concubinage, the Archbishop of Kalocsa, when appealed to, protected the criminals. Giacomo had recourse to the Emperor Albert, who wrote sharply to the archbishop in June; and this proving ineffectual, again in August. What was the result of the affair is not known, but Albert, as we have seen, died in October, to the great detriment of religion; and in 1440 Giacomo left Hungary on account of ill-health. He seems not to have been immediately replaced, and, in the absence of organized persecution, the tares speedily began to multiply again among the wheat. In January, 1444, Eugenius IV., deploring the spread of Hussitism throughout the Danubian regions, appointed the Observantine Vicar Fabiano of Bacs as inquisitor for the whole Slavonian vicariate, which included Hungary, with power to appoint inquisitors under him. These were authorized to act in complete independence of the local prelates; Holy Land indulgences were promised to all who would aid them, and excommunication, removable only by pope or inquisitor, against all withholding assistance. In July, 1446, Eugenius again alludes to the flourishing condition of Hussitism in Hungary and Moldavia, in spite of the labors of the friars, and he recurs to the question which baffled Giacomo della Marca. Many parish priests, he says, in these regions not only keep concubines publicly, but teach that there is no sin in intercourse between unmarried persons; the question has been asked him whether this is heresy, justiciable by the Inquisition; this he answers in the affirmative, and authorizes Fabiano and his deputies to treat it as such. Apparently it was not the practice itself, but the justification of it, which was so heinous.[588]

If Rome was thus active in repressing Hussitism, and thus regardless of the Compactata while crippled by the quarrel with the fathers of Basle, it may readily be imagined that, after the abdication of Felix V. and the restoration of unquestioned supremacy, Nicholas V. was not disposed to respect the bargain made by the council or to regard the Calixtins in any light but that of heretics. It was in vain that the Bohemians proffered obedience if only the Compactata were confirmed, with a tacit condition that Rokyzana’s claims to the archbishopric should be recognized. Ostensibly the sole difficulty in the way of reunion lay in the use of the cup by the laity and the communion of infants; save this there was by this time but little to distinguish the Calixtins from the rest of the Latin churches, although occasionally the question of the sequestrated church lands emerged into view. The papacy had taken its position, however, and it would have plunged all Christendom into war, as, in fact, it more than once attempted, rather than admit that the Council of Basle had been justified in purchasing peace by conceding communion in both elements. Behind this, however, was the question of Rokyzana’s confirmation. Æneas Sylvius informs us that in 1451 he convinced George Podiebrad of the impossibility of effecting this, and secured a promise that the attempt should be abandoned, he pledging himself that if George would present the names of several suitable persons the pope would select one, and peace would then be established. This treated the Compactata as of minor importance, and was doubtless wholly unauthorized. Neither George nor Rokyzana gave up their hopes; the effort was renewed again and again, now with the pope, now with the Emperor Frederic III., and now with the German Diet, but all to no purpose. Occasionally when there was an object to be gained hopes would be held out, only to be withdrawn. The papal emissaries represented Rokyzana to Rome as the most wicked and perfidious of heresiarchs, whose recognition would be the destruction of what remained of Catholicism in Bohemia, and there never was the slightest idea of confirming him.[589]

When the overthrow of Mainhard of Rosenberg and the concentration of power in the hands of George Podiebrad showed that no further hopes were to be built on the Catholic party in Bohemia, Nicholas V. fell back upon the old methods and resolved to try what could be done by a missionary inquisitor. He had at hand an instrument admirably fitted for the work. Giovanni da Capistrano, vicar-general of the Observantine Franciscans, had commenced his career as an inquisitor in 1417; he was now in his sixty-sixth year, vigorous and implacable as ever. Small and insignificant in appearance, shrivelled by austerities until he seemed to consist only of skin and bone and nerves, he rarely tasted meat and allowed himself but four hours of sleep out of the twenty-four, the remainder being all too few for his restless and indefatigable activity. His saintly and self-denying life had gained him enviable powers as a thaumaturge, and his reputation as a preacher drew crowds to listen to his eloquence. In 1451 he was busy in exterminating the Fraticelli, but he suspended his bloody work at the call of Nicholas to undertake the conversion of the Hussites. Nothing was omitted that could contribute to the dramatic effect of his mission. Before assuming it he sought the divine assent by consulting the Virgin at Assisi, when the heavenly light diffused around him was a sign that his apostolate was confirmed; he accepted the enlarged powers which extended his inquisitorial commission to the Bohemian territories, and set forth. Everywhere on his road multitudes assembled to see and listen to the man of God, and everywhere his miraculous powers manifested the authenticity of his mission. At Brescia he addressed an assembly computed at one hundred and twenty thousand souls, and, though walls and trees were broken down by the masses of men gathered thickly upon them, not a human being was injured. At the crossing of the River Sile, near Treviso, the party, with true Observantine austerity, had no money to pay ferriage, and the surly ferryman refused free transportation; but Capistrano quietly took the habit of San Bernardino, which he carried with him, laid it upon the waters, and they shrank away till all had passed dry-shod, when they resumed their former volume. Thus heralded, his way through Venice and Vienna was a triumphal progress; crowds of sixty thousand or one hundred thousand to hear him preach were common; men came from a distance of five hundred miles to listen to him; at Vienna three hundred thousand were reckoned present; the sick were brought before him in thousands, and the miraculous cures which he wrought were computed by hundreds. The ecclesiastical machinery was evidently well-devised and effectively worked, and the desired impression was produced.[590]

In vain the emperor asked permission for him to visit Prague. Podiebrad and Rokyzana refused it peremptorily, and Capistrano’s zeal for martyrdom was not sufficient to prompt him to disregard their wishes. Furnished with imperial letters to the Catholic nobles and to their leader, Ulric Mainhard of Rosenberg, he turned in July to the safer region of Moravia, where presumably the influence of Podiebrad and Rokyzana was not so strong. Here his career indicates how little foundation there was for the persistent Catholic complaints of the proscriptive intolerance of the Calixtins. Though on Bohemian territory, Catholic and Hussite seem to have been dwelling together in mutual harmony; the Bishop of Olmütz was a Catholic, and no hindrance seems to have been experienced by Capistrano in his labors for the conversion of the so-called heretics. Beginning at Brünn, August 1, 1451, there is a register containing names and dates of more than eleven thousand conversions made by him up to May, 1452. Yet at the same time he was restricted to persuasion, and was not allowed to use inquisitorial methods. As his converts were voluntary, he smoothed the path of the repentant heretic, reconciling him to the Church with only the infliction of a salutary penance, and allowing him to retain all his possessions and dignities. Where the heretic was hardened, he was powerless, except through such miraculous power as he could wield. The situation was an anomalous one--unexampled, in fact, in the Middle Ages--of heretic and Catholic dwelling together in peace, the heretic in the ascendant, yet not only tolerating the Catholic, but allowing a man like Capistrano to wander through the land denouncing heretics and making conversions unmolested. To Capistrano the position was irritating in the extreme, insomuch as he was limited to the arts of persuasion, and was unable to enforce his arguments with the dungeon and the stake. This peculiar state of things is well illustrated by an adventure related of him at Breslau. Though Silesia had a Catholic bishop, it belonged to Bohemia, and mutual tolerance was established. In the summer of 1453 Capistrano came there and labored to convert the Hussites, but these sons of Belial, to ridicule his miraculous powers, placed a young man in a bier, carried him to where the inquisitor was preaching, and asked the latter to resuscitate the dead. Capistrano sternly replied, “Let him have his portion with the dead in eternity!” and went his way. Then the heretics said to the crowd, “We have holier men among us;” and one of them went to the coffin, calling to its inmate, “Peter, arise!” and then whispering, “It is time to get up;” but there was no response, and the unfortunate youth was found to be really dead. Yet at this very time Capistrano had no difficulty in exercising his inquisitorial office pitilessly when the victims were unfortunate Jews. A country priest was said to have sold them eight consecrated hosts for use in their infernal rites. Capistrano seized those implicated, tortured them to confession, and burned them, while a woman who was implicated was torn with red-hot pincers. An old Jewess embraced Christianity, and soon afterwards was slain. The Jews were accused of the murder, and also of that of a Christian boy. Capistrano made another onslaught on them, and this time burned no less than forty-one. It is easy to gather from this incident what would have been the fate of the Hussites had he been able to wreak his will on them. Those of Moldavia and Poland, whither he despatched three of his associate inquisitors under Ladislas the Hungarian, probably felt the full rigor of the canons.[591]

During all this the Calixtin leaders had not been wholly indifferent. At the commencement of Capistrano’s mission Rokyzana wrote to him in a friendly tone, remonstrating with him for condemning as a heresy the communion in both elements, which the Council of Basle had permitted to the Bohemians. Some correspondence ensued, in which Capistrano took high ground as to the use of the cup and the papal supremacy; there were negotiations for a conference, and at one time hopes were entertained of an accommodation. Capistrano, however, skilfully eluded a disputation on various pretexts, but really, as we learn from his confidential letter to the cardinal-legate, Nicholas of Cusa, because he knew that the Calixtins had on their side the weight of authority and tradition. Both parties gradually lost their temper and published against each other letters filled with scurrility. Having thus rendered amicable negotiations impossible, Capistrano could safely, in 1452, ask Podiebrad for a safe-conduct to Prague, and on its refusal summon him to render the aid and service due to him as apostolic commissioner and inquisitor.[592]

When the German princes assembled in the Diet of 1452 the Bohemians addressed them, complaining that although they were living in peace and obedience to the Holy See, the provisions of the Compactata, which declared that no one should be stigmatized as a heretic for partaking in both elements, were violated by a friar named Capistrano, who, under the guise of an apostolic commissioner and inquisitor, was traversing their territories proclaiming that all Utraquists were heretics. The agreement which had cost so much blood was thus plainly infringed, and, notwithstanding their desire for peace, a persistence in this would revive all the old troubles. This was significant of strife, and Capistrano, on his side, was eagerly engaged in stimulating it. He wrote to the pope that certain propositions of accommodation entertained by the cardinal-legate were disgraceful, and spoke hopefully of negotiations which he was carrying on with the German princes for a new crusade against the Hussites. Nicholas of Cusa was effectually snubbed for daring to talk of conferences and terms of accommodation. He promptly threw himself on the other side and contributed his share towards provoking a fresh conflict, by issuing, in June, 1452, an encyclical to the Bohemians, in which he plainly told them that those who were not with the Church must be against it; that the Compactata must be thrown aside, as they had not effected the union for which they were designed, and that nothing save pure and simple obedience to the Holy See could be entertained. To render the irritation complete needed only the exquisite insolence with which he assured them that the Church was too pious a mother to concede to her children what she knew to be injurious.[593]

Capistrano’s busy mischief-making was bearing its fruits. The breach between Rome and Bohemia was constantly widening, and if the zeal of the German princes could be brought to correspond to the ardor of the missionary of strife, the horrors of the old Hussite wars might be hopefully looked for again. During the remainder of the year 1452 we find him travelling through Germany, probably with this charitable object, though at Leipsic he paused long enough for his eloquence to win for his rigid Order sixty professors and students.[594] His efforts to raise a crusade against Bohemia, however, were frustrated by the capture of Constantinople in May, 1453. The immense impression which this produced throughout Christendom, the universal alarm at the progress of the Turk, and the necessity of defending Europe against his approach, speedily threw into the shade all minor questions. A new crusade was imperatively wanted, but it could not be wasted upon Bohemia and the Utraquists.

During the summer of 1453, as we have seen, Capistrano was tranquilly employing his enforced leisure in burning Jews at Breslau. Thence he went to Poland, where we find him at Cracow throwing into prison a physician, Master Paul, whom he suspected of being an emissary of Rokyzana. He applied again to Podiebrad for a safe-conduct to Prague, which was curtly refused on the ground that when it had been previously offered it had not been accepted, and that Ladislas did not want the peace of his kingdom disturbed. He left Cracow May 15, 1454, for Breslau and Olmütz, whence he still hoped to accomplish something within the charmed circle of Bohemia, into which he had not been allowed to penetrate. Rokyzana at this time was inspired with hopes that the terror of the Turk and the need for Christian unity would enable him to realize his dream of the archbishopric. He made the large concessions alluded to above on many of the points of dissidence, and used every effort with the emperor to procure through him the papal confirmation. A letter from Ladislas, of June 13, to the Bishop of Olmütz, asking him to restrain Capistrano from using such violent terms in denouncing Bohemians, as he was doing more harm than good, was evidently a move in the same game. Yet even the paramount interests of Christendom could not win for Rokyzana the coveted confirmation, although those interests soon diverted Capistrano’s fiery energies from the heretic to the infidel.[595]

A brief and clear-cut letter of Æneas Sylvius to Capistrano, dated July 26, 1454, tells him to give up the dream of getting to Prague and go to Frankfort, where he will be useful. An assembly of princes had been held in Ratisbon, where a crusade had been agreed upon, and Philip of Burgundy had consented to lead it. Final arrangements were to be made in Frankfort in October, and there Æneas Sylvius wanted the aid of Capistrano’s tireless ardor. Their correspondence at this juncture shows the terror which existed lest Europe should be overrun; the confusion and uncertainty which prevailed, and the selfish differences which threatened to neutralize effort. At Frankfort their worst fears were realized. The zeal of the princes had cooled, and they declared the purpose of the pope and emperor was to steal their money and not to fight. They demanded that the business should be conducted by a general council which should at the same time repress the Holy See--in fact, both parties were selfishly endeavoring to turn the agony of Europe to account; the pope to raise money, and the princes to recover their independence. All that Æneas and Capistrano could obtain was a promise that at the Pentecost of 1455 they would meet the emperor and determine what could be done. In February and March, 1455, they began to assemble at Neuburg, near Vienna, where Podiebrad again used every effort to procure Rokyzana’s confirmation. As for the crusade, the energies of Christendom seemed paralyzed by the petty jealousies and ambitions of its rulers. At last, under the unflagging eloquence of Æneas and Capistrano, things appeared to be taking shape, when the news was received of the death of Nicholas V. on March 22. Everything fell to pieces, and the princes departed, postponing action until the next year. It was a forcible example of the utility of the papacy, which supplied a common head to the discordant forces of the time.[596]

Capistrano’s impetuous energies were now fairly enlisted in the strife with the Turk, and the Hussites had a respite. In fact, the situation was too alarming to permit of their persecution, and it is a remarkable instance of the unbending rigidity of Rome, that even in this perilous juncture the overtures and concessions of Podiebrad and Rokyzana availed them nothing.

Calixtus III. was elected April 8, with a speed which showed how dangerous a papal interregnum was considered. He at once sent legates to preach the crusade throughout Europe, and commenced to build war-ships on the Tiber. The Hungarians, who were justly excited at the impending invasion of Mahomet II. begged Capistrano to come to them and use his eloquence. Calixtus gave him permission, confirmed all the powers conferred on him by Nicholas, and he undertook the task which was to complete his life’s work. Yet even these new duties, which wrought his fiery soul to a higher tension than ever, did not wholly distract his attention from the hated Hussites. The juncture seemed favorable for a reconciliation, which every motive of policy dictated. Besides, Æneas Sylvius had just been promoted to the cardinalate, and that crafty diplomat had succeeded in making the Bohemians look upon him as their friend. They not only hoped to obtain the confirmation of the Compactata, but the cardinal’s hat for Rokyzana. Hearing of this, Capistrano wrote, March 24, 1456, from Buda to Calixtus dissuading him in the most vigorous terms. The Hussites are the worst of mankind, fearing neither God nor man; the heart can scarce conceive the errors which they believe, or the abominations which they practise in secret. The Compactata are their sole bulwark; if these are confirmed, the Hussites, who abound secretly, not only in Bohemia but in Hungary, Transylvania, Moldavia, and the neighboring regions, will rise and declare themselves. The warning was sufficient and the overtures were rejected.[597]

Suddenly the news came that the dreaded Mahomet II. was advancing, and had laid siege to Belgrade. Ladislas, who was King of Hungary as well as of Bohemia, was at Buda-Pesth, and with his uncle, the Count of Cillei, on pretext of a hunting-excursion, basely fled to Austria. John Hunyady, Count of Transylvania, who had been regent of the kingdom, organized the Hungarian forces, with some German crusaders who had come to his assistance, while Capistrano marched with him as papal commander of the crusade. Glorious in the annals of Hungary is the victory of Belgrade. “With a flotilla of boats on the Danube, Hunyady, on July 14, 1456, cut his way into the town through the beleaguering forces. Furious were the attack and the defence until the 22d, when a fierce assault by the Turks was repulsed, and the besieged followed the retreating enemy, burned one of their camps, spiking some of their cannon and carrying the rest back into the town, where they did good service during the rest of that memorable day. Mahomet gathered together his forces for a last desperate attempt, which was a failure, and during the night he fled, leaving twenty-four thousand men upon the field, and three hundred cannon. His army was utterly dispersed, and this disaster, aided by the heroic resistance of Scanderbeg in Albania, arrested the Turkish invasion and gave Europe a breathing-spell. It cost, however, the lives of the two heroes to whom it was due. The stench of the dead bodies sickened the army of the victors, and John Hunyady fell a victim, August 11, to the epidemic, which prevented the following up of the advantage. Capistrano had thrown himself into the work with all his self-forgetful enthusiasm. His eloquence had wrought the Christians up to the highest pitch of religious exaltation; the crusaders would obey no one but him, and his labors were incessant. He passed days without time for food, and nights without rest; for seventeen days, it is said, before the victory, he slept but seven hours in all. He was in his seventy-first year, with a frame weakened by habitual austerities, and when the strain was past exhausted nature paid the penalty. A slow fever set in, August 6, under which he wasted away, and died, October 23. He was perhaps the most perfect type which the age produced of the ideal son of the Church; a purely artificial creation, in which the weakness of humanity disappeared with some of its virtues, and the whole nature, with its rare powers, was concentrated in unselfish devotion to a mistaken purpose. Such men are the tools of the worldly and unscrupulous who know how to use them, and for forty years Capistrano had been thus employed to bring misery on his fellow-beings, unconscious of the evil which he wrought. Yet, as Æneas Sylvius shrewdly points out, there was one weak spot left in his nature. In the letters in which he and Hunyady described the victory of Belgrade neither chief gave credit to the other. As Æneas says, “Capistrano had despised the pomps of the world, he had fled from its delights, he had trampled down avarice, he had overcome lust, but he could not contemn glory.”[598]

No one could be found worthy to replace Capistrano but his friendly rival, Giacomo della Marca, who was accordingly despatched, in 1457, to the scene of his labors of twenty years previous, armed with the same powers, as inquisitor and crusader. The danger from the Turk was still too pressing for him to waste thought on the former function, and he devoted himself to stimulating and organizing the war against the Moslem until his health gave way, and he returned to Italy, where, as we have seen, he not long afterwards had to defend himself from a charge of heresy brought by his zealous Dominican brethren. He was replaced by his disciples, Giovanni da Tagliacozza and Michele da Tussicino, who were followed in 1461 by Frà Gabriele da Verona; but though Franciscans still continued for a generation to labor for the conversion of the Calixtins, they had little success in the absence of power to employ the customary inquisitorial methods, of which more hereafter.[599]

In fact, the prospects of reducing Bohemia to obedience were steadily diminishing. In the wildest uproar of the Hussite wars there were powerful barons and cities who steadily held out for the pope and kaiser, and under the interregnum there had at first been a dual government, shared equally by Catholic and Calixtin. Under the firm hand of George Podiebrad the orthodox communities submitted one by one, and in spiritual matters Rokyzana was supreme. It is true that there was now little to distinguish the churches in doctrine or practice save the use of the cup; but independence served as a protection against the greed of the Roman curia, and there was small encouragement for a surrender of this independence in the clamor which was now going up from Germany. The Basilian regulations, confirmed by Eugenius, had for a time served as a safeguard to some extent, but now these were coolly treated as obsolete, and complaints were loud that all the old abuses were flourishing as vigorously as ever. Elections were set aside, or heavy sums were extorted for their confirmation, while the country was drained of money by the exaction of tenths and the sale of indulgences. Secure in their isolation, the Bohemians might well submit to some inconvenience to be spared the costly blessing of apostolic paternal care. The only hope of Rome lay in the approaching majority of the Catholic youth Ladislas; but when, on the eve of his marriage with the daughter of Charles VII. of France, he suddenly died, towards the close of 1457, not without suspicions of foul play, and George Podiebrad soon afterwards was elected and crowned, it might well seem that, short of Divine interposition, the peaceful return of Bohemia was not to be looked for.[600]

Yet at first it looked as though an accommodation might be reached. Ladislas, shortly before his death, had proposed to send an embassy to Rome for the purpose of effecting a reconciliation, and Calixtus III. had asked of Podiebrad to gratify his vehement desire of seeing Rokyzana, whose high reputation was well known in Rome. Podiebrad, moreover, caused himself to be crowned according to the Roman rite; having no bishop of his own, he borrowed from his son-in-law, Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, those of Raab and Bacs, to perform his consecration; in his coronation oath he swore obedience to Calixtus and his successors, to restore the Catholic religion, and to persecute heretics; he wrote to Calixtus as a faithful son of the Church, and obtained from him letters recognizing him as King of Bohemia; he sent envoys to Rome, who held out promises that Rokyzana would follow, and settle on a lasting basis the submission of Bohemia. All this was mere skirmishing for position; but when, a few months later, Calixtus died, and was succeeded by Æneas Sylvius, who took the name of Pius II., men might hope that some reasonable accommodation could be reached. Since he had gone to Basle in the suite of Cardinal Capranica, and had become the mouth-piece of the antipapal party, influenced, as he himself says, by cupidity rather than by truth, and inspired by the hostility to the Church usually felt by the laity, the new pope had been occupied almost exclusively with German and Bohemian affairs, which he knew better than any living man; he had taken part in the negotiations resulting in the Compactata; he was shrewd, clear-headed, and troubled with few scruples, and, sharing fully in the papal anxiety to unite Christendom against the Turks, he might be expected to recognize the vital importance of reconciliation with Bohemia. George made haste to send an embassy to renew his protestations of obedience, and to ask for the confirmation of the Compactata. Pius, who took no shame in issuing a solemn bull condemning and disavowing all his early opinions uttered during his service with the council, was prepared to break with his own traditions rather than with those of his predecessors. He gave a dubious response; George could win his recognition as king by extirpating heresy, and he promised to send legates. They came, but the pope, although he addressed George as king and as his dearest son when soliciting his co-operation in the crusade, shortly afterwards took a step which, with his knowledge of Bohemia, he knew could not but provoke a rupture. Wenceslas, Dean of Prague, was a Catholic, and a bitter enemy of Rokyzana, and this man Pius appointed as administrator of the archbishopric, thus ousting Rokyzana. All at once was in uproar. Wenceslas endeavored to assert himself, but the power remained in Rokyzana’s hands. George threw into prison Fantinus, who had been his procurator in the curia, and who had been sent with a commission as papal orator, and detained him there for three months. Frederic III., whom George, by a stroke of happy audacity, had recently liberated from a siege by his rebellious subjects in the castle of Vienna, interposed, and delayed the explosion of the papal wrath; but to his earnest request that George should be acknowledged as king Pius returned an absolute refusal. George was a heretic, incapable of the crown, and his subjects’ oaths of allegiance were void; only by returning to the Church could he hope to be fitted for the royal dignity. In June, 1464, Pius, in full consistory, published a bull reciting all the griefs of the Church against Bohemia, pronouncing the Compactata void, as never having been confirmed by the Holy See, and summoning George before him to stand trial for heresy within three terms of sixty days each. In two months Pius was dead, but his successor, Paul II., carried forward the proceedings with the old inquisitorial weapons. Three cardinals were appointed in 1465 to try George as a relapsed heretic, and summoned him in August, as a private person, to appear before them within six months for judgment. Without waiting for the expiration of the term, early in December, Paul issued a bull absolving all George’s subjects from their allegiance, alleging as a reason for haste that the sentence would grow more difficult by delay. The papal wrath increased with the obstinacy of the assumed heretic. In 1468 another summons was issued to him to appear before the cardinals for judgment; and in February, 1469, his name was placed as that son of perdition, the Hussite George Podiebrad, together with those of Rokyzana and Gregory of Heimburg, in the curse of the Cœna Domini, to be anathematized thrice a year, in the solemnities of the mass, in all cathedrals, both in Latin and in the vernacular.[601]

All this was not a mere brutum fulmen. It was not difficult to excite rebellion among turbulent subjects and attacks from ambitious neighbors. With all his vigor and capacity George found the maintenance of his position by no means easy. When, in 1468, the German princes had agreed upon a five years’ truce in order to concentrate their energies against the Moslem, Paul II. threw the empire into confusion by sending the Bishop of Ferrara to preach a crusade with plenary indulgences against Bohemia, adding the special favor that all who joined in the preaching should have the privilege of choosing a confessor, and receiving from him plenary absolution and indulgence. The kingdom was bestowed upon Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, who took the cross, and with an army of crusaders occupied Moravia. A long war ensued, during which George died, in 1471, released from excommunication on his death-bed, and Ladislas II., son of Casimir of Poland, was elected as his successor. In 1475 the rivals came to terms; both were recognized as kings of Bohemia, while Matthias was to have for life Moravia, Silesia, and the greater part of Lusatia, and the survivor was to enjoy the whole kingdom. On the death of Matthias, in 1490, Ladislas recovered the three provinces, and shortly afterwards added Hungary to his dominions.[602]

Ladislas was a good Catholic, and Sixtus IV., who had aided in his election, hoped that the opportunity had at last arrived to break down the stubbornness of the Calixtins. The king made the attempt, but bloody tumults in Prague, which nearly cost him his life, showed that, slight as was the difference between Catholic and Utraquist, the old fanaticism for the cup survived. At length, in 1485, at the Diet of Kuttenberg, mutual toleration was agreed upon, and Ladislas, who was of easy disposition, ran no further risks. Thus the anomalous position of Bohemia, as a member of Latin Christendom, became more remarkable than ever. The great majority of the people were Calixtins and therefore heretics, but the Church had to abandon the attempt to coerce them to salvation. Missionary inquisitors were commissioned from time to time, but practically their efforts were limited to persuasion and controversy. Even Pius II., in 1463, felt obliged to caution Zeger, the Observantine Vicar-general, that his brethren, in dealing with heretics, should restrain their zeal from the customary curses and insults, and should try the effect of gentleness and argument. That these missionaries were mostly Franciscans perhaps explains why the toleration accorded to Catholics could not be enforced against the popular prejudices of which the Order was the object. Even George Podiebrad, in 1460, had permitted the Franciscans to return to Prague, but their zeal was not to be restrained, and they were expelled in 1468. Under Ladislas they came again, in 1482, but in the disturbances of the following year they were glad to escape, their house was levelled to the ground, and was not rebuilt until 1629. From time to time other communities were founded at Hradecz, Glatz, and Neisse, but they were short-lived, and were speedily destroyed by the fanaticism of the people. As the invention of printing facilitated controversy, polemical zeal multiplied treatises to prove the iniquity of the Utraquist heresy, but the Utraquists were not to be converted. They maintained the Compactata as the charter of their religious independence. When, in 1526, King Louis fell in the disastrous day of Mohacz, and the House of Austria, in the person of Ferdinand I., obtained the Bohemian throne, good Catholic though Ferdinand was, he was obliged to pledge himself to preserve the Compactata.[603]

* * * * *

It is not to be imagined that the teachings of Wickliff and Huss were wholly forgotten in Utraquist degeneracy. Their real inheritors were the Taborites, and although these, in their disorderly enthusiasm, vainly contended against the spirit of the age and disappeared from sight under the strong hand of Podiebrad, the seed which they had nurtured was not wholly lost. The profound religious convictions which animated these poor and simple folk are visible through the satire with which Æneas Sylvius requited their hospitality in 1451, on the eve of their suppression. Travelling with some nobles, on a mission from Frederic III., he was benighted near Mount Tabor, and thought it safer to trust himself with the enemies of his faith than to pass the hours of darkness in the open villages. In return for the simple kindliness of his reception the polished scholar and courtier describes them with the liveliest ridicule, and with brutal sneers at their poverty. They were mostly peasants, and as they came forth to greet him in the cold and rain, many were almost naked, having nothing but a shirt or a sheepskin to protect them; one had no saddle, another no reins, another no spurs; this one had lost an eye, that one an arm. Ziska was their patron saint, whose portrait was painted on the city gates. Though they ridiculed the consecration of churches, they were very earnest in listening to the word of God, and if any one was too busy or too lazy to go to the wooden house where they assembled for preaching he was compelled by stripes. Though they paid no tithes, they filled their priests’ houses with corn, beer, wood, vegetables, meat, and all the necessaries of life. Firm as they were in defence of their religious independence, they were not intolerant, and wide diversity of opinion was allowed among them.[604]

When such men as these were driven forth and scattered among the people they were much more likely to make converts than to be converted, and though lost to sight they were assuredly not false to their convictions. The reactionary course of Rokyzana and Podiebrad during the succeeding years could hardly fail to provoke discontent among the more earnest even of the Calixtins and to furnish fresh disciples and teachers. Materials existed for a sect representing the doctrines which, a generation earlier, had set Bohemia aflame; and although when that sect timidly appeared it prudently and sedulously disavowed all affiliation with the hated and dreaded Taborites, there can be no doubt that it was, to a great extent, composed of the same elements.

These new sectaries first present themselves in an organized form in 1457. Earnest, humble Christians, who sought to carry out the doctrines of Jesus, they differed from the Taborites in a yet closer approach to Waldensianism, due probably to the influence of Peter Chelcicky, who, without belonging to them, was yet to some extent their teacher. Like the Waldenses, they rejected the oath and the sword--nothing would justify the taking of human life, and consequently they were non-resistants. Since the time of Constantine and Silvester the Roman Church had gone astray in the pursuit of wealth and worldly power. The sacraments were worthless in polluted hands. Priests might hear confessions and impose penances, but they could not absolve; they could only announce the forgiveness of God. Purgatory was a myth invented by cunning priests. As for the mystery of the Eucharist, they prudently adopted the formula of Peter Chelcicky, which eluded the difficulty by affirming that the believer receives the body and blood of Christ, without pretending to explain or daring to discuss the matter. They ridiculed the superstition of the Calixtins, which exaggerated in the absurdest fashion the sanctity of the Eucharist, which carried the sacrament through the streets for adoration, and which held that he whose eye chanced to fall on it was safe from evil happening for that day; and they sometimes incurred martyrdom by publicly reproving the fanatic zeal which regarded the Eucharist as the holiest of idols. On this basis was founded the brotherhood of love and charity, of patient endurance and meekness, which represented more nearly the Christian ideal than anything the world had seen for thirteen centuries. With extreme simplicity of life there was no exaggeration of asceticism. Heaven was not to be stormed by mortification of the flesh, but was to be won by the sedulous discharge of the duties imposed on man by his Creator, in humble obedience to the divine will, and in pious reliance on Christ. Such was the “Unitas Fratrum”--the Bohemian or Moravian Brotherhood--and that a society thus defenceless and unresisting should endure the savage vicissitudes of that transitional period, and maintain itself through four hundred years to the present time, shows that force is not necessarily the last word in human affairs, and that average human nature is capable of a higher moral development than it has been permitted to reach under prevailing influences, secular and spiritual.[605]

At first they seem to have enjoyed the favor of Rokyzana, whose doctrines they claimed to follow, and whose nephew Gregory was one of their earliest leaders, along with Michael, priest of Zamberg. Rokyzana’s fluctuating policy, as the archbishopric seemed to approach or recede, soon led him to hold aloof, and when they drew apart from the Calixtins and organized themselves as a separate body he had no objection to see them persecuted. In vain they declared that they were neither Waldenses nor Taborites--the one was a word of bitter reproach, the other a terror. When, about 1461, Gregory, with a few companions, ventured secretly to Prague, they were betrayed as conspiring Taborites and put to the torture. It shows their state of religious exaltation that Gregory swooned on the rack and had a beatific vision. It may be put to the credit of Rokyzana that when he saw his nephew insensible from the torture he burst into tears, exclaiming, “O my Gregory, I would I were where thou art!” and that he soon afterwards obtained from Podiebrad permission for them to settle at Liticz. Here they prospered amid alternate peace and persecution, their numbers rapidly increasing.[606]

In retaining all the sacraments they retained belief in the necessity of apostolical succession for that of ordination; but as the sacraments were vitiated in unworthy hands, they became oppressed with misgivings as to the efficacy of the sacerdotal character of their priests, derived as it was through the Church of Rome. Some of them proposed sending to the legendary Christians of India, but they met with two men who had been in the East, and the accounts they received of the Oriental churches satisfied them that the succession there had been lost. Then they bethought them of the Greeks, but they met some Greeks in Prague, and many Bohemians had been in the Levant and Danubian provinces, from whom they learned that fees were required for ordination, thus rendering it void through simony; moreover, they heard of three Bohemians who had been ordained without inquiry as to their morals, which satisfied them that no true ordination was to be obtained there. Finally they turned to the Waldenses, of whom there was a community on the Austrian border. These claimed to descend from the primitive Church; that their ancestors had separated from Rome when the papacy was secularized under Silvester by the donation of Constantine, and that they had preserved the apostolic succession untainted. It remained for the brethren to see whether it was the will of God that they should organize themselves by means of these Waldenses. At Lhotka, in 1467, an assembly of about sixty chosen deputies was held. After fasting and earnest prayer, recourse was had to the lot, to decide whether they should separate themselves from the Roman priesthood. The result was affirmative. Then they selected nine men, from among whom three or two or one should be drawn, or none, if God so willed it. Twelve cards were taken, on three of which was written “is,” and on nine “is not.” These were mingled together, and a youth was directed to distribute nine of them among the men selected. All three with “is” proved to have been distributed, and the assembly devoutly thanked God for showing them the path to follow. Michael of Zamberg was sent to the Waldensian Bishop Stephen, who investigated his faith and life, and thanked God, with tears, that it had been vouchsafed him before he died to see such pious men. After episcopal consecration Michael returned; careful inquiry was made as to the antecedents of one of the three elect, named Matthias, and he was duly consecrated as bishop by Michael, who thereupon laid down both his Waldensian episcopate and Catholic priesthood, and was again ordained anew by Matthias.[607]

Thus all connection with Rome was sundered, and intimate relations were established with the Waldenses. Mutual sympathy and the identity of their faith drew the two sects together, although the austere virtue of the Brethren reproached the older heretics with concealing their faith by attending Catholic mass, with accumulating wealth, and with neglecting the poor. The Waldenses took the reproof kindly, promised amendment, and in a short time the two sects united and formed one body. Although the official name remained the “Unity of the Brethren,” gradually the despised term of Waldenses came to be recognized, and was freely used by the body to designate themselves, in their confessions of faith and apologetic tracts. I have already alluded to the mission which was sent in 1498 to the Brethren of Italy and France, and to the increased spirit of vigor and independence which the old Alpine communities drew from the resolute steadfastness of their new associates.[608]

Gregory had moulded the Church of the Brethren on the strictest basis. Members on entering were not, it is true, obliged to contribute their property to the common fund, but this was frequently done. The closest watch was kept on the conduct of each, and any dereliction was visited with expulsion, not to be revoked without evidence of change of heart. No one was allowed to take an oath, even in court, to hold an office, to keep an inn, to follow any trade except in the necessaries of life. Any noble desiring to join was required to lay aside his rank and resign whatever offices he might hold. In 1479 two barons and several knights applied for admission, when the rules were strictly enforced, and some submitted while others withdrew. This rigor at last caused violent dissensions, and in 1490 the Synod of Brandeis relaxed the rules. The puritan party recalcitrated and were strong enough to cause a revocation of this action in a subsequent synod. Much ill-feeling was generated, until, in 1495, at the Synod of Reichenau, there was mutual forgiveness and a moderation of the rules. Yet two of the puritan leaders, Jacob of Wodnan and Amos of Stekna, refused to accept the compromise, and founded the sect known as Amosites, or the Little Party, which maintained a separate existence for forty-six years.[609]

During this period the Brethren had been subjected to repeated and severe persecution. Sometimes driven for refuge to the mountain and forest, whence they earned the name of Jamnici, or cave-dwellers, they counted their roll of martyrs who had testified in the dungeon or at the stake to the strength of their convictions. Yet the little band steadily grew. In the year 1500 it was deemed necessary to increase the number of bishops to four. In Bohemia and Moravia they counted between three hundred and four hundred churches with nearly two hundred thousand members. There were few villages and scarce any towns in which they were not to be found, and they had powerful protectors among the nobility, who, by the enslavement of the peasants in 1487, had become practically independent and able to shelter them during periods of persecution. The Brethren were active in education and in the use of the press. Every parish had its school, and there were higher institutions of learning, especially at Jungbunzlau and Litomysl. Of the six Bohemian printing-offices they possessed three, while the Catholics had but one and the Calixtins two. Of the sixty books issued in Bohemia between 1500 and 1510, fifty were printed by the Brethren.[610]

From this period until the death of Ladislas, in 1516, they were subjected to intermittent but severe persecution, especially in Bohemia. Ladislas, in his will, left instructions for their extermination “for the sake of his soul’s salvation and of the true faith;” but the minority of his son Louis, only ten years old, the breaking-out of disturbances, and the feuds between Catholic and Calixtin brought them peace. The exiled pastors returned, the churches were reopened, and public service was resumed. With the rise of Lutheranism and the negotiations between the Bohemians and the German Protestants their history passes beyond our present horizon, except to allude to the fidelity with which they endured the shocks of the counter-Reformation, and succeeded in transmitting to our own time the lessons which they had learned from Peter Waldo and John Wickliff. They brought across the Atlantic the union of fearless zeal with the gentler Christian virtues, and in the annals of Pennsylvania the name of Moravian came to represent all that serves as the firmest and surest foundation of social organization. Parkman has well indicated the contrast between the civilizing influence of the kindly Moravian missionaries and the manner in which their Jesuit rivals were content to substitute the cross as a fetich in place of the medicine-bag. The same well-directed enthusiasm endures to the present day. Small as is the Moravian Church, it maintained in 1885 no less than three hundred and nineteen missionaries scattered among the remote places of the earth, with over eighty-one thousand native converts as church members; and the more rugged and inhospitable the fields of labor the more earnest the zeal of the good Brethren. But for them the savage coasts of Greenland would be almost destitute of Christian teaching, and in their truly apostolic work we may recognize that the blood of the martyrs of Constance was not shed in vain.[611]

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