News of Jan Hus' death at the stake in July of 1415 enraged the population in Bohemia and Moravia. The Council of Constance was denounced by 500 Czech noblemen. They drew up a document which declared that the way Hus was treated was an insult to the whole country. They proclaimed that Hus was not a heretic but a good Catholic. Above all, they pledged themselves to defend the doctrines of Christ against man-made decrees. Challenging papal authority and the doctrine of papal infallibility, they asserted that they would obey only those papal commands which agreed with Scripture, and they gave Charles University the power to judge such matters.
The Council invited all 500 nobles to Constance to discuss their concerns. None accepted the invitation.
The rebels adopted a new symbol of their movement, the chalice. Unlike the traditional Catholics, the reformers believed in administering the Eucharist as early Church had done, in both kinds (sub ultrque species), wine as well as bread. They were called the Ultraquists or the Chalists. They broke the interdict against Prague by beginning to celebrate Mass again in the city. They served in their new Ultraquist way, and celebrated in Czech instead of Latin.
Both Ultraquist and traditional Catholic churches co-existed in Prague at this time, with the King, Wenceslas IV, deciding which churches would be designated for each. In 1419, under Church pressure, Wenceslas allocated only three Prague churches to the Hussites. A peaceful protest turned violent when someone threw stones from the council chambers of City Hall in Prague's New Town at the Ultraquist procession passing by. A mob stormed the chambers and two Catholic councilmen were thrown out the window to their deaths on the spears of the mob below. On hearing the news, Wenceslas dies of a stroke.
The consequences of these events, referred to as the First Defenestration of Prague, were far-reaching. Wenceslas' successor was his brother, Sigismund, a member of the Luxemburg dynasty, the King of German, and the man who had ordered Jan Hus burnt at the stake. However, he was unable to assert his control over the Czech countries. For the next two hundred years, there was no strong central authority, no powerful alliance of church and monarchy, in Bohemia and Moravia. The nobles increased their power. At times, anarchy reigned. During these turbulent two centuries, however, the Czech people were free to work out their own destiny without the domination of popes or kings. There was no Inquisition in the Czech lands.
As one would expect, neither Church and nor monarchy gave up their power easily. Following the Defenestration, Pope Martin V, just elected by the Council of Constance, declared a crusade against Bohemia. Sigismund obligingly raised an army and advanced toward Prague.
Hus' followers organized. Nearly every town in Bohemia and Moravia sent recruits. A brilliant one-eyed military man, John Zizka, was chosen general. Twice, Zizka's forces defeated crusades against the Hussites, sending the armies fleeing back to Germany. Sigismund's third crusade, on hearing the Hussite troops singing the new song, "Who are the fighters of God. . .," fled even before the battle began.
Zizka's phenomenal success was due not only to his innovations in military strategy, but to advances in firearms and artillery. "Pistole," originally a Czech word ("whistle"), entered common usage at this time.
During the decade 1420-1430, there were six unsuccessful crusades against the Hussites. With their failure, the pope lost control of the church on this eastern fringe of the Holy Roman Empire.
The subsequent drama reflected a larger turbulence boiling throughout Europe. It evolved in three dimensions: 1) confrontation between those who accepted the divine and absolute power of popes and kings, and those who embraced the new ideas of individual conscience and belief; 2) nationalism and ethnic strife between the Slavs and the Germanic people; and 3) the eternal clash between the "haves" and the "have nots."
When the Hussite movement started, all three forces were pushing in the same direction: for change. Later, the moderate Hussites formed alliances with the traditional powers, even with the hated Sigismund, against the radicals.
At this time the Church owned almost half of all the land in the Czech countries. In the scramble to relieve the Church of its property and return the institution to its original poverty and simplicity, strife developed among the reformers. More radical groups wanted to divide some of the land among the peasants, making them freemen. The Taborites, who settled in the Southern Bohemian city of Tabor (meaning "camp")advocated holding all property in common, as a commune. Another group, the Adamites, went even further and advocated free love, practiced nudism, and revived some older heresies brought by the Waldensians (Picards) from France. In this controversy, the nobles prevailed, and once they had secured this property, their revolutionary zeal diminished markedly.
The moderate Ultraquists, who included the nobles and the burghers of Prague, formulated the Four Articles of Prague, also known as the Compacts. These set forth as basic rights 1) an Ultraquist Eucharist, 2) the abolition of simony (corruption in the acquisition of Church offices), 3) recognition of Scripture as the ultimate spiritual authority, and 4) the end of excessive wealth for the Church.
Using their power in selecting a ruler, the nobles would demand that all prospective kings agree to the Articles. They were fully accepted only during the reign of George of Podebrady, "the Hussite King," one of the Czech nobles who reigned from 1458 to 1471. They were never accepted by the Pope.
Moderate though they were in doctrine, the Ultraquists continued Church practice of using force to impose religious belief. Will Durant, in his volume The Reformation, conveys the German view of the violence: "Zizka's puritans. . passed up and down Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia like a devastating storm, pillaging monasteries, massacring monks and compelling the population to accept the Four Articles of Prague. The Germans in Bohemia, who wished to remain Catholics, were favorite victims of hussite arms."
At this momentous period in history, we cannot consider the Czech lands in isolation. Durant puts it well: "A thousand factors and influences -- ecclesiastical, intellectual, emotional, economic, political, moral -- were coming together, after centuries of obstruction and suppression, in a whirlwind that would throw Europe into the greatest upheaval since the barbarian conquest of Rome." To briefly name just a few key factors: the discovery of America in 1492, the invention of printing in 1440, the translation and reading of the Bible by an ever more literate population, the rise of nationalist feelings, and the advent of Calvin, Zwingli, and Luther.
One hundred and two years after Jan Hus' death at the stake, Martin Luther posted his 95 these on the Wittenburg church and challenged the Christian world to debate them.
In 1520, in his open letter to the German nobility, Luther urged the reconciliation of the German Church with the Hussites of Bohemia. He pointed out that Hus had been burned in flagrant violation of the safe conduct Sigismund had promised. Challenging the Church's heretofore accepted right to enforce faith by excommunication and death, he asserted that "we should vanquish heretics with books, not burning." Twenty-six tumultuous years later, he died of an apoplectic stroke at the age of 63.
Unable to stem the rising storm of Protestantism, the Pope lost control of the Church in Germany in 1525 and later in Switzerland and France. In 1534, the English "Act of Supremacy" removed England from papal control. The Swedish Diet upheld Luther's doctrines in 1593. The advent of the Age of Discovery and advances in science challenged the world view of the Church: in 1522 Magellan sailed around the world and in 1610 Galileo asserted that the earth revolves around the sun.
The Protestant revolution continued. Durant asserts that persecution was effective in stamping out open heresy in places like Spain and France, but "probably strengthened Protestantism in Germany, Scandinavia, and England by arousing in their people a vivid fear of what might happen to them if Catholicism were restored."
Amid the violence, religious hatred, anarchy, and killing of the early Hussite era, a simple, self-taught squire, Peter Chelcicky (1390-1460)had founded a new Hussite religious community in Southern Bohemia, the Unitas Fratrum or Unity of Brethren. Its influence was later to stretch to the New World and to our own century. Chelcicky taught that Christians should reject the use of force. He saw as the most important precept of the Bible, the non-violent acceptance of injustices, of evil.
When the Pope refused to consecrate the Ultraquist Archbishop Rokycana, he actually contributed further to the development of Protestantism. Using the doctrine of apostolic success as a weapon, he hoped to "starve" the rebel church of priests. Without a bishop or archbishop, no new clergy could be ordained. The Unity of Brethren considered becoming a part of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and a message was sent to Byzantium. However, the fall of that city to the Turks in 1453 ended that option. In 1467, the Brethren broke with both Rome and the Ultraquists, who had also begun to persecute them for heresy. The organized themselves as an independent church with priests elected by the community.
Peter Chelcicky combined the ideas of Hus, Wyclif, and Peter Waldus. He taught that the understanding of Scripture is central, that each Christian should follow God's precepts "as his own intellect understands them." The Brethren put great emphasis on education, teaching all members of their community, both men and women, to read. They published the first Czech translation of the Scriptures, the Bible of Kralice.
They developed a disciplined communal lifestyle with community houses for single men, for single,women and for married couples. They practiced adult baptism, signifying the conscious and voluntary acceptance of Christian principles. Communal prayer was important. Ritual was simple and Spartan.
We know the Unitas Fratrum today as the Moravian Brethren and the Bohemian Brethren. In the fifteenth century, before the birth of Luther, they had already, quietly and non-violently, embodied the new spirit of Protestantism.
In the Czech lands, the Hussite Era ended abruptly and cataclysmically with many of the Protestant fear about the restoration of Catholicism being realized. Over the 200-year Hussite period, the House of Habsburg had been rising in Europe. With its Spanish roots, the Habsburgs represented the Catholic counter-reformation. The final years of resistance to their ascendancy began, ironically, soon after the 200th anniversary of Hus' death.
Known as the Thirty Years War, these battles started after the Second Defenestration of Prague. When the king refused to hear the complaints oft Protestant nobles, they threw two of his councilors out of the window. They then elected 30 directors to govern the country, forced the Jesuits to leave Bohemia, and declared invalid the designation of the Habsburg Ferdinand II as the future Kind of Bohemia. These bold but fatal moves set the course of Czech history for the next three centuries.
The battle on White Mountain near Prague in 1621 crushed the Protestant Estates (nobles) and, with them, the Czech Reformation. Ferdinand turned his religious zeal against the leaders of the revolution and the Protestants. Their property was confiscated. Many were condemned to death and publicly executed in from of the Town Hall. All privileges granted to the Ultraquists and to Non-Catholics were annulled. Catholicism was made the only accepted religion in the land. Charles University was handed over to the Jesuits. Czech books were confiscated and burned. German became the official language. The monarch was made absolute and hereditary.
Thus, the forces which had supported reform two hundred years before were all reversed. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 made it official. Eastern Europe was left to the Habsburgs, while Protestantism was allowed to reman and develop in Western Europe.
The Thirty Years War had brought devastation to Europe, comparable to that of the Black Death of the previous century. The population was reduced by two-thirds. Whole villages and cities ceased to exist. Bohemia paid the heaviest price. The population fell from three million in 1618 to 800,000 in 1654. Only 30,000 freeman's families were left of the original 150,000. The drastic changes in Bohemia and Moravia also resulted in mass emigration.
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