Late Middle Ages

Jan Hus and the Hussite Wars

Jan Hus (c. 1372–6 July 1415) was a Bohemian priest, preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague, and rector of the University of Prague, whose execution at the Council of Constance ignited the most successful pre-Reformation challenge to the Western church. The wars that followed his death lasted fifteen years, produced the first sustained military defeats of the crusading papacy on European soil, and forced the Roman church to grant communion in both kinds — the sub utraque specie — to the laity of Bohemia. The eventual settlement, the Compactata of Jihlava (1436), was the only formal concession of doctrinal discipline that the medieval papacy ever made to a heretical movement, and the episode shapes every modern account of the late medieval church’s relations with national movements and with vernacular scripture.

Hus at Prague: preacher, professor, and Bohemian reformer

Hus was born c. 1372 in Husinec in southern Bohemia, of peasant stock. He matriculated at the University of Prague in 1390, took the B.A. in 1393, the M.A. in 1396, and was ordained in 1401. He rose rapidly: bachelor of theology in 1404, and a member of the team that examined the writings of John Wycliffe on behalf of Archbishop Zbyněk Zajíc of Hazmburk in the same year. In 1402 Hus was appointed preacher of the Bethlehem Chapel, a house founded in 1391 by the Prague merchant Jan Kříž and the parish priest Jan of Středokluky specifically to provide preaching in the Czech language; the chapel held perhaps three hundred, and it was there that Hus developed a sermon style that Anne Hudson has called the single most influential pulpit voice in central Europe before Luther. He was twice elected rector of the University of Prague, in 1409–10 and again in the troubled winter of 1410–11, and he served as an adviser to King Wenceslaus IV (d. 1419) during the struggle with his brother Sigismund over the governance of Bohemia.

The Wycliffite current at Prague was real and was academic in origin. Between 1380 and 1390 the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe had produced a body of writings — the De dominio divino, the Trialogus, the De veritate sacrae scripturae, and the two versions of his English Bible — that the Prague masters received through the marriage of Anne of Bohemia to Richard II in 1382. The transmission was not simple: the manuscripts reached the Prague masters in fits and starts, and Hus’s relation to Wycliffe has been the subject of intense scholarly debate since the nineteenth century. The classic study of H. B. Workman (John Wyclif, 1926) treated Hus as a Czech Wycliffite pure and simple; the revisionist Matthew Spinka (John Hus and the Czech Reform, 1941; John Hus’ Concept of the Church, 1966) argued that Hus was an independent thinker who used Wycliffe as a quarry, not as a master. More recently, Pavel Soukup, Ota Pavlíček, and František Šmahel have situated Hus firmly in a Czech tradition of moral reform (the devotio moderna Bohemica of the previous generation) and in the politics of the Prague university, which after the Kutná Hora Decree of 18 January 1409 was re-organised in favour of the Bohemian “nation” against the German-speaking masters.

The substance of Hus’s challenge was pastoral before it was metaphysical. He preached against the wealth of the clergy, against the sale of indulgences (the preaching of the pardon-seller John of Chlum, soon to be retracted, helped trigger the crisis of 1412), and against the sins of the priests who heard confession. Theologically, he held to Wycliffe’s eucharistic remanence — the doctrine that the bread remained bread after the consecration — but the Council of Constance records show that he was willing to use the language of “real presence” if the metaphysics were explained away. This is the key point made by Spinka and developed by Thomas A. Fudge: what was condemned at Constance was not primarily eucharistic, but ecclesiological. Hus held that the church is the predestinate body of the saved, and that the pope, to be pope, must be among them. The visible head of an institution numerically riddled with the reprobate could not bind the Christian conscience.

Constance, 1414–1415

The Council of Constance opened on 5 November 1414 under the presidency of Sigismund of Luxembourg, king of the Romans. Hus had been summoned by Sigismund personally and had been given a salvus conductus dated 18 October 1414, promising him free passage to Constance, a hearing, and a safe return. He arrived on 3 November 1414 and was given rooms in the house of a canon named F. Ammann. The promise was worthless. On 28 November 1414 he was arrested at Sigismund’s instigation and held in the Dominican friary under difficult conditions — chained, denied books, denied a secretary — for seventy-three days before his trial began.

The public hearings opened on 5 June 1415 in the Franciscan church. The acts of the trial, edited by Václav Novotný in 1909 and re-edited with new documents by Fudge in 2002, show that Hus was charged on forty-five articles drawn from his De ecclesia and from the Quaestio de sanguine Christi sub specie vini. He defended himself ably. He was not obstinate: the documents of the trial show him repeatedly distinguishing what he had written from how it might be read, and the famous letter to the Bohemian knights and barons of 1415 (preserved in Codex Vaticanus Latinus 4222) shows a man who knew that he was in danger and who framed his possible death as a martyrdom. He appealed, in order, to Christ, to a future pope, and to a general council — never, as the saintly ideal of his own trial would later suggest, to a Bohemian nation. He was condemned on 6 July 1415, degraded from the priesthood by the bishop of Constance, and burned the same morning at the stake outside the city gate, near the present-day Hus-Stein. His ashes were gathered and thrown into the Rhine; pieces of his clothing, smuggled back to Prague, became relics of a kind that the Council of Constance had tried to prevent.

Ulrich von Richental, the Constance town clerk, recorded the execution in his Chronik des Konzils von Konstanz with a matter-of-fact sobriety that has been the despair of Catholic hagiographers ever since. The Chronicon describes the crowd, the pyre, the patience of the victim, and the departure of the executioners; it does not stage a sermon. Richental’s account, used by every subsequent historian from Johannes von Müller (1782) to the modern editors of the Reichstagsakten, is the single most important primary source for the public culture of the trial.

The defenestration of 1419 and the wars

The reaction in Bohemia was immediate. The nobles of the kingdom, meeting in the Diet, presented a formal protest at Constance on 2 September 1415. By 1417 a Bohemian embassy was travelling to the Council of Basel, then still in the conciliarist phase, to demand the condemnation of Hus’s judges. The radical moment came on 30 July 1419, when the radical Hussite preacher Jan Želivský led a procession of armed townsmen to the New Town Hall of Prague; the councillors were seized, and seven of them were thrown from the windows — the Prager Fenstersturz, a defenestration which the chronicler Laurence of Březová recorded in a famously terse line. King Wenceslaus died of apoplexy on 16 August 1419, and Sigismund was left to fight for a kingdom that was already largely in revolt.

The wars fell into two phases. From 1419 to c. 1424, the war was dominated by the blind one-eyed captain Jan Žižka (d. 1424), a former officer of King Wenceslaus who used the Hussite tactical system of the wagenburg — the armoured wagon-fort, drawn up in circle or arc, with hand-gonnes and crossbowmen behind timber parapets — to defeat crusading armies in the open field. Žižka’s masterpiece was the Battle of Vítkov Hill on 14 July 1420, in which a small Hussite force held the steep southern slope of the Vítkov ridge against the crusading army of Sigismund, and the following day’s rout of the main crusader body; the chronicler again is Laurence of Březová, who served as a notary to the Hussite captains. The Battle of Ústí nad Labem (Aussig), 25 June 1426, was a similar affair: the crusading army under the cardinal-legate Giuliano Cesarini was cut to pieces by the combined Hussite infantry, and Cesarini himself barely escaped by the river. The Battle of Taus (Domažlice), 14 August 1431, was the last great Hussite field victory: the crusading army of Frederick, burgrave of Nuremberg, dissolved without a blow when the Hussite Wagenburg appeared on the ridge above the town, and the chronicler again reports that the soldiers began to say the Hospodine, pomiluj ny — “Lord, have mercy on us” — as the standard Czech battle hymn was heard in the distance.

The second phase of the war (c. 1424–1434) was internal. The Hussite movement split at the Diet of Čáslav in 1421 into two wings, the moderate utraquists (the Czech kališníci, named from the chalice, kalich) who were prepared to negotiate on communion in both kinds if the rest of the church’s rites were retained, and the radical Taborites — the heirs of Žižka, the chiliasts, the chiliastic commune of Tábor in southern Bohemia, the practitioners of the communio sub utraque with the parvus populus of children and the elaborate exegesis of the Apokalypsis and the Pístala of the radical lay preacher Martin Huska. The two wings fought each other at the Battle of Lipany on 30 May 1434; the Taborite army was destroyed, Jan Čapek of Sány the last Taborite captain was killed, and the radical moment closed.

The Compacts of Basel and the unitas fratrum

The settlement of the war, the Compactata, was proclaimed by the Council of Basel (now meeting in the city, after its own crisis) at Jihlava on 5 July 1436, and was accepted by the Bohemian Diet on the same day. The Compacts granted communion in both kinds to the laity of Bohemia, free preaching of the gospel by parish priests, and the use of Czech in the liturgy; they were confirmed by Sigismund, by the council, and eventually by Pope Pius II in 1462 (the confirmations, like the original Compactata, are printed in the older editions of the Monumenta conciliorum generalium saeculi XV of Birkowski). They were in force, in principle, until 1567, when Pius V revoked them after the failure of the later Utraquist church to hold the kingdom.

The more enduring product of the war was the Unitas Fratrum (Unity of Brethren), the continuationist body founded at Kunvald in eastern Bohemia on 1 March 1457 by the Utraquist priest Brother Gregory (Řehoř Krajčí) under the protection of the local lord George of Poděbrady — George himself, when king of Bohemia from 1458, would be the only Hussite monarch in history. The Unitas inherited the Taborite radical tradition, the lay preaching, the rejection of the mass as a sacrifice, and the congregational discipline; it was this body, not the Utraquist church, which Comenius would later claim as the seed of the Reformation in central Europe, and which survives in the modern Jednota bratrská and, through the diaspora of 1722 at Herrnhut, the Moravian Church. The historiography is reviewed by Fudge in Jan Hus: Religious Reform and Social Revolution in Bohemia (2010) and in a more critical register by Thomas Fudge in the Historische Zeitschrift.

Reading Hus

The standard Czech biography is now Fudge, Jan Hus: Religious Reform and Social Revolution in Bohemia (2010), which should be read alongside Spinka, John Hus and the Czech Reform (1941) and John Hus’ Concept of the Church (1966). Šmahel’s magisterial Husitská revoluce (4 vols, 1993–2013) is the work for the military and political history of the war. On the trial, the key edition is the Processus Iudiciarius contra Ioannem Hus in Fudge, The Trial of Jan Hus: Medieval Heresy and Criminal Procedure (2013). On Constance, see also The Council of Constance and the resolution of the schism and the overview of the late medieval church; the wider heretical context is in The major heresies of medieval Europe and the parallel English movement in John Wycliffe and the Lollard movement.

References and further reading

  • Thomas A. Fudge, Jan Hus: Religious Reform and Social Revolution in Bohemia (Brill, 2010).
  • Thomas A. Fudge (ed. and trans.), The Trial of Jan Hus: Medieval Heresy and Criminal Procedure (Oxford, 2013).
  • František Šmahel, Husitská revoluce (4 vols, Historický ústav AV ČR, 1993–2013).
  • Matthew Spinka, John Hus and the Czech Reform (University of North Carolina Press, 1941).
  • Pavel Soukup, Jan Hus: Stručný životopis (Univerzita Pardubice, 2015).
  • Ulrich von Richental, Chronik des Konzils von Konstanz, ed. M. R. Buck (Hiersemann, 1982).