Hussitism (1415-1436)

Hussitism cannot be understood without measuring the shock that the burning at Constance produced in Bohemia: a national preacher, holding an imperial safe-conduct, burnt by a foreign council. Indignation did the rest — and it was Czech first, theological second.

The burning of Hus and the protest of the 452 lords (1415)

On 6 July 1415, at the fifteenth session of the Council of Constance, in the presence of Emperor Sigismund, thirty propositions drawn chiefly from Hus's De Ecclesia were read out in public, the man was declared an obstinate heretic, degraded from the priesthood — his tonsure shaved off in mockery — then handed over to the secular arm, which sent him to the stake that same day^[4].

"This holy synod of Constance, seeing that the Church of God has nothing further that it can do, relinquishes Jan Hus to the judgment of the secular authority and decrees that he is to be relinquished to the secular court." — Council of Constance, 15th session, 6 July 1415 (Ignispedia translation)^[5]

The detail of the trial and of the thirty articles belongs to the article Jan Hus: it is not repeated here, except to fix the starting point — without Constance, no Hussitism. The news reached Prague within weeks and caused an explosion there: in September 1415, 452 Bohemian and Moravian lords set their seals to a solemn protest addressed to the council, denouncing the execution of a "good, just and Catholic man" and promising to defend the free preaching of the Gospel on their lands^[6]. It was the first collective act of the movement: the nobility of the kingdom stood as one body with the university and the people of Prague against the council.

Jerome of Prague, the second burning (1416)

Far from yielding, the council struck a second time. Jerome of Prague (c. 1379 – 1416), a brilliant philosopher, friend and lieutenant of Hus, who had come to Constance to defend him, first recanted there under pressure, then retracted his recantation with a courage that impressed even his judges — the humanist Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), present at Constance, left an admiring portrait of him in his Latin letter to Leonardo Bruni, written on the very day of the sentence, 30 May 1416^[7]. Condemned in his turn, he was burnt alive on 30 May 1416^[8]. For the Bohemians, the proof was made: Constance did not judge errors, it murdered a nation. The two burnings, ten months apart, sealed the unity of the Hussite camp — moderates and radicals now communed in the same martyrology.

Jakoubek and the chalice: the birth of Utraquism (1414-1417)

While Hus was dying at Constance, his intellectual successor at Prague invented the movement's rallying sign. Jakoubek of Stříbro (in Latin Jacobellus von Mies, c. 1372 – 1429), master of the university and preacher, convinced himself, Bible in hand, that communion under both kinds — bread and wine — was a commandment of Christ himself: "Drink of it, all of you" (Mt 26:27), "unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you" (Jn 6:53)^[9]. From 1414 onwards, he began distributing the chalice to the laity in several churches of Prague — Hus himself, still alive at Constance, had never preached this practice^[10].

The council reacted with a dogmatic clarity that would make history: at its thirteenth session, on 15 June 1415, it defined that the custom of communicating the laity under the single species of bread, "introduced by the Church and the holy Fathers with reasonable cause, and observed for a very long time", was to be held as a law which no one might change without the authority of the Church — and it forbade communion under both kinds without authorisation^[11]. It was this decree, even more than the thirty articles against Hus, that turned a Bohemian dispute into a Eucharistic schism: Prague now communed in the chalice against Constance, and the chalice painted on banners, weapons and clothing became the visible uniform of the party — hence its names: Calixtines (from the Latin calix, the chalice) or Utraquists (from sub utraque specie, "under both kinds")^[12].

In the summer of 1420, besieged by the first crusade, the Hussites gave themselves what no medieval heresy had possessed before them: a written programme, voted, promulgated in three languages — a true religious and national charter.

The four demands (July 1420)

Drafted under the decisive influence of Jakoubek and adopted in July 1420, promulgated in Latin, Czech and German, the Four Articles of Prague fit on one page and say everything^[13].

The political genius of the text was to weld three Bohemias into one: the university and the people of Prague found in it the chalice and the Word (articles 1-2), the nobility found in it the goods of the clergy (article 3), and everyone found in it the reform of morals (article 4)^[14]. The Archbishop of Prague himself, Conrad of Vechta, rallied to it on 21 April 1421: he adopted the articles, ordained Utraquist priests and invited the former clergy to conform — the heresy now had an archbishop^[15].

What the articles keep of Catholicism — and what they break

It must be said honestly: taken one by one, the Four Articles are not all false in the same degree. To ask that the Gospel be preached, that the clergy live poorly and that simony be punished, is to ask what saints — a Catherine of Siena — were asking at the same moment without breaking away^[16]. The break lies in two shifts: who decides and what becomes obligatory. "Free" preaching withdraws the preacher from the bishop; clerical poverty is imposed by the prince, who grows rich on the confiscations; and above all the chalice, a free usage as it had been in the early Church, becomes necessary to salvation — Jakoubek taught that without the chalice, there is no life in oneself^[17]. It is this necessity, asserted against the decree of Constance, that makes Utraquism a formal heresy rather than a mere local custom: no longer a rite under discussion, but an article of faith opposed to the Church^[18].

Behind the visible chalice, Hussitism carried the whole Wycliffite ecclesiology handed down by Hus: it was this that Constance struck in the thirty articles, and this that makes the movement incompatible with the Catholic faith — even when its anger against abuses was just.

The Church of the predestined and the unworthy prelate

The heart of the system, inherited from Wyclif through Hus's De Ecclesia, holds in two theses: the true Church is only the invisible assembly of the predestined (universitas praedestinatorum), and no prelate in a state of mortal sin legitimately exercises his office — his censures do not bind, his authority does not oblige^[19]. The practical corollary: obedience is due only conditionally — pope, bishop or council are obeyed only in so far as their command conforms to "the law of Christ", of which each believer, Bible in hand, makes himself judge^[20].

The Catholic answer holds in two words of Christ: "He who hears you hears me" (Lk 10:16) founds a visible, teaching Church which is heard before it is judged; and "practise and observe whatever they tell you" (Mt 23:3), said of the Pharisees seated on the chair of Moses, separates the validity of the ministry from the worthiness of the minister — the Augustinian doctrine against Donatism, which Saint Augustine had settled in the fourth century and which Saint Thomas takes up again for the sacraments conferred by the unworthy: they are valid ex opere operato, by the work accomplished, not by the holiness of the instrument^[21]. To condition all authority on the supposed grace of its holder is to deliver the Church to the private judgment of each — and, politically, to deliver the kingdom to civil war, as the sequel showed.

Scripture alone against the magisterium

Like the English Wycliffism from which it proceeds, Hussitism makes Scripture in the vulgar tongue, read and interpreted by each, the supreme norm against the magisterium: the "law of Christ" alleged against the pope is the Bible read without the Church^[22]. Hus and Jakoubek did not deny Tradition in theory, but in practice every decree, every custom, every definition that contradicted their reading — Constance on the chalice, Rome on indulgences — was swept aside with a verse. It is the direct medieval antecedent of the Reformation's Scripture alone, and the Church opposes to it what it would oppose to Luther: Scripture is not interpreted against the one who received, kept and canonised it — "the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth" (1 Tim 3:15)^[23].

The chalice for the laity: the sacramental breaking point

On the substance, the Catholic doctrine of concomitance had already answered the argument of the chalice: the risen Christ is indivisible, and he is received whole under each species — flesh, blood, soul and divinity under bread alone as under wine alone. The Council of Trent would solemnly define it a century later (session 21, 1562), but Constance had already assumed it in 1415: to commune under one kind alone is to be deprived of no grace necessary to salvation^[24]. The ancient usage of the lay chalice — real in the first millennium — had been restricted for causes which the Church judged reasonable (danger of spilling, irreverence, heresies denying concomitance), and only the authority of the Church can regulate a rite which it instituted^[25]. By erecting the chalice into a necessity of salvation, Jakoubek turned a disciplinary question into a new dogma — and it is this new dogma, not the wine itself, that the Church condemned. For the full exposition of Eucharistic doctrine and its defence, see The Real Eucharistic Presence.

"If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." — 1 Jn 1:8: against the claim, common to the Hussite radicals as to the Spirituals of the time, of a reform that would free one from obedience and from the ordained means of grace^[26].

From 1419 to 1434, Bohemia lived through what no Christian kingdom had seen since the Albigensian crusades — but in reverse: this time, it was the heretics who won the battles, and the crusaders who fled. Fifteen years of war mixing faith, Czech nation against Germans, nobility hungry for Church goods, and the genius of a one-eyed leader.

The defenestration and the king's death (1419)

On 30 July 1419, a Hussite procession led by the radical preacher Jan Želivský marched on the town hall of Prague's New Town to demand the release of Utraquist prisoners; a stone thrown from a window wounded a participant, the crowd burst in and hurled seven town councillors from the windows — they were finished off with pikes in the street^[27]. It was the first defenestration of Prague: the signal of revolution. Seventeen days later, on 16 August 1419, King Wenceslas IV, who had until then protected the Hussites out of calculation against his brother Sigismund, died of apoplexy — for the radicals, it was God freeing the throne; for Sigismund, the legitimate heir, it was the hour to retake his kingdom^[28].

Žižka and the wagon fortresses

The man who turned riot into an invincible army was called Jan Žižka of Trocnov (c. 1360 – 1424): a petty nobleman from southern Bohemia, a veteran — he is said to have fought the Teutonic Knights — blind in one eye lost in battle, soon blind in both after the siege of Rabí around 1421, and yet never beaten^[29]. His invention was peasant-like and brilliant: the vozová hradba, the wagon fortress — farm wagons, armoured and chained in a square, manned with crossbowmen, hand-gunners and iron flails, against which the heavy chivalry of the crusaders broke; then, at the signal, the counter-charge of infantrymen armed with flails^[30]. With peasants and artisans, Žižka invented field artillery and disciplined infantry a century before their triumph in Europe — his military ordinance, of biblical severity, punished indiscipline as a sin^[31].

Vítkov, Kutná Hora: five crusades driven back

Pope Martin V — elected at Constance to close the Great Schism — had the crusade preached, and Sigismund entered Bohemia at the head of an imperial army. On 14 July 1420, on the hill of Vítkov overlooking Prague, Žižka's troops crushed the vanguard of the crusaders: Sigismund, who had had himself crowned King of Bohemia in the cathedral on 28 July, had to disband his army and leave the city^[32]. In June 1421, the diet of Čáslav solemnly deposed him and entrusted the kingdom to four regents — Hussite Bohemia governed itself without king or Roman archbishop^[33].

Four more crusades followed until 1431 — Kutná Hora (December 1421), where Žižka, encircled, broke through the imperial lines in the depths of winter; Německý Brod (January 1422); the campaigns of 1427; and finally Domažlice (August 1431), where the crusaders, hearing in the distance the Hussite war chorale "Ktož jsú boží bojovníci" ("You who are God's warriors"), took flight before even fighting^[34]. Meanwhile, the Hussite armies carried the war beyond the frontiers — the famous "chevauchées" (spanilé jízdy) into Saxony, Franconia, Hungary and as far as Poland — under Prokop the Great (Prokop Holý, "the Bald"), a priest turned general after Žižka's death on 11 October 1424 near Přibyslav^[35]. At his death, his veterans took the name of Orphans (Sirotci): orphans of their father in war.

Lipany (1434): the moderates crush the radicals

War ended as revolutions end: the moderates allied with the former enemy to crush the radicals. The Utraquists of Prague and of the nobility, weary of fifteen years of war and of the millenarian excesses of the radicals, negotiated with the Council of Basel — and turned against the Taborites and the Orphans. On 30 May 1434, at Lipany, forty kilometres east of Prague, the army of the "Bohemian League" led by Diviš Bořek of Miletínek annihilated the radicals: Prokop the Great and Prokop the Small fell on the battlefield, and military Taboritism never recovered^[36]. The full story of the radical wing — Tábor the community of the elect, the millennium with weapons in hand, the refusal of all compromise — belongs to the article Taborites: it is not entered into here, except to fix the lesson — the decisive battle was played out among Hussites, moderates against radicals, negotiable chalice against absolute chalice.

Exhausted by Lipany, the moderate victors obtained at the negotiating table what arms alone had never given a heresy: a concordat signed with an ecumenical council.

The embassy of January 1433

On 4 January 1433, a Bohemian embassy solemnly entered Basel, where the council sat: Prokop the Great himself, John of Rokycana the theological leader of the Utraquists, Nicholas of Pelhřimov the Taborite bishop, and an Englishman gone over to the Hussites, Peter Payne — the "English Hussite", a former Oxford man who embodied the living filiation between Wycliffism and Prague^[37]. The debates lasted months: the Bohemians demanded the Four Articles as a right, the Fathers conceded them as a toleration. The text that emerged, the Compactata, authorised communion under both kinds where the usage had become established, maintained the Church's authority on the rest, and promised the forgetting of injuries^[38]. The Prague assembly accepted them on 30 November 1433 — the Taborites refused to submit to them, hence Lipany six months later.

Jihlava 1436: Sigismund recognised, the chalice tolerated

After Lipany, nothing more stood in the way of peace: at the diet of Jihlava, on 5 July 1436, the Estates of Bohemia and Moravia solemnly ratified the Compactata, recognised Sigismund as King of Bohemia, and received in exchange communion under both kinds, offices in the Czech tongue and absolution from censures^[39]. The same Sigismund who had delivered Hus to the stake twenty-one years earlier now reigned, at sixty-eight, over a kingdom officially Calixtine and officially reconciled — he would die the following year, in 1437. It was an event without precedent in the history of the medieval Church: never had a council composed with a condemned heresy to the point of recognising a rite of its own for a whole kingdom^[40]. The Catholic counterpart was not slight either: visible unity was restored, the legitimate king was recognised, and the radicals — the only irreconcilables — had been vanquished by the moderates themselves.

Hussitism did not die in 1436: it became a tolerated national Church, a king, then a free Church — before the Counter-Reformation closed the dossier two centuries later.

George of Poděbrady, the Hussite king (1458-1471)

In 1458, the Estates of Bohemia raised to the throne a great Utraquist lord, George of Poděbrady: the first and only Hussite king in history, he governed as a prince of peace — his plan for an alliance of Christian princes against the Turks, carried as far as Rome and Paris, passes for the first plan of peaceful organisation of Europe^[41]. But Rome never lastingly ratified the compromise: in 1462, Pius II revoked the Compactata, and in 1466 Paul II excommunicated George and loosed his subjects from their oath — the kingdom fell back into war until the king's death in 1471^[42]. The lesson is clear: the toleration of Jihlava rested on a political balance, not on Rome's doctrinal assent.

The Unitas Fratrum (1457) and the peace of Kutná Hora (1485)

From 1457 onwards, Hussites disillusioned by wars waged in God's name withdrew to Kunvald, in eastern Bohemia, around Gregory called the Patriarch: they founded the Unitas Fratrum, the "Unity of the Brethren" — apostolic discipline, refusal of oath and arms, a free Church outside the State^[43]. From them would be born, two centuries and one exile later, the Moravian Church of the Brethren. In 1485, the religious peace of Kutná Hora, concluded under Vladislas II Jagiello, froze the balance: Catholics and Utraquists mutually recognised each other for thirty-one years — in fact for more than a century — and Bohemia became the only kingdom in Europe where two confessions legally coexisted before the Westphalian treaties^[44].

From the White Mountain to Luther: the claimed heritage

The epilogue is tragic: after the revolt of the Estates and the White Mountain (8 November 1620), Ferdinand II restored Catholicism by constraint, banned the chalice and dissolved the Utraquist Church — Hussitism as an institution died where it had been born, at Prague^[45]. But its long shadow crossed the century: at the Leipzig disputation (June-July 1519), cornered by Johann Eck, who accused him of professing "a disguised Hussitism", Luther ended by assuming the filiation instead of defending himself against it^[46].

"We are all Hussites without knowing it." — Martin Luther, remark of 1520 reported after the Leipzig disputation (Ignispedia translation)^[47]

By this word, the 16th-century Reformation itself recognised its debt to 15th-century Bohemia: without Wyclif no Hus, without Hus no Hussite wars — and without the Hussite wars, no precedent of a Church of the chalice wringing its freedom, weapons in hand^[48].

A century of polemic has made Hussitism by turns a crusade of liberty against Rome and a bloody jacquerie. The Catholic gaze keeps neither the Protestant hagiography nor the black legend: it discerns.

A share of truth that must be recognised

As with English Wycliffism, Hussitism was born of a real scandal: the Great Schism (1378-1417) offered Christians the spectacle of two, then three, competing popes; simony, the accumulation of benefices, the traffic of indulgences — the very one Hus denounced at Prague in 1412 against the bulls of John XXIII — are abuses documented by ecclesial historiography itself^[49]. The thirst for Scripture in an understood tongue, the desire for a fuller communion, the refusal of episcopal pomp: all this is evangelical in its principle, and the Church recognised it in deeds — Vatican II would recall the duty of nourishing the people with Scripture (Dei Verbum, nn. 22 and 25), and communion under both kinds, freely authorised today in the circumstances provided by the Church, has nothing incompatible with the faith any more^[50]. The Church never retracted the condemnation of Constance, but Saint John Paul II, on 17 December 1999, expressed his "profound regret for the cruel death" inflicted on Hus and recognised in him a reformer of the Church of great moral uprightness — see the article Jan Hus for the full dossier^[51].

Why condemnation was unavoidable

But from partial truth, Hussitism made a false system — and an armed system. Three breaks make it incompatible with the Catholic faith: breaking the visible Church by reducing it to the predestined and subordinating all obedience to private judgment contradicts the promise — "I am with you always, to the close of the age" (Mt 28:20); erecting the chalice into a necessity of salvation against the decree of a council opposes a new dogma to the authority Christ gave his Church to regulate rites; delivering Church goods and the punishment of sins to the secular arm confuses the two swords and turns reform into plunder — the Bohemian nobility, first signatory of the Four Articles, was not mistaken about it^[52]. And when doctrine takes up arms — defenestration, civil war, devastating chevauchées, the millenarianism of Tábor — the Church, charged with the peace of peoples as with truth, can only judge with the Gospel: "All who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Mt 26:52)^[53].

What the Catholic retains — with charity

The Christian rejoices in no burning — neither of Constance in 1415, nor of the Hussite burnings lit against the Catholics who remained faithful: each victim is a soul the Church would have wished to bring back^[54]. He retains above all the double lesson of the dossier: a reform that begins by cutting away — the bishop, the council, the altar under one kind alone — ends by impoverishing those it claimed to enrich, as a century of Utraquist Church torn unceasingly between Prague and Tábor shows; and a Church that tolerates simony and pomp for too long itself prepares the Huses of tomorrow — the lesson the Council of Trent, a century later, would draw by reforming the discipline of the clergy for good^[55].

"Truth prevails" — Veritas vincit, motto of Jan Hus, become the Czech national motto: the Catholic hears in it another promise — not that every revolt in truth's name prevails, but that Truth itself, who is Christ, prevails in his Church despite the faults of its pastors and the violence of its children^[56].

• The founder: Jan Hus (c. 1370-1415) — Bethlehem, the De Ecclesia, Constance and the burning of 6 July 1415
• The English matrix: Wycliffism — Lollards, Twelve Conclusions (1395) and 45 articles condemned at Constance; and John Wycliffe
• The judging council: see the article on the Council of Constance (1414-1418) — the end of the Schism, Hus, the Eucharistic decrees
• The radical wing: Taborites — Tábor, the millennium with weapons in hand, the refusal of Basel
• The conciliarist temptation of the time: Radical Conciliarism — the superiority of council over pope, its excesses
• The doctrine of impeccability: The Heresy of the Free Spirit — the freed soul, its theses, its condemnation
• The poor cousins of Lyon: The Waldensians (1170-1532) — Waldo, evangelical poverty and the break
• The dualists of the Midi: Catharism — perfects, consolament, Catholic refutation
• The holy war of 1209-1229: The Albigensians — Béziers, Muret, Toulouse and the Treaty of Meaux-Paris
• The Balkan roots: Bogomilism (10th-15th century) — the priest Bogomil and the road to the West
• The Armenian ancestors: Paulicianism — Constantine of Mananalis, Sergius, Tephrike
• The Franciscan Spirituals: The Fraticelli — Olivi, absolute poverty and the burnings of the Midi
• Joachim and the Eternal Gospel: Radical Joachimism (13th-14th century) — the three states of the world and its heirs
• The Catholic doctrine of the altar: The Real Eucharistic Presence — concomitance, Trent session 21
• The pardons of the Church: Indulgences — nature, denounced abuses, authentic doctrine
• A century later: Martin Luther — Leipzig 1519, Scripture alone, the break of 1517