was that he wrote in Bohemian. Since the time of Otto of Brandenburg,
the German language had gained much ground in the town councils of
Bohemia; and the foundation of the Prague University had brought a rush
of German scholars to that city. The arrangements for the votings of
the Nations had secured a predominance to the German element in the
University; for not only did the Bavarian and Saxon nations represent
almost exclusively the German influence; but even in the districts from
which the Polish nation was drawn, there was a large German admixture.
Of course those students who had come from a great distance had given
a special proof of their genuine interest in learning; and they
naturally looked upon themselves as the representatives of a higher
culture than that of the ordinary townsfolk of Prague. Hence it came
that the leading doctors of the University inclined to consider German
rather than Bohemian as the suitable language for men of culture,
especially when writing on abstruse subjects; and this feeling they
were all the more anxious to assert, because, in the general stir
of thought, a native Bohemian literature was beginning to attract
attention.
Charles himself had studied the language carefully, had favoured the
revival of the Slavonic ritual, and, as already mentioned, had chosen
Milic of Kromĕr̆íz̆ in order to encourage the popular preaching of
Bohemian. Under these circumstances, satirists, poets, and historians
began to write in their native language; and the Masters of the
University felt that they would have a hard struggle before they could
denationalise Bohemia. They were therefore especially irritated when
a cultivated nobleman like S̆títný insisted on discussing the most
profound and subtle questions of theology in the Bohemian language; and
this alarm was certainly not diminished when they found that he coupled
these speculations with denunciations of the corruptions of the clergy,
the tyrannies of nobles, and even the injustices of kings. Thus, then,
a general movement for the reform of morals and the improvement of the
clergy was more and more connecting itself with the struggles between
German and Bohemian for the supremacy of their respective languages. It
is conceivable that even so bitter a controversy as this might have
been guided into more peaceable channels by a king who combined zeal
for the Church, hearty appreciation of German learning, and a real
enthusiasm for Bohemian traditions. But whether or not Charles would
have been equal to such a task, there can be little doubt that his
death in 1378, and the accession of his son Wenceslaus IV., did prepare
the way for the more violent explosion which followed.
A great name is, in any case, a very dangerous inheritance; and when
that inheritance implies an obligation on the heir to carry out a
great work begun by his predecessor, the tradition generally involves
failure and disgrace. In Wenceslaus, as in so many sons of great
rulers, some of the qualities which had secured his father’s success
were conspicuously wanting. Charles had known when to insist, and when
to abstain from insisting, on the reforms which he had most at heart.
He had known how far to go in the punishment of offences, and when to
pardon graciously; above all, he had known how to respect, and even to
utilise, the abilities of honest opponents. None of these lessons of
statesmanship could Wenceslaus ever learn; he was absolutely without
self-restraint or sense of proportion; and, consequently, though his
aims were generally those of a wise and patriotic ruler, he frequently
used the methods of a cruel tyrant.
Yet, with all these grave defects, Wenceslaus was far from being the
unscrupulous and self-indulgent monster which his enemies delighted to
paint him. In the early years of his reign his policy was wise and
enlightened, though, even then, it was marked occasionally by that
hastiness and uncertainty which belonged to his passionate temperament.
But, in the difficult position in which he was placed, every step
which he took was a dangerous one, and was certain to encounter fierce
opposition.
The first work which his Imperial position imposed on him was the
effort to restore order in the Church, by putting an end to the
divisions between the rival Popes. In this point he wisely followed the
policy of his father, and supported the claims of Pope Urban VI., who
was actually living at Rome. The assembly of German princes accepted
the decision of the Emperor; and at Prague he received the support both
of the University and the Archbishop. But a difficulty at once arose.
The Pope of Avignon was, as a matter of course, supported by the King
of France; and the old traditions of the House of Luxemburg were in
favour of friendly relations with the French kings. Greatly, therefore,
to Urban’s indignation, Wenceslaus insisted on renewing his alliance
with Charles in the next year to that in which he had recognised Urban
as pope; he also refused to support that Pope in his quarrels with the
House of Anjou for the possession of Sicily; and an even more vital
cause of difference between Urban and Wenceslaus was the determination
of the King to assert his authority over the clergy of Bohemia.
It was in these quarrels with his clergy that Wenceslaus first showed
that tendency to violent methods, which undermined his own power and
inflicted great injury on the cause of Church reformation. In 1385 he
was involved in a quarrel with the Dean of Breslau. It appeared that a
cask of beer sent to the dean by his brother had been intercepted by
the Town Council, on the ground that no foreign beer should be admitted
into the town. The dean, therefore, laid an interdict upon Breslau.
Wenceslaus came to inquire into the matter, and demanded that the
religious services should be celebrated, as long at least as he stayed
in the town. The dean refused; and thereupon Wenceslaus banished the
whole Chapter of Breslau from the town for two years, and handed over a
large part of their property to the citizens.
But the most dangerous of his clerical enemies was the Archbishop of
Prague, John of Jenstein. The Archbishop, himself of noble birth, had
had a quarrel with the Marshal of the Court about certain rights of
fishing on the Elbe; and, in asserting these rights, he had destroyed
a weir which the marshal had made. Wenceslaus took the side of his
official, and demanded that the Archbishop should make compensation.
Jenstein refused; and Wenceslaus thereupon confiscated his property.
But these acts, however arbitrary, might possibly have been forgotten,
had they not been followed by a more celebrated quarrel.
In the year 1393 the Vice Chamberlain, who was the chief judge of the
royal law-court, had put to death two priests. It is uncertain what
their offences were; but the Archbishop claimed them as under his
jurisdiction, and asserted that they should only have been tried in
his court. About the same time, the Archbishop had wished to seize
and punish certain Jews, who, after being baptised as Christians, had
relapsed into Judaism. As the Jews were under the special protection
of the King’s court, the Vice Chamberlain refused to surrender them
to the Archbishop. For these two acts of opposition to his power, the
Archbishop excommunicated the Vice Chamberlain, and denounced him as a
heretic. The King received this news with great indignation; and his
anger was still further quickened by a more personal insult. Not long
before this time, he had recommended a special favourite to a bishopric
in Pomerania; but, as the rulers of Pomerania had resisted the
appointment, Wenceslaus had been unable to establish his claim. He was
therefore resolved to endow a new bishopric in Bohemia, to which his
nominee could be appointed; and the death of the abbot of a monastery
in Prague suggested to the King the advisability of suppressing the
monastery in order to obtain funds for the endowment of his new
bishopric. The Archbishop opposed the creation of this bishopric as a
diminution of his own diocese; and he may very likely have considered
the suppression of the monastery as an act of injustice. In defiance,
therefore, of the King’s order, the Archbishop directed the monks to
proceed to the election of a new abbot, which they accordingly did.
Wenceslaus hastened back to Prague in great indignation; and the
Archbishop fled to the Castle of Raudnice. The King claimed this as
a royal castle; and he therefore considered the Archbishop’s flight
thither as conclusive proof of an organised conspiracy against the
royal authority. Finding that Jenstein would not return to Prague, the
king summoned before him the two chief officials of the archbishopric,
Puchnic, and John Nepomuc. When they persistently refused to give
any evidence against the Archbishop, Wenceslaus ordered them to be
tortured. As they continued to defy him, he had them burnt on the hand;
and, at last, fixing upon Nepomuc, either as the most defiant or the
most important of his victims, he ordered him to be bound hand and
foot, and thrown into the Moldau.
This crime was to produce even greater triumphs for the clerical party
than those which had followed the murder of Becket; and Wenceslaus
seems to have repented of it almost as soon as it was committed. He
set Puchnic free, and gave him money compensation for his sufferings;
and he recalled Jenstein to Prague. The Archbishop came; a sort of
reconciliation was patched up, but its unreality was evident from the
first. Jenstein secretly fled to Rome and demanded that the Pope should
lay an interdict on Bohemia. At the same time all the clergy appealed
to Sigismund, King of Hungary, the brother of Wenceslaus, to come to
Bohemia to avenge their wrongs. Strange to say, this second appeal was
the only one which produced a result. The new pope, Boniface IX., was
eager to obtain the support of Wenceslaus, and therefore took his part
against the Archbishop. Sigismund, on the contrary, was always ready to
plot against his brother; and he easily found allies among the Bohemian
nobility.
For, though the offences of Wenceslaus against the clergy had
attracted the most attention, his injuries to the secular nobles had
been not less keenly felt. In his desire to weaken the more powerful
members of the aristocracy, he had formed a private Council among the
small nobility and citizens; and, by their help, he had opposed and
counteracted the greater nobles. He had further offended their sense of
dignity and decorum by playing the part of Haroun Alraschid, and paying
secret visits to the houses of his various subjects, to discover any
offences which might have escaped the notice of the ordinary tribunals.
This conduct had made him so unpopular with the nobles that, even
before Sigismund’s intervention, they had formed a conspiracy against
him. The ostensible leader of this conspiracy was the king’s cousin
Jodok, the Margrave of Moravia; but perhaps its most powerful member
was Henry of Rosenberg. This nobleman, like so many of his time, was
a distinguished patron of literature and art; though his influence in
such a movement was no doubt due to the more material considerations of
his high rank, wide connections, and large territorial influence.
[Illustration: KRUMOV, ONE OF THE CHIEF SEATS OF THE ROSENBERGS.]
The Rosenbergs were the members of a very powerful group of families
called the Vítkovici, who were the practical rulers of the south and
south-east of Bohemia. There they exercised an authority which was
little short of regal. They had bodies of soldiers at their command;
they coined money and built fortresses at their pleasure. They
professed to trace their origin to the Italian family of the Orsini;
and they had played almost as important a part in the thirteenth
century as the Vrs̆ovici had played in the earlier history of Bohemia.
Of these Vítkovici the Rosenbergs were the most important branch;
and their name shows that they had to a large extent Germanised
themselves, even in the time of Ottakar. They had strengthened their
position in Bohemia by founding towns and monasteries, planting woods,
and building churches; and their fishponds became so important that
the town of Prague was mainly supplied from them. So deeply-rooted
was their power that the signs of its past greatness are visible even
at the present day, in the towns of Krumov, Tr̆ebon̆, Prachatice,
the monastery of Hohenfurt, and the castle and village of Rosenberg.
It will easily be understood that the leader of so powerful a clan
would deeply resent such attempts as those of Wenceslaus to infringe
the privileges of the nobility, and to call men of lower rank to his
Councils. Nor did the nobles rely solely on Bohemian support. Jodok of
Moravia had taken counsel with the Duke of Austria and the Margrave of
Meissen, who were always ready for any opportunity of weakening the
Bohemian kingdom. Such a combination as this would have been dangerous
even to Charles; and Wenceslaus was quite unable to stand against it.
The rebels were quickly ready for action; and in the year 1394, as
Wenceslaus was on his way to Prague, he was seized by Jodok and his
followers, and imprisoned in the Castle of Prague. The demands of the
insurgent nobles were now formulated. They insisted that Wenceslaus
should leave them in possession of all the fortresses that had been
pledged to them, and that he should appoint Jodok as his Viceroy in
Bohemia. Duke John of Görlitz, the youngest brother of Wenceslaus,
hastened to the rescue of the king; and, though Jodok succeeded in
carrying off his prisoner to Austria, John was welcomed by the
citizens of Prague, who swore to recognise him as the administrator of
the country till the King should once more be at liberty to act.
In the meantime the princes of the Empire had become indignant at the
treatment of their Emperor; and they persuaded the Duke of Austria
to set him free. Wenceslaus returned, embittered and suspicious, to
his kingdom; and his brother John soon found that the position of
liberator and peacemaker was a very difficult one. The rebel nobles
had fled to Austria, whence they made raids upon their native country;
John attempted to make peace between the king and the insurgents; but,
when Wenceslaus found that John had mistaken the extent of the powers
entrusted to him by the rebels, he accused his brother of deceiving
him, and deprived him of his vice-royalty. Many of the citizens of
Prague had become attached to John, and they remonstrated against
his deposition. Thereupon Wenceslaus deposed all the members of the
Town Council, appointed a new Council in their place, and then went
through the town, accompanied by an executioner, who cut off the heads
of the King’s leading opponents at the doors of their houses. In his
discontent with John, Wenceslaus now appealed to his brother Sigismund.
Sigismund came, and John soon after died, not without suspicion of
poison. Sigismund at once persuaded Wenceslaus to recognise him as his
heir if he should die without sons, to appoint a Council of the nobles,
and to promise not to introduce any changes in the government without
the consent of that Council.
The hollowness of the peace which followed was very quickly seen. When
Jodok came to see the king at Carlstein in the same year, Wenceslaus
was so carried away by the recollection of his cousin’s insults, that
he had him arrested and imprisoned. Then, suddenly remembering the
treaty of peace, he set him free again. But Jodok thought more of his
imprisonment than of his liberation; and, though nominally reconciled,
the King and the Margrave remained enemies throughout life.
The Bohemian quarrels had, in the meantime, given opportunity for the
intrigues of Wenceslaus’s rivals in the Empire. That jealousy which
the Electors always felt of the concentration of the Imperial power in
any one family, had been for some time directed against the House of
Luxemburg. Charles’s extension of Bohemian territory, by the addition
of German lands, had caused much suspicion and dislike. But his
combination of vigour and self-restraint, and his complete hold over
his Bohemian subjects, had prevented the intriguers from making any
head during his lifetime. Now, however, the quarrels of Wenceslaus with
his subjects had given a double opportunity to his German opponents;
for while, on the one hand, they could point to his long detention
in Bohemia as a proof of his indifference to Imperial affairs, on
the other hand, the disaffection of his Bohemian subjects supplied a
hopeful weapon for undermining his power.
His two leading enemies were Rupert, Count Palatine of the Rhine, who
aimed at the Imperial dignity, and the Archbishop of Mainz, who had
secured his see by a promise to support the intrigues of Rupert. These
conspirators succeeded in winning to their side Pope Boniface IX. This
Pope had indeed been at first friendly to Wenceslaus; but he had been
offended by the readiness with which the King of Bohemia had listened
to the French proposals for the election of a new Pope in place of the
two rival claimants to the Holy See. Under various pretexts, the Duke
of Saxony and the Archbishops of Trier and Köln were drawn into the
conspiracy; and so, in February, 1400, the Electors met at Frankfort
and resolved to choose a new Emperor.
The most plausible grounds for this deposition were mainly of a
negative kind. Wenceslaus was charged with failing to procure a
peaceful settlement of the affairs of the Church, and with paying no
heed to those wars which were disturbing the Empire. Though Wenceslaus
might have found ample excuse for these failures, he could not
directly deny them; but the other charges were either false or grossly
exaggerated. One of them, however, must be quoted, since it has so much
bearing on the troubles which were approaching in the Bohemian kingdom.
This was a charge that he “had drowned, burnt, and otherwise murdered
and tortured reverend prelates and priests.” This accusation shows
that the murder of Nepomuc was to be represented, at the pleasure of
Wenceslaus’s enemies, either as part of a general massacre of priests,
or as the cruel execution of one specially righteous man.
It was, therefore, as the champion of Holy Church against its
oppressor, that Rupert was chosen Holy Roman Emperor. In this character
he at once marched into Bohemia and won the support of Jodok and
the discontented nobles. Again Wenceslaus was forced to make terms
with his enemies; and again Sigismund was called in and appointed
Viceroy. But Sigismund gained favour with no party. Jodok and his
friends resented the power entrusted to him; the citizens of Bohemia
complained of the heavy taxes which he laid upon them; and Wenceslaus
resisted his proposal that he should counteract the schemes of Rupert
by accompanying Sigismund to Rome, and by accepting the Imperial crown
from the Pope. Finding his plans thwarted, Sigismund suddenly seized
upon his brother, and carried him off as prisoner to Vienna. From this
imprisonment Wenceslaus succeeded in escaping in 1403; and, on his
return to Prague, he was welcomed as the liberator of Bohemia from
Sigismund.
In the meantime the reform movement had been approaching a crisis. The
teacher who, after the death of Milic, had gained most influence in
the country, was a Bohemian nobleman named Matthias of Janov. He had
not devoted himself so exclusively as Conrad and Milic had done to the
denunciation of moral abuses, but had also attacked practices like the
worship of images and saints; and he had been the first to bring before
the public the question which was afterwards to be so interesting to
Bohemians, the granting of the cup to the laity in the Holy Communion.
But though this latter fact gives Matthias a kind of historic interest,
he seems to have been in the main a source of weakness to the cause
which he defended. Never wholly disinterested in his objects, he soon
flinched from the attacks of the rulers of the Church; and in 1389 he
formally recanted his reforming doctrines.
[Illustration: VILLAGE OF HUSINEC.]
Along with the movement for ecclesiastical reform, the Bohemian
national revival had been steadily making way; and the opposition of
the German party had served to deepen the zeal of the reformers for
the encouragement of the Bohemian languages. A most important link
was formed in 1396 between the linguistic and the moral revival. In
that year a man named John of Milheim founded a chapel which was to
be entirely devoted to Bohemian preaching, in order, as its founder
expressed it, “that the Word of God should not be fettered, and that
Bohemian preachers should not be obliged to go from house to house.”
The new foundation was to be called the Bethlehem Chapel, and was to
be consecrated to the Holy Innocents. Strange to say, the first three
preachers seem to have been somewhat hesitating and uncertain in their
tendencies; and it was not till 1402 that the appointment of Jan Hus
secured to the Bethlehem Chapel a special position in the history of
Bohemia.
[Illustration: HUSINEC, SHOWING COTTAGE WHERE HUS WAS BORN.]
On July 6, 1369, Jan Hus was born at Husinec, in the south of Bohemia.
This village lies in a deep valley among pine-covered hills, and the
tiny cottage in which Hus was born still remains. As his parents were
poor, he was forced to support himself in his early days by singing in
churches; and even after he had been sent to the University he was in
such straits that he was at one time compelled to live on dry bread.
Nevertheless he made steady way in the University; two years after
taking his degree of Master of Arts, he was appointed examiner; in
1401 he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and in 1403 he was
chosen Rector of the University. He had thrown himself from the first
into the national cause; and he denounced, from his pulpit in the
Bethlehem Chapel, the expedition of the rebel nobles against Prague.
He showed great zeal in giving new literary expression to the Bohemian
language, and expunged from it the Germanisms which had crept into it.
He also persistently opposed the encroachments of the Germans in the
government of the University. At the same time he always declared that
he would prefer a good German to a bad Bohemian, even if the latter
were his brother.
It was in this same year, 1403, that the national reform movement began
to connect itself generally with questions of ritual and doctrine.
The exact point in history at which the doctrines of Wyclif gained
influence in Bohemia, is very difficult to fix. The marriage of
Anna, the sister of Wenceslaus, in 1381, to Richard II. of England,
undoubtedly produced close contact between the two countries. It is
clear, from his own statements, that Wyclif was much impressed by the
forwardness of the Bohemians in religious knowledge, and specially by
the fact that they had already translated the Bible into their native
tongue. But, although this experience much affected the work of the
English Reformer, it seems doubtful how soon he began to repay the
debt, by imparting his ideas to Bohemia. Apparently, neither Matthias
of Janov nor Thomas of S̆títný were deeply acquainted with Wyclif’s
works; and neither his condemnation in 1382 nor his death in 1385 seem
to have excited much interest in Bohemia. Yet, on the other hand, it
is evident, from the scene which is about to be described, that both
Hus and some of his followers must have given considerable attention to
Wyclif’s writings.