The Real History of the End of the World (16 page)

Hus tried to remain true to his beliefs without admitting to heresy. He also stated that many of the charges against him were due to purposely inaccurate translations of his work. He was happy to explain them. But soon the questions moved to the effects of Hus's preaching. This was the most serious accusation. If Hus not only believed in heresy but also exhorted others to believe, this was basically incitement to riot. The council gave instances of priests being attacked and other cases of civil disobedience that they put down to Hus's influence.
⁹

Hus was questioned for several days before the council and assorted dignitaries, including the Holy Roman emperor. He gave enough information to convince most of them that he was indeed a heretic. Scholars are still debating the issue, but they can afford to be objective. The council saw him as a threat. Hus was told to either retract his errors or be burned at the stake. Actually, the council begged him to recant. If he did, they could lock him up somewhere and forget about him, telling his followers that he had admitted that they were right and he was wrong. Hus answered that he couldn't do that because it would be perjury against the truth.
¹⁰
So the softer punishment was out.

It was ordered that the writings of Hus be burned first, but oddly, the council didn't stop him from writing letters to his supporters, which still exist. He encouraged them to carry on the fight and expose the iniquities of the Antichrist who was very much in evidence at the council. He also said that if he had erred, it was up to Christ to correct him, not the pope and cardinals. That was heresy in itself.
¹¹

After a final appeal to recant failed, Hus was brought to the cathedral on July 6, 1415. The charges of which he had been convicted were read out, with some interruptions from the Czech bishops in his defense. He repeated that he had been falsely accused and that he relied on the authority of the Bible to prove him right. Hus was formally thrown out of the priesthood and turned over to secular authorities to face the flames.
¹²

Hus was brought to a public square and chained to a stake. The wood was stacked around him up to his chin. The fire was lit and, a few moments later, he was choked to death by the smoke.
¹³

That was the end of Jan Hus but only the beginning of the Hussite movement.

The men at the Council of Constance knew that executing Hus would provide a martyr to the cause. This was one reason why they weren't that eager to burn him. They had no idea what their decision would unleash.

Heresy was nothing new in Bohemia or in the rest of Europe. With the glaring exception of the Cathars who, like the Zoroastrians, believed in a good and an evil god, most Christian heresies were basically attempts to reform the church and return to the “pure Christianity” of the First Christians. Few of them advocated a radical change in the foundations of society; even fewer were millennial or apocalyptic in the way that the movements of the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries were.

But the world was changing. The first serious arrival of the Black Death, in the 1340s, had traumatized Europe. The Great Schism in the church weakened the authority of the popes. And, long before the printing press, the Bible had been translated from Latin into the languages spoken in the streets. More laypeople outside of the nobility were able to read, and the first book they attempted was usually the Bible. The second thing they did was read it to others.

One sect, the Waldensians, had been founded in the twelfth century on the premise that everyone should read the Bible and decide the truth for themselves. Despite two centuries of persecution, they continued to exist and even spread.
¹⁴
Many have seen Waldensian influences in the Hussite movement.

After the martyrdom of Hus, his colleagues at the University of Prague and his followers throughout Bohemia continued and expanded upon his teaching. Soon Prague was a Hussite center. The local authorities were in sympathy with the movement, and for a time, it prospered.

The Hussite leaders established four articles of faith: communion with bread and wine for both priests and parishioners, the confiscation of secular property from priests and monks, the punishment of public sin, and the free preaching of the word of God.
¹⁵
This last meant that one didn't need to be a priest or have a license to preach.

The main group of Hussites was made up of educated university men or upper nobility. These people wanted church reform but within the system. But allowing free speech meant that all sorts of ideas about religion could be in the air and in the marketplace and taverns, not just castles and classrooms. The Hussites spawned a “radical left” that held both political and religious views. Putting these together created a gateway to revolution.

The most radical splinter group became known as the Taborites. They held their services on hilltops in imitation of the hill from which Jesus ascended into heaven. A fourth-century tradition said that this place was called Mount Tabor.
¹⁶
Soon the Hussites became two distinct sects.

The Hussites had tossed around the word
Antichrist
pretty much the way most medieval reformers did. It was anyone who actively worked against the Christian spirit. The Taborites took the term much more seriously. There was only one antichrist for them and they were determined to identify and destroy him. For the first time in Europe since the fall of Rome an apocalyptic Christian sect turned into a political revolutionary movement.
¹⁷

Part of this was the fault of the Czech Catholic rulers, especially the new king, Sigismund. After negotiating with the moderate Hussites in the autumn of 1419, he called for a crusade to suppress them entirely. The scholars in Prague, who had been preaching nonviolent resistance, felt forced to agree that taking up arms in the defense of the truth is an acceptable act.

In 1419, a Taborite prophecy declared that the Second Coming would happen at some time during Carnival season—that is, between February 10 and 14 of 1420. The “elect” were to go to one of five cities in Bohemia to await the end and to be safe during the breakdown in society caused by the biblical tribulations. The anticipation of the event was intense. They seem to have imagined a sort of opposite to the Rapture. The preacher Koranda told the Taborites, “One day we'll get up and find all the others lying dead with their noses sticking up in the air.”
¹⁸

When the date passed without incident, there must have been many who drifted from the faith and back to the less-radical Hussite beliefs. But enough stayed that it was possible to form Taborite cities. King Sigismund laid siege to them and eventually caused the Taborites to flee. Finally they established a city of their own, which they named Tabor (of course). It was well fortified, and there, in March 1420, they set up their society, still hoping that Christ would arrive soon.
¹⁹

By September 1420, the Taborites were beginning to wonder if Christ was going to show up at all. At this point, their leaders realized that they had been mistaken. Christ had come, but “like a thief in the night.” The signs were all around. The Millennium had begun, and it was up to all the Taborites to help cleanse the earth. “The Taborites in this time of punishment are angels. . . . [T]hey are an army sent by God through the whole world to remove all scandals from the kingdom of Christ, which is the Church Militant, and to expel the evil ones from the midst of the just and to take vengeance . . . on the nations of the enemies of the Law of Christ and against their cities, villages and fortified places.”
²⁰

This free pass to slaughter and destroy was taken up by the Taborites with frightening ferocity. They went forth from their cities, killing without mercy or even bothering to find out the religious views of the victims. They also burned towns and looted provisions for their common storehouse. The violence was all the more dreadful because, like the crusaders who took Jerusalem in 1096, they were on a mission from God; therefore, in their minds all their actions were sanctioned.

The Taborite armies were promised by their leaders that soon the world would be ready for Christ to come in all His glory. The saints and martyrs would rise, “and this would happen soon, in a few years, so that some of us now living would see the saints of God resurgent and among them Master John Hus.”
²¹

Once this occurred, the Taborites would be able to turn their bloody swords into plowshares and live in a world without sin or pain or even death.

The violence caused a crusade to be established against the Hussites and Taborites, strongly supported by King Sigismund, who still hadn't been able to be formally crowned due to political disputes. But after nearly fifteen years of fighting, the crusade hadn't yet succeeded, mostly due to the strength of the Taborite armies and the unwillingness of the Hussites to fight. In 1436, an agreement was made between the moderate Hussites and the orthodox Catholic forces. The Hussites were allowed to take communion as both bread and wine in their churches. After that, the two groups combined forces and finally defeated the Taborites.
²²

One sect of the Hussites, under the leadership of Peter Chelchiký, developed a new theology of personal salvation. Chelchiký preached equality, pacifism, the choosing of priests for their moral character, the “taking up of the cross” and living a life in imitation of Christ. He wrote against the excesses of the Taborites in 1421. His teachings became the basis of
Unitas Fratres
(Unity of the Brethren). In 1467 they met and chose their own priests by lot, unconnected with the Catholic Church.
²³

The Church of the Brethren is still active today.

The Hussites were not the only group that attempted to establish theocratic city governments. Geneva under John Calvin is the classic example. One of the many other Protestant groups of the sixteenth century was that of the Anabaptists. For outsiders, their main points of difference with other Protestants were their insistence on adult, rather than infant, baptism and their opposition to tithes, something they shared with English Puritans.

The Anabaptists began in Germany as a sort of second wave of Protestantism. They weren't rebelling against the Catholic Church but that of the Calvinist Zwingli.
²⁴
From 1533 to 1535, the Anabaptists established a Kingdom of Christ in the city of Münster, before they were defeated by secular military forces.

It was only when the new sects converted the rulers of principalities that Protestantism became a long-lasting state religion, as with the success of Lutherans in Germany and Scandinavia. The English took somewhat longer to come to terms with being a quasi-Protestant country and decided to do away with the monarchy. Setting up a government without a king was harder than it looked, as Oliver Cromwell and the Fifth Monarchy Men discovered.

1
Edward Peters, ed.,
Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 292.

2
Howard Kaminsky,
A History of the Hussite Revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), w5-40.

3
J. K. Zeman, “Restitution and Dissent in the Late Medieval Revival Movements,”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
44, no.1 (1976): 11.

4
Bernard McGinn,
Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 259.

5
Charles-Joseph Hefele and H. Leclercq,
Histoire des Conciles Tome VII Première Parti.
(Paris: Letouzey et Ane, 1916), 253.

6
Ibid., 258.

7
McGinn, 263.

8
Ibid., 265.

9
Ibid.

10
Ibid., 299.

11
Ibid., 305-306.

12
Ibid., 329. The Church was not allowed to impose a death sentence, and priests could not be executed by the civil authorities; thus Hus had to be made a layman again, and the council had to give him to laypeople to be killed. It was just a formality.

13
Ibid., 331.

14
Peters, 139-164.

15
Peter Brock, Cornelis H. Van Schooneveld,
The Political and Social Doctrines of the Unity of Czech Brethren in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries
(The Hague: Mouton, 1957), 12.

16
Howard Kaminsky, “Chiliasm and the Hussite Revolution,”
Church History
26, no. 1 (1957): 44, n. 3.

17
McGinn, 263.

18
Quoted in Kaminsky,
A History of the Hussite Revolution,
330. The preacher doesn't say what they'll do with all the bodies, but he implies that anyone who wants can get a new house.

19
Ibid., 329-359.

20
Quoted in ibid., 346.

21
Quoted in ibid., 348.

22
Richard Kieckhefer,
Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1979), 84-86.

23
Zeman, 21-24.

24
James M. Stayer,
The German Peasant's War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods
(Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1994), 63.

I never disclosed the manner and great number of the visions
and many other revelations I had. . . . Now necessity compels me
to write down the coming events I publicly preached about.

—Savonarola, “The Compendium of Revelations”
¹