The Wandering Harlot (The Marie Series) (40 page)

HISTORICAL NOTES

The year is AD 1410, and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and the Catholic Church are both in turmoil. King Rupert is dead, and the two cousins Sigismund and Jobst von Mähren are involved in a dispute over his testament. Sigismund will eventually prevail, but even he is not able to put an end to the feuds and power struggles among the nobles that pose almost irreconcilable problems for all of Christendom.

Three princes of the church lay claim to being the legitimate followers of the apostle Peter, and are in an all-out war with one another. At the same time, the clergy is in decline. Monks and priests have become flesh-peddlers and abbots and bishops territorial lords who care less about the souls entrusted to them than their own wealth and status.

In England, the preacher John Wycliffe raises his voice against the scandalous situation in the clergy, and in Prague, the Master Jan Hus rises to denounce the rulers. But no one who has reached the pinnacle of success ever wants to permit his demotion to a lower status, and none of the three popes—Gregory XII in Rome, Benedict XIII in Avignon, nor John XXIII in Pisa—agrees to step down and make way for the unity of the Catholic faith.

For this reason, Kaiser Sigismund convenes a council in Constance. Only one of the popes, John XXIII, appears personally, and he expects support from the kaiser against his two adversaries. Gregory and Benedict merely send representatives. But how can the kaiser break the impasse and settle the competing claims when the Spanish empire supports one pope, France the other, and the kaiser himself the third? After long negotiations, John XXIII is finally declared unfit and removed from the list of popes. The name John falls into such disrepute that for six hundred years no pope will choose that name again. Not until the twentieth century will Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli take this name, becoming the true John XXIII. Gregory XII finally renounces his claim voluntarily while Benedict XIII clings to his title for the rest of his days, though his influence shrinks to a small group of supporters after Oddo Colonna is selected as the compromise candidate, becoming Pope Martin V.

Though the Council of Constance solves the papal problem, it fails in other significant respects. It does not bring an end to the pomp and immorality of the clergy nor set up an honest dialogue with church critics. Jan Hus, who came to Constance trusting in the free conduct promised by the kaiser, is put on trial before an ecclesiastical court, condemned to death in a questionable proceeding, and burned at the stake on Brüel Field. The consequences of this betrayal were the long and ruthless Hussite Wars and the alienation of people of German and Czech descent in Bohemia.

More than one hundred years after the Council of Constance, a Benedictine monk will nail his ninety-five theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg, thus continuing and extending even further the work of Wycliffe and Hus. He cannot reform the Catholic Church, but his protest will open a schism in the church, reaching far beyond the Reich. The conflict with the new confession will, however, not remain without consequence in the clergy and monasteries, and will change them more in the hundred years following than in the thousand years before.

During the Council of Constance, morality became so loose that the minstrel Oswald von Wolkenstein mocked the town as a whorehouse extending from one gate to the other. Newly arriving prostitutes therefore resorted to radical means to fight the unfair local competition. Many of the nobles simply took any girl they liked, as Count Eberhard von Württemberg did, seizing a Constance citizen’s daughter off the street and then taking her on horseback to his quarters.

The city of Constance had to struggle with the consequences of this for many years. Even a generation later, the term “council child” was the worst insult any citizen of Constance could fling against another.

Such were the realities of the times faced by Marie Schärer and others like her forced by circumstance to struggle for survival and dignity in the harsh and often cruel world of medieval Europe.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

© 2008 by Photo Studio Berger

Iny Lorentz is the pen name for the husband-and-wife writing team Iny Klocke and Elmar Wohlrath, historians whose tales of medieval action, adventure, and romance reflect their academic interests and love for each other. Together, they’ve written more than thirty-five books, almost all of which quickly became bestsellers and which are also available as audiobooks. The five-book Marie series, perhaps their most popular, has sold more than five and a half million copies in Germany alone and has been translated into fourteen languages. The first book in the series,
The Wandering Whore
,
introduced the captivating and beloved character Marie, whose story has since been made into an award-winning German television movie called
The Whore
, starring actress Alexandra Neldel. Elmar and Iny live and write in Poing, near Munich.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Lee Chadeayne is a former classical musician, college professor, and owner of a language translation company in Massachusetts. A charter member of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), he’s been an active member since 1970. He presently serves as editor of the
ALTA newsletter
and as a copyeditor for the American Arthritis Society newsletter. He is a scholar and student of both history and languages, especially Middle High German. His translated works to date focus on music, art, language, history, and general literature; notable works include
The Settlers of Catan
by Rebecca Gablé,
The Copper Sign
by Katia Fox, and the bestselling Hangman’s Daughter series by Oliver Pötzsch.