Jan Hus

Jan Hus was a Czech priest and university teacher in Prague whose attacks on the wealth and corruption of the clergy, and whose challenge to papal authority, led to his burning as a heretic at the Council of Constance in 1415. His death sparked the Hussite movement in Bohemia, which fought off a series of crusades, and he is remembered as a forerunner of the Protestant Reformation a century later.

Hus was born to a peasant family in Husinec, in southern Bohemia, from which he took his name; the year is uncertain, with estimates ranging from about 1369 to the mid-1370s. Very little about his childhood is reliably known. He studied at the University of Prague, gaining his bachelor's degree in 1393 and his master's in 1396, and began teaching there in 1398. Ordained a priest in 1400, he became dean of the philosophy faculty, and in 1402 he was appointed preacher at Prague's Bethlehem Chapel, where sermons were given in Czech.

Hus was strongly influenced by the English theologian John Wycliffe, whose books had reached Prague. From the pulpit he condemned simony, the buying and selling of church offices, and the moral failings of priests and bishops. When the Western Schism split the Church between rival popes, King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia sought neutrality. In 1409 the king's Decree of Kutná Hora gave the Czech "nation" at the university three votes to one for the foreign masters, and over a thousand German students and teachers left; Hus became rector. That year Pope Alexander V, elected by the Council of Pisa and later classed as an antipope, ordered Wycliffe's writings surrendered and preaching outside approved churches stopped. Wycliffe's books were burned in Prague in 1410 and Hus was excommunicated, but he went on preaching.

In 1411 John XXIII, Alexander's successor, proclaimed a crusade against the King of Naples and authorised the sale of indulgences to pay for it. In a public disputation in 1412 Hus denied that popes or bishops could rightly wage war in the Church's name, and taught that sins were forgiven through true repentance rather than money. His supporters burned papal bulls, and three young men who denounced the indulgences were beheaded. When Prague was placed under interdict, Hus left the city in late 1412, appealing to Christ as the supreme judge. In the countryside he wrote works in Czech for ordinary priests and readers, and in 1413 his treatise On the Church, drawing heavily on Wycliffe, which argued that Christ, not the pope, was the Church's head.

The German king Sigismund, brother of Wenceslaus, summoned a general council to Constance to end the schism. Hus travelled there under Sigismund's promise of safe conduct, arriving on 3 November 1414. On 28 November he was arrested, and he spent months in prison in poor health. Sigismund protested but was persuaded that a promise to a heretic was not binding. At hearings in June 1415 Hus said he would recant only if shown his errors from Scripture, and he refused to abjure views he denied ever teaching. On 6 July 1415 the council condemned him, stripped him of his priesthood and handed him to the secular authorities, who burned him at the stake the same day.

Around a hundred Bohemian and Moravian nobles sealed a protest against his execution. After Wenceslaus died in 1419, his followers, the Hussites, rose up and in the Hussite Wars defeated several crusades; the Basel Compacts of 1436 allowed them to keep their own form of worship. Bohemia remained largely Hussite until the Protestant defeat at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620 brought Catholic Habsburg rule. Martin Luther admired him, and Hus is also credited with reforms to Czech spelling, including the háček. Nearly six centuries after his execution, in 1999, Pope John Paul II voiced the Catholic Church's sorrow over the manner of his death.

Our 1400 map shows the Kingdom of Bohemia within the Holy Roman Empire in the years of his preaching in Prague.