The Council of Constance — History for Humans

A companion to the Council of Constance scenario in Ecclesiastical Politics. The game never reads this file. It's here for anyone who wants the history behind the year, before, during, or after playing it.

The short version

Between October 1414 and July 1415, a general council of the Western Church met in the imperial city of Constance, on the lake where the Rhine flows out toward Basel. It had three jobs: end a schism that had given Christendom two, and then three, rival popes; reform the Church "in head and members"; and deal with heresy, above all the teaching of the English theologian John Wyclif and of the Prague preacher Jan Hus, who was widely believed to share it.

In the nine months the game covers, the council deposed one pope, accepted the resignation of another, declared that its own authority came directly from Christ, and burned Hus at the stake. It went on sitting for nearly three years more before it elected the pope who finally ended the schism.

The Great Schism

In 1378 the cardinals in Rome elected Urban VI while a Roman crowd outside demanded an Italian pope. Within months many of the same cardinals declared the election invalid, pointing to that pressure, and elected Clement VII, who settled at Avignon. Western Christendom split into two "obediences," largely along political lines: France, Scotland, and the Spanish kingdoms for Avignon; the Empire, England, and most of Italy for Rome. Each line elected successors. For a generation, every bishopric, abbey, and university had to decide which pope was real, and an ordinary Christian could not be entirely sure his priest's sacraments came from the true Church.

In 1409, cardinals from both camps met at Pisa, declared both popes deposed, and elected a third. Neither of the first two accepted it, so now there were three. The Pisan line's second pope, elected in 1410, was Baldassare Cossa, who took the name John XXIII: a Neapolitan nobleman, once a papal soldier and governor of Bologna, able, brave, and thoroughly worldly. The Church later counted him an antipope, which is why Angelo Roncalli could take the same name in 1958.

Out of this crisis grew the theory called conciliarism: that the Church as a whole, gathered in a general council, held an authority that a disputed pope could not override, at least in an emergency like this one. Its great theorists included three men who would sit at Constance: Pierre d'Ailly, Jean Gerson, and Francesco Zabarella. Constance was where the theory was put to work.

Jan Hus and Bohemia

Jan Hus was born around 1370 in Husinec, in southern Bohemia, to a poor family. He rose through the University of Prague, becoming master of arts in 1396 and later dean and rector, and from 1402 he preached at Bethlehem Chapel, a great hall built for preaching in Czech. He was a moral reformer with an enormous following. He preached against simony, clerical wealth, and the sins of the clergy, and he held up Scripture as the law of Christ. Even his enemies granted that his own life was blameless.

Wyclif's writings reached Prague in the 1390s, and they electrified the Czech masters. Hus drew heavily on Wyclif, especially for the idea of the true Church as the body of those predestined to salvation rather than the visible hierarchy, and for hard questions about whether a prelate living in grave sin holds real authority. But he did not follow Wyclif everywhere. Above all, he rejected Wyclif's teaching that the bread and wine remain after the consecration, and he kept the Mass, the sacraments, the saints, and the priesthood. He was a reformer within the medieval Church, arguing its questions in its own terms. A century later the Reformation recognized itself in him all the same: after reading De Ecclesia in 1520, Luther wrote to a friend, "We are all Hussites without knowing it."

The quarrels ran through the university and the royal court. In 1409 King Wenceslas IV's Decree of Kutná Hora gave the Czech "nation" of the university three votes to one for all the foreign nations together. The German masters and students left in protest and founded the University of Leipzig, and many of them would meet Hus again at Constance.

In 1412, John XXIII sent preachers to Prague to sell indulgences funding his war against King Ladislaus of Naples. Hus denounced the sale. The king, who was taking a share of the proceeds, withdrew his protection. Three young men who heckled the indulgence preachers were beheaded, and buried at Bethlehem as martyrs. The papal court placed Hus under major excommunication and put any place that sheltered him under interdict, so that no sacraments could be celebrated there. To spare Prague, Hus left the city for the castles of sympathetic lords in the south, where he preached in the countryside and wrote his most important Latin work, De Ecclesia ("On the Church"). He also appealed from the pope's court to Christ himself, which his friends admired and every canon lawyer considered contempt of court.

When Sigismund, King of the Romans and heir to the Bohemian crown, planned the council, he invited Hus to come and give an account of his teaching, and promised him a safe-conduct. Friends warned Hus not to go. He went anyway, because the charge of heresy wounded him as nothing else could, and because he believed he would be given a real hearing before learned men. He made his will before leaving.

The year at Constance

Constance was a small city of perhaps six to eight thousand people, and the council brought in tens of thousands more over its course: prelates with their households, university delegations, princes, merchants, money-changers, entertainers, and every kind of hanger-on. A citizen of the town, Ulrich Richental, wrote a chronicle of it all, counting arrivals with more enthusiasm than accuracy.

John XXIII arrived on 28 October 1414, and Hus on 3 November. Within a month, on 28 November, Hus was summoned to meet the cardinals and detained. He spent the winter in the cellar prison of the Dominican friary on a small island just offshore, where he fell seriously ill. Sigismund, who arrived on Christmas Eve, was at first furious that his safe-conduct had been ignored. By the new year he had accepted the argument that a secular ruler's promise could not stop the Church from judging a heretic. Historians still argue about what exactly the safe-conduct promised — safe travel, protection until a hearing, or safe return home whatever the verdict — and Czech memory has never forgiven the king for it.

Over the winter the council reorganized itself to vote by "nations" rather than by individual prelates, which broke the numerical advantage of the Italian bishops loyal to John XXIII. Cornered, John swore on 2 March 1415 to resign if his rivals did the same. On the night of 20 March, under cover of a tournament, he fled the city in disguise to the lands of his ally Duke Frederick of Austria. The council nearly dissolved. It held together largely through Sigismund's determination and the preaching of Gerson and others, and on 6 April it adopted the decree Haec sancta: the council held its power directly from Christ, and everyone, even a pope, had to obey it in matters of faith, the ending of the schism, and reform. John was captured, suspended on 14 May, and deposed on 29 May.

With his papal jailers gone, Hus passed into the custody of the Bishop of Constance and spent the spring chained at night in the bishop's castle at Gottlieben, down the Rhine. In June he was brought back to the city for three public hearings, on 5, 7, and 8 June; on the morning of the seventh, a solar eclipse darkened the sky. He was not given the open theological debate he had hoped for. The council's position was simple: he must abjure the articles drawn from his writings. His was just as simple: he would renounce anything he actually held if he were shown from Scripture that it was wrong, but to abjure articles he had never taught would be to swear to a lie. Through late June, commissioners, old friends, and anonymous well-wishers pressed him with gentler and gentler formulas. On 1 July he refused them all in writing.

On 4 July the Roman pope, Gregory XII, resigned with dignity through a representative. On 6 July, in the cathedral, Hus was condemned as an obstinate heretic. According to tradition he reminded Sigismund, who was present, of his safe-conduct, and the king blushed. Seven bishops ritually stripped him of his priesthood and crowned him with a paper hat painted with devils, and he was handed over to the secular authorities, who burned him that same morning in a meadow outside the city walls. He died singing. His ashes were thrown into the Rhine so that no relics would remain, and Bohemians are said to have carried away the earth where he died.

After 1415

Hus's friend Jerome of Prague, who had come to Constance against all advice, was burned on the same spot in May 1416. The humanist Poggio Bracciolini watched his trial and wrote a famous letter praising his eloquence and courage.

The council went on to depose the Avignon pope, Benedict XIII, who never accepted it and died in 1423 still claiming the papacy from a castle on the Spanish coast. In November 1417 it elected Cardinal Oddo Colonna as Martin V, ending the schism. It also passed the decree Frequens, requiring general councils to meet at regular intervals, a promise the popes soon found ways around.

In Bohemia the execution provoked outrage. In September 1415, hundreds of Bohemian and Moravian nobles sent the council a protest under their seals. The lay chalice, communion in both bread and wine for ordinary believers, which Hus's colleague Jakoubek of Stříbro had begun offering in Prague while Hus was in prison, became the movement's symbol. In 1419 tensions exploded into the Hussite Wars, in which Bohemian armies defeated crusade after crusade sent against them. A settlement in 1436 allowed Bohemia to keep the chalice.

A century later, Martin Luther, pressed in debate at Leipzig to say whether the council had been right about Hus, answered that some of the condemned articles were thoroughly Christian, and soon afterward wrote that "we are all Hussites without knowing it." Today 6 July is a public holiday in the Czech Republic. In Konstanz, a boulder called the Hussenstein marks the traditional site of the burning, the merchants' hall by the harbor where the council's conclave met still stands, and the island friary where Hus spent the winter is now a hotel.

How the council worked

A general council was less one assembly than a federation of many. Solemn sessions in the cathedral were grand liturgical occasions at which decrees were formally read and approved. The arguing happened elsewhere: in general congregations, working meetings of the whole council; in commissions, small committees on particular cases, including the ones that examined Hus; and in the nations.

The nations were the council's great innovation. Borrowing a model from the universities, it divided itself into four blocs, each meeting separately and casting one vote: the Italian, the French, the English, and the German (which included Bohemians, Poles, Hungarians, and Scandinavians). The Spanish kingdoms, loyal to Benedict XIII, joined later as a fifth. Voting by nation was pushed through by the English, Germans, and French over the winter of 1414–1415, and it was never formally decreed. It mattered enormously: John XXIII had brought a crowd of Italian bishops who would have outvoted everyone as individuals, and the cardinals, who had no nation of their own, found themselves without a collective vote at all.

The people

Sigismund (1368–1437), King of Hungary and King of the Romans, later Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia. The council was his project: he pressured John XXIII into summoning it and held it together when John fled. Charming, extravagant, chronically short of money, and genuinely devoted to healing the Church, he is remembered in Bohemia chiefly for the safe-conduct.

John XXIII (Baldassare Cossa, died 1419). The Pisan pope, who summoned the council expecting to control it. After his deposition he was held prisoner for several years, eventually made his peace with Martin V, and was made a cardinal before his death. His tomb in the Florence Baptistery, by Donatello and Michelozzo, still stands.

Jan Hus (c. 1370–1415). Priest, university master, and the most influential preacher in Bohemia. His letters from prison, many of which survive, are among the most moving documents of the Middle Ages.

Pierre d'Ailly (1351–1420), Cardinal of Cambrai. Theologian, conciliarist, reformer, and geographer; his Imago Mundi was read closely by Christopher Columbus. He presided over the hearings against Hus.

Jean Gerson (1363–1429), Chancellor of the University of Paris. The most celebrated theologian of his day, a mystic and pastoral writer as well as a conciliar theorist, and one of Hus's most determined opponents. At Constance he was also pursuing a bitter case against the Paris theologian Jean Petit, who had defended the murder of the Duke of Orléans as justified tyrannicide.

Francesco Zabarella (1360–1417), Cardinal of Florence. The leading canon lawyer of the age, and a moderate voice on the Hus commission who pressed for the mildest acceptable form of abjuration. He died at Constance.

John of Chlum and Wenceslas of Dubá. The Bohemian knights Sigismund appointed to escort Hus, who stood by him to the end.

Peter of Mladoňovice. Chlum's secretary, whose eyewitness account of Hus's trial and death is the most important source for this story.

Stephen Páleč. Once Hus's close friend and ally at the university, later his most effective accuser. The two broke over the indulgences of 1412.

Michael de Causis. A Prague priest who fled Bohemia under a financial cloud and became the tireless procurator of the case against Hus at the papal court and at Constance.

Jerome of Prague. Layman, philosopher, and Hus's brilliant, reckless friend, burned at Constance in 1416.

Guillaume Fillastre, cardinal, and Ulrich Richental, burgher, both kept records of the council: Fillastre a dry, sharp-eyed diary from the inside, Richental an illustrated chronicle from the streets.

Robert Hallam, Bishop of Salisbury, leader of the English nation and a close ally of Sigismund. He also died at Constance and is buried in its cathedral.

Oddo Colonna, a quiet Roman cardinal who, as Martin V, became the pope who ended the schism.

Record and legend

Much of what makes this year vivid is well attested, chiefly through Mladoňovice, Richental, Fillastre, and Hus's own letters: the placards against Hus on the church doors, Sigismund singing the Christmas gospel as deacon, the eclipse during the hearings, the king's overheard remark that Hus must never be trusted even if he recanted, Páleč weeping at Hus's cell, Hus's dream of the pictures at Bethlehem Chapel being painted over and then repainted more beautifully, the bishops quarrelling over whether to remove his tonsure with scissors or a razor, his smile when he saw his books burning, and his singing at the stake.

Other famous details are later legend. John XXIII's remark on first seeing Constance, that it was a pit where foxes are caught, survives only as hearsay. The story that Sigismund, corrected on his Latin, replied that as King of the Romans he was above grammar is a traveling anecdote. Hus's words sancta simplicitas ("holy simplicity"), supposedly spoken to an old woman adding wood to the fire, are almost certainly legend. Hus did pun on his own name, which means "goose" in Czech, but the prophecy of a swan who would rise a century after the goose was roasted is a later tradition, one Lutherans came to apply to Luther.

What the game invents

The three player characters and their households are invented, as are a few minor figures around them. So are the answers to things history leaves unknown: who wrote the anonymous letters Hus received from a conciliar father urging him to submit, which of his jailers could be bribed, and who among the Bohemians might have been informing on the others. The game also lets a player try to change the outcome, which history did not allow. Everything else aims to stay within the record.

Words you'll meet

Saying the names

Czech stresses the first syllable. Hus rhymes with "goose." Páleč is PAH-lech. Chlum is KHLOOM, with the ch of Scottish "loch." Dubá is DOO-bah. Mladoňovice is MLAH-don-yo-vi-tseh. Litomyšl is LIH-to-mishl. Kutná Hora is KOOT-nah HO-rah. Šimon is SHIH-mon, and Písek is PEE-sek. Jakoubek is YAH-koh-bek. d'Ailly is roughly dah-YEE, and Gerson zher-SOHN.