That the causal forces in the Reformation were neither racial religious bias nor special gift on the part of any religious teachers is made tolerably clear by the pre-Lutheran episode of the Hussites in Bohemia a century before the German movement. In Bohemia as elsewhere clerical avarice, worldliness, and misconduct had long kept up anti-clerical feeling; and the adoption of Wiclif’s teaching by Huss40 at the end of the fourteenth century was the result, and not the cause, of Bohemian anti-papalism.41 The Waldensians, whose doctrines were closely akin to those of Huss, were represented in Bohemia as early as the twelfth century; and so late as 1330 their community was a teaching centre, able to send money help to the Waldensians of Italy. So apparent was the heredity that Æneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope Pius II, maintained that the Hussites were a branch of the Waldenses.42

Before Huss too a whole series of native reformers, beginning with the Moravian Militz, Archdeacon of Prague, had set up a partly anti-clerical propaganda. Militz, who gave up his emoluments (1363) to become a wandering preacher, actually wrote a Libellus de Anti-christo, affirming that the Church was already in Anti-christ’s power, or nearly so.43 It was written while he was imprisoned by the Inquisition at Rome at the instance of the mendicant orders, whom he censured. As, however, the later hostility he incurred, up to his death, was on the score of his influence with the people, the treatise cannot well have been current in his lifetime. A contemporary, Conrad of Waldhausen, holding similar views, joined Militz in opposing the mendicant friars as Wiclif was doing at the same period; and the King of Bohemia (the emperor Charles IV) gave zealous countenance to both. A follower of Militz, Matthias of Janow, a prebendary of Prague, holding the same views as to Anti-christ, wrote a book on The Abomination of Desolation of Priests and Monks, and yet another to similar effect.

There was thus a considerable movement in the direction of Church reform before either Huss or Wiclif was heard in Bohemia; and a Bohemian king had shown a reforming zeal, apparently not on financial motives, before any other European potentate. And whereas racial jealousy of the dominant Italians was a main factor in the movement of Luther, the much more strongly motived jealousy of the Czechs against the Germans who exploited Bohemia was a main element in the salient movement of the Hussites.44 Called in to work the silver mines, and led further by the increasing field for commerce and industry,45 the more civilized Germans secured control of the Czech church and monasteries, appropriating most of the best livings. As they greatly predominated also at the University of Prague, Huss, whose inspiration was largely racial patriotism, wrought with his colleague Jerome to have the university made strictly national.46 When, accordingly, the German heads of the university still (1403 and 1408) condemned the doctrines of Wiclif as preached by Huss, the motives of the censors were as much racial and economic as theological; that is to say, the “Teutonic conscience” operated in its own interest to the exaltation of papal rule against the Czech conscience.

The first crisis in the racial struggle ended in Huss’s obtaining a royal decree (1409) giving three votes in university affairs (wherein, according to medieval custom, the voting was by nations) to the Bohemians, and only one to the Germans, though the latter were the majority. Thereupon a multitude of the German students marched back to Germany, where there was founded for them the university of Leipzig;47 and the racial quarrel was more envenomed than ever.

At the same time the ecclesiastical authorities, closely allied with the German interest, took up the cause of the Church against heresy; and Archbishop Sbinko of Prague, having procured a papal bull, caused a number of Wiclifian and other manuscripts to be burned48 (1410), soon after excommunicating Huss. The now nationalist university protested, and the king sequestrated the estates of the archbishop on his refusal to indemnify the owners of the manuscripts. In 1411, further, Huss denounced the proposed papal crusade against Naples, and in 1412 the sale of indulgences by permission of Pope John XXIII, exactly as Luther denounced those of Leo X a century later, calling the Pope Antichrist in the Lutheran manner, while his partizans burned the papal bulls.49 For the rest, he preached against image-worship, auricular confession, ceremonialism, and clerical endowments.50 At the Council of Constance (1415), accordingly, there was arrayed against him a solid mass of German churchmen, including the ex-rector of Prague University, now bishop of Misnia. Further, the Germans were scholastically, as a rule, Nominalists, and Huss a Realist; and as Gerson, the most powerful of the French prelates, was zealous for the former school, he threw his influence on the German side,51 as did the Bishop of London on the part of England.52 The forty-five Wiclifian heresies, therefore, were re-condemned; Huss was sentenced to imprisonment, though he had gone to the Council under a letter of safe-conduct from the emperor;53 and on his refusal to retract he was burned alive (July 6, 1415). Jerome, taking flight, was caught, and, being imprisoned, recanted; but later revoked the recantation and was burned likewise (May 30, 1416).

The subsequent fortunes of the Hussite party were determined as usual by the political and economic forces. The King of Bohemia had joyfully accepted Huss’s doctrine that the tithes were not the property of the churchmen; and had locally protected him as his “fowl with the golden eggs,” proceeding to plunder the Church as did the German princes in the next age.54 When, later, the revolutionary Hussites began plundering churches and monasteries, the Bohemian nobles in their turn profited,55 and became good Hussites accordingly; while yet another aristocracy was formed in Prague by the citizens who managed the confiscations there.56 As happened earlier in Hungary and later in Germany, again, there followed a revolt of the peasants against their extortionate masters;57 and there resulted a period of ferocious civil war and exacerbated fanaticism. Ziska, the Hussite leader, had been a strong anti-German;58 and when the emperor entered into the struggle the racial hatred grew more intense than ever. On the Hussite side the claim for “the cup” (that is, the administration of the eucharist with wine as well as bread, in the original manner, departed from by the Church in the eleventh century) indicated the nature of the religious feeling involved. More memorable was the communistic zeal of the advanced section of the Taborites (so called from the town of Tabor, their headquarters), who anticipated the German movement of the Anabaptists,59 a small minority of them seeking to set up community of women. For the rest, all the other main features of later Protestantism came up at the same time—the zealous establishment of schools for the young;60 the insistence on the Bible as the sole standard of knowledge and practice; inflexible courage in warfare and good military organization, with determined denial of sacerdotal claims.61

The ideal collapsed as similar ideals did before and afterwards. First the main body of the Hussites, led by Ziska, though at war with the Catholics in general and the Germans in particular, warred murderously also on the extremer communists, called the Adamites, and destroyed them (1421). Then, as the country became more and more exhausted by the civil war, the common people gradually fell away from the Taborites, who were the prime fanatics of the period. The zeal of the communist section, too, itself fell away; and at length, in 1434, the Taborites, betrayed by one of their generals, were defeated with great slaughter by the nobles in the battle of Lipan. Meanwhile, the upper aristocracy had reaped the economic fruits of the revolution at the expense of townsmen, small proprietors, and peasants;62 and, just as the lot of the German peasants in Luther’s day was worse after their vain revolt than before, so the Bohemian peasantry at the close of the fifteenth century had sunk back to the condition of serfdom from which they had almost completely emerged at the beginning. It is doubtful, indeed, whether the material lot of the poor was bettered in any degree at any stage of the Protestant revolution, in any country. So little efficacy for social betterment has a movement guided by a light set above reason.

That there was in the period some Christian freethinking of a finer sort than the general Taborite doctrine is proved by the recovery of the unprinted work of the Czech Peter Helchitsky (Chelcicky), The Net of Faith, which impeached the current orthodoxy and the ecclesiastico-political system on the lines of the more exalted of the Paulicians and the Lollards, very much to the same effect as the modern gospel of Tolstoy. In the midst of a party of warlike fanatics Helchitsky denounced war as mere wholesale murder, taught the sinfulness of wealth, declaimed against cities as the great corrupters of life, and preached a peaceful and non-resistant anarchism, ignoring the State. But his party in turn developed into that of the Bohemian Brethren, an intensely Puritan sect, opposed to learning, and ashamed of the memory of the communism in which their order began.63 Of permanent gain to culture there is hardly a trace in the entire evolution.