The History of the Renaissance World (100 page)

Meanwhile, a rearrangement had taken place on the other side of the Bohemian border. Rupert, king of Germany, had died in 1410, after a frustrating and fruitless decade on the throne. The electors had quarreled over the next candidate until 1411, finally settling on Sigismund, king of Hungary (after the death of his wife the queen) and survivor of the 1396 Battle of Nicopolis, younger son of Emperor Charles IV and brother of Wenceslaus IV.

Sigismund had moved, steadily, into the center of international intrigues. He was now forty-three years old: “tall, with bright eyes, broad forehead, pleasantly rosy cheeks, and a long thick beard,” says the fifteenth-century chronicler Aeneas Sylvius, who later became Pope Pius II. “He had a large mind and formed many plans, but was changeable . . . witty in conversation, given to wine and women, and thousands of love intrigues are laid to his charge. . . . He made more promises than he kept, and often deceived.”
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Hoping to simultaneously recover Bohemia, corral Italy, and solve the embarrassment of the triple papacy, Sigismund used his new authority as king of Germany to propose an international church council. He needed only one pope to sign off on the idea, and John XXIII agreed; most likely, he expected that the council would depose his two papal rivals.

It took several years to organize the council, but it finally convened in the German town of Constance two days before All Saints’ Day, 1414. Nearly four hundred high-ranking clergy were present: archbishops, abbots, priors, and priests. But they were outnumbered by university leaders, scholars, and ambassadors from the courts of Europe. The council had two major problems to address—the spread of Wycliffe’s heresies and the scandal of the three popes—and both were as much academic and political puzzles as theological dilemmas.

Constance was crowded out—not just with council attendees but with hundreds of merchants, clowns, jugglers, conjurers, musicians, barbers, and prostitutes. There was more carousing than contemplation in the streets: “The Swabians say,” Jan Hus remarked, “that it will take thirty years to purify Constance of all its sins.” One local resident estimated that seventy thousand outsiders descended on the city during the Council’s deliberations.
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The opening act of the Council was to summon Jan Hus to defend his beliefs. Hus himself seems to have gotten the impression that the Council disapproved of him only because its members did not understand exactly what he was saying. He was further reassured when Sigismund himself pledged a royal safe-conduct: if Hus came to Constance, he would be allowed to depart again in peace. “Under the safe conduct of your protection, [I will] appear at the Council, the Lord Most High being my defender,” Hus wrote back to the king, accepting the promise. “I have taught nothing in secret, but only in public . . . so I desire to be heard, not privately, but before a public audience. . . . And I shall not be afraid.”
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Hus arrived at Constance in early November of 1414; he wrote back to his friends in Bohemia, telling them that he had been welcomed politely (and noting, with some worry, that lodging and food in Constance was much more expensive than he had expected). But while he was preparing his defense, his lodging house was surrounded by soldiers. The College of Cardinals had decided to treat him as a heretic, not a guest.
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He was imprisoned in a dank cell at a local monastery, right next to the latrines, and soon he was suffering from severe dysentery. Sigismund, finding out about the arrest after the fact, protested the violation of the royal safe-conduct. But he soon saw that freeing Hus would alienate much of the Council; and so he sacrificed Hus to the greater cause, the end of the Great Schism of the papacy.

Hus remained imprisoned for months. “Please get me a Bible,” he wrote to his friends, “and some pens and small inkhorn. . . . And send another shirt by the bearer.” Meanwhile, the Council turned back to deal with the three popes. The Pisan pope John XXIII, who had been present since the council opened, soon saw that the assembled clergy were bent on removing him. In March of 1415 he took his leave; in his absence, the council deposed him.
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This left two popes to be dealt with. The pugnacious Roman pope Boniface IX had died nine years before, and his successor Gregory XII had always hoped to bring the schism to an end. He now offered to abdicate, on condition that the council also depose the Avignon pope, Benedict XIII, and agree on a single papal candidate who would take the place of all three.
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Benedict flatly refused to cooperate. Sigismund began negotiations with his secular allies—most notably, the king of Aragon—in an attempt to force him out of Avignon. But this was a slow and delicate operation, and as it dragged on, the Council of Constance turned its attention back to Hus. Debates and arguments followed; but not until June was Hus allowed to speak for himself. None of his defenses were accepted. He was given several chances to recant and refused. Finally, on July 6, he was brought to the cathedral of Constance and condemned as a heretic. Directly afterwards, he was taken outside the city to an execution site known as the Devil’s Place. He was chained to a stake, firewood piled up to his chin: “In the truth of the gospel I have written, taught and preached,” he called out, “today I will gladly die.” And then the fire was lit.

No one from the Council was present; they had all gone back to their deliberations, and were already arguing again about the papacy.
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U
LTIMATELY, THE KING OF
A
RAGON
agreed to support the deposition of the obstinate Avignon pope, and the Council was able to end the schism. In 1417, a single pope was appointed by the cardinals and approved by the Council: the Roman priest Martin V. With its work done, the Council began to wind up its business, the assembled ambassadors, priests, professors, and prostitutes finally heading home.

But John Hus was not forgotten. At the news of his death, his followers in Bohemia had begun to gather weapons and organize themselves into groups: no longer simply followers of Wycliffe, they were now Hussites, an increasingly bold movement that was rapidly transforming into a popular army.

The new pope Martin V excommunicated all of Hus’s followers early in 1418, forcing King Wenceslaus to act against them or be accused of defying the one true Church. Pragmatically, Wenceslaus ordered the arrest of priests in Prague who had allowed laypeople to serve the Eucharist, a clear Hussite acceptance of the radical ideas first proposed by Wycliffe. But Wenceslaus had no more luck with the Hussites than with the imperial cities. His punishment led to a riot; in July of 1419, Hussites stormed through the streets of Prague, breaking into the town hall and demanding that the officials there release the imprisoned priests. In the scuffle that followed, Hussites threw thirteen Prague administrators out of the windows. Seven were killed in the street below.

King Wenceslaus died shortly afterwards, reputedly of shock, more likely of acute alcohol poisoning. His brother Sigismund reclaimed Bohemia for Germany, adding the duchy back to his combined German-Hungarian empire. He then set out to destroy the Hussites; but the incident at the town hall (later nicknamed the “First Defenestration of Prague”) had been only the first act in a long and bloody struggle between the imperial German armies and the militant Hussite resistance. The Hussite Wars would drag on for another twenty years: a bloody, extended, and explicit rejection of the authority of emperor, king, pope, and Church.
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Chapter Eighty-Eight

The Taking of France

Between 1401 and 1420,
the king of England finally seizes France

I
N
E
NGLAND
, Henry IV sat on the throne. He had claimed the crown of England in every possible way: “first, by conquest,” says Froissart, “second, from being heir to it; and third, from the pure and free resignation which King Richard had made of it. . . . [And] Parliament [too] declared that it was their will he should be king.”
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There was, in all this, a faint air of protesting too much. Henry derived his right to rule from his father, John of Gaunt; John, the oldest surviving son of Edward III at the time of the king’s death, could have claimed to be rightful king in the place of his dead brother’s son Richard. But he had never made this claim. And since five sons of Edward III had grown to adulthood, there were plenty of other royal cousins in England who could make a similar claim to the throne. The strongest claim belonged to Edmund Mortimer, the Earl of March; his mother Philippa was the only daughter of Edward’s second son, Lionel of Antwerp. Like the Black Prince, Lionel had died before his father, but Philippa was still senior to Henry IV. She had been Richard II’s heiress, and after her death in 1382, her claim had passed to her son.

The upshot was that Henry IV, although popular with his people, was vulnerable to challenge. And the first years of his rule were particularly tumultuous. Wales had been part of the English empire for over a century, but now a wealthy Welsh farmer named Owain Glyndwr took advantage of Henry’s insecure crown and called his countrymen to follow him to independence. Early in 1401, he began to lead attacks on the English living in the north of Wales. Henry sent his oldest son, Prince Hal, at the head of a reprisal force, but Owain continued to inflict “considerable losses on the English.”
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And then Henry IV began to make missteps.

Rumors of Richard II’s survival had already begun to circulate, despite all of his efforts. He was not making much headway against the Welsh, and the Scots had taken the opportunity to mount invasions in the north as well. Meanwhile, Edmund Mortimer, who (despite being deprived of his putative crown) had been loyally fighting for the English cause against the Welsh, was taken prisoner in a battle with Owain Glyndwr. Mortimer’s brother-in-law Henry Percy, who had been leading the resistance to the Scots, offered to ransom him out of Owain Glyndwr’s hands. But Henry IV refused to allow it.

This removed Edmund Mortimer, his potential rival, from the English scene. But both Mortimer and Henry Percy, who until this point had been supporters of Henry IV, were indignant. Owain Glyndwr seized on the indignation. He set Mortimer free, gave him his own daughter Catherine as wife, and made an alliance with both Mortimer and Percy: they would help him gain independence from England, and he would in turn help put Mortimer on the English throne.

Henry IV had accidentally turned the Welsh revolt into a civil war, and the revolt he had created boiled along for another decade. Henry Percy, nicknamed “Hotspur” because of his tendency to act first and think later, was killed almost immediately; in the middle of a savage battle fought against the royal forces at Shrewsbury, in July of 1403, he lifted the faceplate of his helmet to get a breath of air and was at once struck through the palate by a random arrow. Mortimer survived until 1409, when he was trapped at Harlech Castle by an English siege; starving and possibly ill with plague, he died in January before the siege could be lifted. His wife, Owain’s daughter, and their four children were at Harlech as well. After the castle surrendered, they were taken to the Tower of London, where Catherine, her only son, and two of her daughters all died of illness.
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Owain Glyndwr’s revolt outlived them all. It was still dragging on when Henry IV died, in March of 1413, after five years of a horrible illness that featured “festering of the flesh, dehydration of the eyes, and rupture of the internal organs”: possibly, some form of leprosy.
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C
HARLES
VI did not have a good decade either.

He was more often out of his wits than in them, and in the absence of any royal control, his favorite brother, Louis of Orleans, and his uncle, the seventy-year-old Duke of Burgundy, were feuding. Both hoped to control the mad king, and through him, France.

In 1404, the Duke of Burgundy died and his part of the feud devolved to his son and heir John, newly returned from the Battle of Nicopolis and ransomed from Turkish captivity. The new Duke rapidly gained both power and popularity. He managed to arrange a match between his eleven-year-old daughter and the young Dauphin Louis, Charles VI’s son and heir (despite his fits, Charles had been married since the age of seventeen, and by 1404 his wife Isabeau had borne him eight children). “A very heavy tax was about this time imposed on all the inhabitants throughout France, by the king and his council at Paris,” writes the chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet, “but the Duke of Burgundy would not consent that it should be levied—which conduct gained him universal popularity throughout the kingdom.”
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