Jan Hus Burned at Konstanz

JAN 01 1415 · 12:00

Jan Hus at the Council of Konstanz, refusing to recant, in Václav Brožík's monumental canvas of 1883. Place: A meadow outside the walls of Konstanz, on the German shore of the Bodensee Figures: Jan Hus, priest, magister, sometime rector of the Charles University · Sigismund of Luxembourg, King of the Romans (Charles's younger son) · the assembled fathers of the Council of Konstanz · Jeroným of Prague, who will follow him to the stake a year later Hus has been preaching at the Bethlehem Chapel in the Old Town for thirteen years, in Czech, to standing crowds of two thousand. He preaches communion under both kinds, vernacular scripture, the Wycliffite position that the church is the body of the predestined and the pope is not necessarily its head. He has been excommunicated three times. He has refused to recant. In 1414 the Council of Konstanz convenes, the largest church gathering of the Middle Ages, to end the Schism and reform the church. Sigismund of Luxembourg, Charles's younger son and now King of the Romans, presides. He issues Hus a safe-conduct, salvus conductus, an imperial guarantee of free travel to and from the council. Hus arrives in Konstanz on November 3, 1414. He is arrested on November 28 and held in the Dominican prison on an island in the lake. The council declares the safe-conduct void on the ground that no temporal prince may extend protection to a heretic against the church. Sigismund, who could have insisted, does not.