CONSTANCE
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CONSTANCE
civil authority (dependent among Christians on state
of grace). More than once (e. g. 1411) Hus had ap-
pealed to a general council, and when at the opening
of the Council of Constance Emperor Sigismund and
King Wenceslaus of Bohemia urged him to present
himself, he was not unwilling; it was made up, he
knew, of ardent reformers, and he could hojie by his
eloquence to convert them to his own intense faith in
the ideas of Wyclif. He left Prague, 11 October, 1414,
in the company of three Bohemian nobles and assured
of a safe-conduct {salvus conductus) from Emperor
Sigismund. They entered Constance 3 November,
where Hus took up his residence in a private house,
and where (5 November) the safe-conduct was deliv-
ered to him. The day after his arrival he appeared
before John XXIII, who treated him courteously, re-
moved the censures of excommunication and inter-
dict, but forbade him to say Mass or to preach, also to
appear at public ecclesiastical functions (his thor-
oughly heretical and even revolutionary doctrines
were long notorious and, as said above, had already
been condemned at Rome). He appeared again before
the pope and the cardinals, 2S November, declared
himself innocent of a single error, and said he was
ready to retract and do penance if convicted of any.
He had continued, however, to violate the papal pro-
hibition, said Mass daily and preached to the people
present. Consequently he was the same day arrested,
by order of the Bishop of Constance, and a little later
(6 December) placed in the Dominican convent. On
complaining of the unsanitary condition of his place of
confinement he was transferred to the castle of Ciott-
lieben, and later to the Franciscan convent at Con-
stance (June, 1415). His examination went on dur-
ing April and May, and was conducted by d'Ailly and
Fillastre ; in the meantime he carried on an extensive
correspondence, wrote various treatises, and replied to
the charges of his opponents. His Bohemian friends
protested against the arrest of Hus, and exhiljited the
emperor's safe-conduct (but only after the arrest).
Sigismund was at first wroth over the arrest, but later
(1 Jan., 1415) declared that he would not prevent the
council from dealing according to law with ]K'rsons
accvised of heresy. The aforesaid condonuiation (4
May) of the forty-five propositions of Wyclif fore-
shadowed the fate of Hus, despite the protests of Bo-
hemians and Poles against his severe incarceration,
the slanders against Bohemian faith, the delay of jus-
tice, secrecy of the proceedings, and the violation of
the imperial safe-conduct (Raynaldus, ad an. 1414,
no. 10). The public trial took place on 5, 7, and 8
June, 1415; extracts from his works were read, wit-
nesses were heard. He denied some of the teachings
attributed to him, defended others, notably opinions
of Wyclif, declared that no Bohemian was a heretic,
etc. He refused all formulse of submission, again de-
clared himself conscious of no error, nor, as he said,
had any been proved against him from the Scrip-
tures. He declared that he would not condemn the
truth, nor perjure himself. His books were burned by
order of the council (24 June). New efforts to obtain
a retractation proved fruitless. He was brought for
final sentence before the fifteenth session (6 July,
1415), at which the emperor :i>-islil. mid on which
occasion thirty propositions, t;il;'n nn.-ily from the
work of Hus "On the Church" 1 1 )c lAclcsia), were
read publicly. He refused to retract anything and so
was condemned as a heretic, deposed, and degraded,
and handed over to the .secular arm, which in turn
condemned him to peri.sh at the stake, at that time the
usual legal punishment of convicted h(>retics. He suf-
fered that cruel death with .sclf-pcis.se.ssion and courage
and when aiiout to expire cried out. it is said: "Christ,
Son of the living ( lud. have mercy on us!" His ashes
were thrown into the Rhine. Owing largely to the dram-
atic circumstances of his death, he became at once the
hero of Bohemian patriotism and the martyr-saint of
multitudes in Bohemia and elsewhere who shared his
demagogic and revolutionary principles. They were
surely incompatible with either the ecclesiastical or
the civil order of the time, and would at any period
have bred both religious and civil anarchy, had they
been put into practice. As to the safe-conduct of the
emperor, we must distinguish, says Dr. von Funk
(Kirchengeschichte, 3d ed., Freiburg, 1902, p. 495,
and the more recent literature there quoted; also
"Der Katholik", 1898. LXXVIII, 186-90, and K.
Miiller, non-Catholic, in the "Hist. Vierteljahrschrift",
1898, 41-86) between the arrest of Hus at Constance
and his execution. The former act was always ac-
counted in Bohemia a violation of the safe-conduct
and a breach of faith on the emperor's part; on the
other hand they knew well, and so did Hus, that the
safe-conduct was only a guarantee against illegal vio-
lence and could not protect him from the sentence of his
legitimate judges. (On the death penalty for heresy,
see Ficker, " Die gesetzliche Einf iihrung der Todestrafe
fur Haresie" in "MittheU. d. Inst. f. oest. Geschichts-
forschung", 1888, 177 sqq., and Havet, "L'heresie et
le bras seculierau moyen age jusqu'au XIIP siecle",
Paris, 1881 ; see also Gosselin, "Temporal Power of the
Pope in the Middle Ages ", I, 85-89). In the medieval
German codes known as the Sachsenspiegel (about
1225) and the Schwabenspiegel (about 1275), heresy is
already punishable with the stake. It is not true that
the council declared that no faith should be kept with
aheretic (see Pallavicino, " Hist. Cone. Trid.", XII, 15,
8; Hoflerin "Hist, polit. Blatter", IV, 421, and Hefele,
"Conciliengesch.", VII, 227, also Baudrillart, op. cit.,
II, 1217). In the following year Jerome (Hieronymus)
of Prague, the friend of Hus, suffered the same fate at
Constance. He had come voluntarily to the council in
April, 1415, but soon fled the city; afterwards, mind-
ful of the fate of Hus, he obtained from the council a
safe-conduct to return for his defence. He did not ap-
pear, however, and was soon seized in Bavaria and
brought in chains to Constance. In September, 1415,
he abjured the forty-five propositions of Wyclif and
the thirty of Hus, but did not regain his freedom, as
his sincerity was suspected, and new charges were
made against him. Finally, he was brought before
the council, 23 May, 1416, one year after his arrest.
This time he solemnly withdrew his abjuration as a
sinful act and compelled by fear, and proclaimed Hus
a holy and upright man. He was forthwith con-
demned as a heretic in the twenty-fii'st session (30
May, 1416) and perished at the stake with no less
courage than Hus. The humanist Poggio was an
eyewitness of his death, and his letter to Leonardo of
Arezzo, describing the scene, may be seen in Hefele,
"Conciliengesch.' , VII, 280 sqq. The death of both
Hus and Jerome of Prague affected strongly other
humanists of the time; iEneas Sylvius (later Pius II)
said that they went to their deaths as men invited to a
banquet. The immediate consequences were grave
enough, i. e. the long I'traquist wars. For an equit-
able criticism of the defects in the trials of both Hus
and Jerome see Baudrillart in " Diet, de th^ol. cath.",
II, 1216-17. (See also Hussites.)
Jean Petit (Johantjcs Parriis) and Johann von Falk- ;| cnhcrg. — The question of the licity of tyrannicide oc- cupied the attention of the council. The Franciscan Jean Petit (Parvus) had publicly defended (in nine theses) the Duke of Burgundy for his share in the murder of Louis d'Orleans (23 Nov., 1407), on the ground that any subject might kill or cause to be killed a tyrannical ruler (Ker\'yn de Lettenhove, Jean sans peur et I'apologie du tyrannicide, Brussels, 1861). After several years of discussion this thesis was condcnmed at Paris in 1414 by the bi.shop, the in- quisitor, and tlie university. The Duke of Burgundy appealed to the Roman See. At Constance the mat- ter was discussed in the fifteenth session (6 July, 1415); many French doctors were eager for the for-
