CHAPTER VIII
The Western Slavs
1300–1517

I. BOHEMIA

HERETOFORE the Slavs had been human flotsam, surging westward at times to the Elbe, southward to the Mediterranean, eastward to the Urals, north even to the Arctic Sea; then, in the thirteenth century, repulsed in the west by the Livonian and Teutonic knights, and subjected to Mongol and Tatar domination in the east. In the fourteenth century Bohemia led the Holy Roman Empire and the pre-Lutheran Reformation; and Poland, united with a vast Lithuania, became a major power, with a highly cultured upper class. In the fifteenth century Russia freed herself from the Tatars, and unified her far-flung principalities into a massive state. Like a tidal wave, the Slavs entered history.

In 1306 the death of Wenceslaus III ended the ancient Przemyslid line in Bohemia. After an interlude of minor kings the baronial and ecclesiastical electors brought in John of Luxembourg to found a new dynasty (1310). His gallant adventures made Bohemia for a generation an unwilling citadel of chivalry. He could hardly live without tournaments, and when these proved too innocuous he sallied forth to war in almost every realm of Europe. It became a bon mot of the times that “nothing can be done without the help of God and the King of Bohemia.”¹ Brescia, besieged by Verona, begged his aid; he promised to come; at the news thereof the Veronese raised the siege. Brescia, Bergamo, Cremona, Parma, Modena, even Milan voluntarily acknowledged him as their feudal sovereign in return for his protection; what Frederick I Barbarossa and Frederick II Wonder of the World had been unable to secure by arms, this King obtained almost by the magic of his name. His dashing wars added terrain to Bohemia but forfeited the affection of the people, who could not forgive him for being so often absent from their country that he neglected its administration and never learned its speech. In 1336, on a crusade in Lithuania, he contracted a disease that left him blind. Nevertheless, when he learned that Edward III of England had landed in Normandy and was moving toward Paris, John and his son Charles, with 500 Bohemian knights, rode across Europe to succor the king of France. Father and son fought in the van at Crécy. When the French retreated, the blind King bade two knights bind their horses on either side to his and lead him against the victorious English, saying, “So will it God, it shall not be said that a king of Bohemia flies from the battlefield.” Fifty of his knights were killed around him; he was mortally wounded, and was taken, dying, to the tent of the English King. Edward sent the corpse to Charles with a courtly message: “This day has fallen the crown of chivalry.” ²

Charles IV was a less heroic but much wiser king. He preferred negotiation to war, and was not too cowardly to compromise; yet he extended the boundaries of his kingdom. In the thirty-two years of his reign he kept the Slavs and the Germans in unwonted peace. He reorganized the government, reformed the judiciary, and made Prague one of the handsomest cities in Europe. He built there a royal residence on the style of the Louvre, and the famous castle of Karlstein (Charles’s Stone) as a repository for the archives of the state and the jewels of the crown—which were treasured not for vanity and display but as a reserve fund conveniently mobile and immune to debasements of the currency. He brought in Matthew of Arras to design St. Vitus’ Cathedral, and Tommaso da Modena to paint frescoes in churches and palaces. He protected the peasantry from oppression, and promoted commerce and industry. He founded the University of Prague (1347), transmitted to his countrymen the cultural interest that he had acquired in France and Italy, and provided the intellectual stimulus that exploded in the Hussite revolt. His court became the center of the Bohemian humanists, led by Bishop John of Stresa, Petrarch’s friend. The Italian poet admired Charles beyond any other monarch of the time, visited him in Prague, and begged him to conquer Italy; but Charles had better sense. His reign, despite his Golden Bull, was Bohemia’s Golden Age. He survives smiling, in a splendid limestone bust, in the cathedral of Prague.

Wenceslaus IV was a youth of eighteen when his father died (1378). His good nature, his affection for his people, his lenience in taxing them, his skill in administration, won him great favor with all but the nobles, who thought their privileges imperiled by his popularity. His occasional hot temper, and his addiction to drink, gave them a leverage for displacing him. They surprised him at his country seat, threw him into prison (1394), and restored him only on his promise to do nothing of moment without the consent of a council of nobles and bishops. New disputes arose; Sigismund of Hungary was called in; he arrested Wenceslaus, his brother, and took him prisoner to Vienna (1402). Wenceslaus escaped a few years later, made his way back to Bohemia, was received with joy by the people, and regained his throne and powers. The rest of his story mingles with the tragedy of Huss.

II. JOHN HUSS: 1369–1415

Wenceslaus was loved and hated for winking at heresy and scowling at the Germans. A rapid infiltration of Bohemia by German miners, craftsmen, merchants, and students had generated a racial hostility between Teutons and Czechs; Huss would have received less support from people and king had he not symbolized a native resentment of German prominence. Wenceslaus did not forget that the archbishops of Germany had led the movement to depose him from the Imperial throne. His sister Anne had married Richard II of England, and had seen—probably had sympathized with—the attempt of Wyclif to divorce England from the Roman Church. In 1388 Adelbert Ranconis left a sum to enable Bohemian students to go to Paris or Oxford. Some of these in England secured or transcribed works by Wyclif, and took them to Bohemia. Milíč of Kroměříže and Conrad Waldhouser roused Prague with their denunciations of immorality in laity and clergy; Matthias of Janov and Thomas of Stitny continued this preaching; the Emperor, and even Archbishop Ernst, approved; and in 1391 a special church, called the Bethlehem Chapel, was founded in Prague to lead the movement of reform. In 1402 John Huss was appointed to the pulpit of this chapel.

He had begun life in the village of Husinetz, and was known as John of Husinetz, which he later shortened to Hus. Toward 1390 he came as a poor student to Prague, where he earned his way by serving in the churches. He aimed to enter the priesthood; nevertheless, after the custom of the age, he joined in what Paris would later term the gay “Bohemian” ways of university youth. In 1396 he received his degree of master of arts, and began to teach at the university; in 1401 he was chosen dean of the faculty of arts—i.e., of the “humanities.” In that year he was ordained priest, and reformed his life to an almost monastic austerity. As head of the Bethlehem Chapel he became the most famous preacher in Prague. Many figures high in the court were among his listeners, and Queen Sophia made him her chaplain. He preached in Czech, and taught his congregation to take an active part in the service by singing hymns.

His accusers later affirmed that in the very first year of his ministry he had echoed Wyclif’s doubts as to the disappearance of bread and wine from the consecrated elements in the Eucharist. Unquestionably he had read some of Wyclif’s works; he had made copies of them which still exist with his annotations; and at his trial he confessed to having said: “Wyclif, I trust, will be saved; but could I think he would be damned, I would my soul were with his.”³ In 1403 the opinions of Wyclif had won such vogue in the University of Prague that the chapter—the administrative clergy—of the cathedral submitted to the university masters forty-five excerpts from the writings of Wyclif, and asked should these doctrines be barred from the university. Several masters, including Huss, answered No; but the majority ruled that thereafter no member of the university staff should, either publicly or privately, defend or adhere to any of the forty-five articles.

Huss must have ignored this prohibition, for in 1408 the clergy of Prague petitioned Archbishop Zbynek to reprove him. The Archbishop proceeded cautiously, being then in conflict with the King. But when Huss continued to express sympathy for Wyclif’s views Zbynek excommunicated him and several associates (1409); and when they persisted in exercising their priestly functions he placed all Prague under an interdict. He ordered all writings of Wyclif that could be found in Bohemia to be surrendered to him; 200 manuscripts were brought to him; he burned them in the courtyard of his palace. Huss appealed to the newly elected Pope John XXIII. John summoned him to appear before the papal court. He refused to go.

In 1411 the Pope, desiring funds for a crusade against Ladislas, King of Naples, announced a new offering of indulgences. When this was proclaimed in Prague, and the papal agents seemed to the reformers to be selling forgiveness for coin, Huss and his chief supporter, Jerome of Prague, publicly preached against indulgences, questioned the existence of purgatory, and protested against the Church’s collecting money to spill Christian blood. Descending to vituperation, Huss called the Pope a money-grubber, even Antichrist.⁴ A large section of the public shared Huss’s views, and subjected the papal agents to such ridicule and abuse that the King forbade any further preaching or action against the offering of indulgences. Three youths who violated this edict were hailed before the city council; Huss pleaded for them, and admitted that his preaching had aroused them; they were condemned and beheaded. The Pope now launched his own excommunication against Huss; and when Huss ignored it John laid an interdict upon any city where he should stay (1411). On the advice of the King, Huss left Prague, and remained in rural seclusion for two years.

In those years he wrote his major works, some in Latin, some in Czech, nearly all inspired by Wyclif, some perhaps echoing the heresies and anticlericalism that a remnant of the Waldensians had brought with them into Bohemia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He rejected image worship, auricular confession, and the multiplication of ornate religious rites. He gave his movement a popular and nationalistic character by denouncing the Germans and defending the Slavs. In a tract on Traffic in Holy Things he attacked the simony of the clergy; in De sex erroribus he condemned the taking of fees by priests for baptism, confirmation, Masses, marriages, or burials; he charged some Prague clerics with selling consecrated oil; and he adopted Wyclif’s view that a priest guilty of simony could not validly administer a sacrament.⁵ His treatise De ecclesia became his apologia and his ruin; from its pages were drawn the heresies for which he was burned. He followed Wyclif into predestinarianism, and agreed with Wyclif, Marsilius, and Ockham that the Church should have no worldly goods. Like Calvin, he defined the Church neither as the clergy nor as the whole body of Christians, but as the totality, in heaven or on earth, of the saved.⁶ Christ, not the pope, is the head of the Church; the Bible, not the pope, should be the Christian’s guide. The pope is not infallible, even in faith or morals; the pope himself may be a hardened sinner or heretic. Accepting a legend widely credited at the time (even by Gerson), Huss made much of a supposititious Pope John VIII who (said the legend) had revealed her sex by giving unpremeditated birth to a child on the streets of Rome.⁷ A pope, Huss concluded, is to be obeyed only when his commands conform to the law of Christ. “To rebel against an erring pope is to obey Christ.”⁸

When a general council met at Constance in 1414 to depose three rival popes and enact a program of ecclesiastical reform, a chance seemed open to reconcile the Hussites with the Church. Emperor Sigismund, heir apparent to the childless Wenceslaus IV, was anxious to restore religious unity and peace in Bohemia. He suggested that Huss should go to Constance and attempt a reconciliation. For this hazardous journey he offered Huss a safe-conduct to Constance, a public hearing before the Council, and a free and safe return to Bohemia in case Huss should reject the judgment of the assembly. Despite the anxious warnings of his associates, Huss set out for Constance (October 1414), escorted by three Czech nobles and several friends. About the same time Stephen of Palecz and other Bohemian opponents of Huss went to Constance to indict him before the Council.

Arrived, he was at first treated courteously, and lived in freedom. But when Palecz laid before the Council a list of Huss’s heresies, they summoned and questioned him. Convinced by his replies that he was a major heretic, they ordered him imprisoned. He fell ill, and was for a time near death; Pope John XXIII sent papal physicians to treat him. Sigismund complained that the action of the Council violated the safe-conduct that he had given Huss; it answered that it was not bound by his action; that his authority did not extend to spiritual concerns; that the Church had the right to overrule the state in trying an enemy of the Church. In April Huss was removed to the fortress of Gottlieben on the Rhine; there he was placed in fetters, and was so poorly fed that he again fell gravely ill. Meanwhile his fellow heretic, Jerome of Prague, had rashly entered Constance, and had nailed to the city gates, to the doors of churches, and upon the houses of cardinals, a request that the Emperor and the Council should give him a safe-conduct and a public hearing. At the urging of Huss’s friends he left the city and began a return to Bohemia; but on the way he stopped to preach against the Council’s treatment of Huss. He was arrested, brought back to Constance, and jailed.

On July 5, after seven months of imprisonment, Huss was led in chains before the Council, and again on the seventh and the eighth. Asked his view of the forty-five articles already condemned in Wyclif’s works, he rejected most of them, approved of some. Confronted with extracts from his book, On the church, he expressed his willingness to recant such as could be refuted from Scripture (precisely the position taken by Luther at Worms). The Council argued that Scripture must be interpreted not by the free judgment of individuals but by the heads of the Church, and it demanded that Huss should retract all the quoted articles without reservation. Both his friends and his accusers pleaded with him to yield. He refused. He lost the good will of the vacillating Emperor by declaring that a secular as well as a spiritual authority ceases to be a lawful ruler the moment he falls into mortal sin.⁹ Sigismund now informed Huss that if the Council condemned him his safe-conduct would be automatically canceled.

After three days of questioning, and vain efforts by the Emperor and cardinals to persuade him to recant, Huss was returned to his prison cell. The Council allowed him and itself four weeks to weigh the matter. It was even more complex to the Council than to Huss. How could a heretic be allowed to live without thereby branding as inhuman crimes all past executions for heresy? This Council had deposed popes; was it to be defied by a simple Bohemian priest? Was not the Church the spiritual, as the state was the physical, arm of society, responsible for a moral order that needed some indisputable authority as its base? To assail that authority seemed to the Council as clearly treason as to take up arms against the king. Opinion would have to develop through another century before Luther would be able to make a similar defiance and live.

Further efforts were made to secure some semblance of retraction from Huss. The Emperor sent special emissaries to plead with him. He gave always the same reply: he would abandon any of his views that could be disproved from Scripture. On July 6, 1415, in the cathedral of Constance, the Council condemned both Wyclif and Huss, ordered Huss’s writings to be burned, and delivered him to the secular arm. He was at once unfrocked, and was led out of the city to a place where a pyre of faggots had been prepared. A last appeal was made to him to save himself with a word of retraction; he again refused. The fire consumed him as he chanted hymns.

Jerome, in a forgivable moment of terror, recanted before the Council the teachings of his friend (September 10,1415). Remanded to prison, he gradually regained his courage. He asked for a hearing, and after a long delay he was led before the assembly (May 23, 1416); but instead of being allowed to state his case he was required first to answer the several charges laid against him. He protested with a passionate eloquence that moved the skeptical but politic Italian humanist, Poggio Bracciolini, who had come to Constance as secretary to Pope John XXIII.

The charges were read to him one by one, and he answered each without retraction. When at last he was allowed to speak freely he almost won over the Council by his fervor and sincerity. He reviewed some of the historic cases in which men had been killed for their beliefs; he recalled how Stephen the Apostle had been condemned to death by priests, and held that there could hardly be a greater sin than that priests should wrongly slay a priest. The Council hoped that he would save himself by asking forgiveness; instead he repudiated his earlier recantation, reaffirmed his faith in the doctrines of Wyclif and Huss, and branded the burning of Huss as a crime certain to be punished by God. The Council gave him four days to reconsider. Unrepentant, he was condemned (May 30), and was led out at once to the same spot where Huss had died. When the executioner went behind him to light the pyre, Jerome bade him, “Come in front, and light it before my face; if I had feared death I should never have come here.” He sang a hymn till he choked with the smoke.

III. THE BOHEMIAN REVOLUTION: 1415–36

The news of Huss’s death, relayed by couriers to Bohemia, aroused a national revolt. An assembly of Bohemian and Moravian nobles sent to the Council of Constance (September 2, 1415) a document signed by 500 leading Czechs; it upheld Huss as a good and upright Catholic, denounced his execution as an insult to his country, and proclaimed that the signatories would fight to the last drop of their blood to defend the doctrines of Christ against man-made decrees. A further declaration pledged the members to obey thereafter only such papal commands as agreed with Scripture; the judges of such agreement were to be the faculty of the University of Prague. The university itself hailed Huss as a martyr, and praised the imprisoned Jerome. The Council summoned the rebellious nobles to appear before it and answer charges of heresy; none came. It ordered the university closed; the majority of masters and students went on with their work.

About 1412 one of Huss’s followers, Jakoubek of Strzibo, had proposed that the early Christian custom of administering the Eucharist in both forms —sub utraque specie—wine as well as bread—should be restored throughout Christendom. When the idea captivated the rank and file of his supporters, Huss gave it his approval. The Council forbade it, and defended the abandonment of the primitive custom on the ground that it risked the spilling of Christ’s blood. After Huss’s death the University of Prague and the nobles, led by Queen Sophia, adopted lay communion in both kinds as a command of Christ, and the chalice became the symbol of the “Utraquist” revolt. The followers of Huss formulated in 1420 the “Four Articles of Prague” as their basic demands: that the Eucharist should be given in wine as well as bread; that ecclesiastical simony should be promptly punished; that the Word of God should be preached without hindrance as the sole standard of religious truth and practice; and that an end should be put to the ownership of extensive material possessions by priests or monks. A radical minority among the rebels rejected the veneration of relics, capital punishment, purgatory, and Masses for the dead. All the elements of the Lutheran Reformation were present in this Hussite revolt.

King Wenceslaus, who had sympathized with the movement, possibly because it promised to transfer church property to the state, now began to fear it as threatening civil as well as ecclesiastical authority. In the “New Town” that he had added to Prague he appointed only anti-Hussites to the council, and these men issued punitive regulations designed to suppress the heresy. On July 30, 1419, a Hussite crowd paraded into New Town, forced its way into the council chamber, and threw the councilors out of the windows into the street, where another crowd finished them off. A popular assembly was organized, which elected Hussite councilors. Wenceslaus confirmed the new council, and then died of a heart attack (1419).

The Bohemian nobles offered to accept Sigismund as their king if he would recognize the Four Articles of Prague. He countered by demanding from all Czechs full obedience to the Church, and burned at the stake a Bohemian who refused to renounce the “lay chalice.” The new pope, Martin V, announced a crusade against the Bohemian heretics, and Sigismund advanced with a large force against Prague (1420). Almost overnight the Hussites organized an army; nearly every town in Bohemia and Moravia sent impassioned recruits; Jan Zižka, a sixty-year-old knight with one eye, trained them, and led them to incredible victories. Twice they defeated Sigismund’s troops. Sigismund raised another army, but when a false report came that Zižka’s men were approaching, this new host fled in disorder without ever sighting an enemy. Inflated with success, Zižka’s Puritans now adopted from their opponents the idea that religious dissent should be suppressed by force; they passed up and down Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia like a devastating storm, pillaging monasteries, massacring monks, and compelling the population to accept the Four Articles of Prague. The Germans in Bohemia, who wished to remain Catholic, became the favorite victims of Hussite arms. Meanwhile, and for seventeen years (1419–36), Bohemia survived without a king.

Diverse and conflicting elements had united to make the Bohemian revolution. The native Bohemians resented the wealth and arrogance of the German settlers, and hoped to drive them from the country. The nobles coveted ecclesiastical properties, and thought them worth an excommunication. The proletariat aspired to free itself from middle-class masters. The middle classes hoped to raise their modest power, as against the nobility, in the Diet that ruled Prague and gave some government to Bohemia. The serfs, especially on church estates, dreamed of dividing those blessed acres, and, at worst, of freeing themselves from villein bonds. Some of the lower clergy, fleeced by the hierarchy, gave the rebellion their tacit support, and provided for it the religious services interdicted by the Church.

When the arms of the Hussites had won them most of Bohemia, the contradictions in their aims broke them into fratricidal factions. After the nobles had seized most of the property owned by orthodox ecclesiastical groups,¹¹ they felt that the revolution should subside and invite the sanctifying effects of time. While the serfs who had tilled these lands for the Church clamored for their division among themselves as freemen, the noble appropriators demanded that the peasants should serve the new masters on the same servile basis as before. Zižka supported the peasants, and for a time besieged the now conservative “Calixtine” or chalice Hussites in Prague. Tiring of the struggle, he accepted a truce, withdrew to eastern Bohemia, and founded a “Horeb Brotherhood” dedicated to the Four Articles and to killing Germans. When he died (1424) he bequeathed his skin to be made into a martial drum.¹²

In the town of Tabor another party of Hussites formed, who held that real Christianity required a communistic organization of life. Long before Huss there had been in Bohemia little groups of Waldensians, Beghards, and other irrepressible heretics mingling religious with communistic ideals. They had maintained a salutary quiet until Zižka’s troops had overthrown the power of the Church in most of Bohemia; now they came into the open, and captured doctrinal leadership at Tabor. Many of them rejected the Real Presence, purgatory, prayers for the dead, and all sacraments except baptism and communion, and discouraged the veneration of relics, images, and saints, they proposed to restore the simple ritual of the Apostolic Church, and repudiated all ecclesiastical rites and robes that they could not find in early Christianity. They objected to altars, organs, and the splendor of church decoration, and they destroyed such ornaments wherever they could. Like later Protestants, they reduced divine worship to communion, prayer, Scriptural readings, a sermon, and the singing of hymns; and these services were conducted by clergymen indistinguishable from the laity in dress. Most of the Taborites deduced communism from millennarianism: Christ would soon come to establish His Kingdom on earth; in that Kingdom there would be no property, no Church or state, no class distinctions, no human laws, no taxes, no marriage; surely it would please Christ, when he came, to find such a heavenly utopia already established by His worshipers. At Tabor and some other towns these principles were put into practice; there, said a contemporary professor in the University of Prague, “all is held in common, no one owns anything for himself alone; so to own is considered a deadly sin. They hold that all should be equal brothers and sisters.”¹³

A Bohemian peasant turned philosopher, Peter Chelcicky, went further, and wrote in vigorous Czech a series of Tolstoian tracts advocating a pacifistic anarchism. He attacked the powerful and the rich, denounced war and capital punishment as murder, and demanded a society without lords or serfs, or laws of any kind. He bade his followers take Christianity literally as they found it in the New Testament: to baptize only adults, to turn their backs upon the world and its ways, upon oaths and learning and class distinctions, upon commerce and city life; and to live in voluntary poverty, preferably tilling the land, and completely ignoring “civilization” and the state.¹⁴ The Taborites found this pacifism unsuited to their temperament. They divided into moderate and advanced radicals (these preached nudism and a communism of women), and the two factions passed from argument to war. In the course of a few years unequal abilities developed inequalities of power and privilege, finally of goods; and the apostles of peace and freedom were replaced by ruthless lawgivers wielding despotic force.¹⁵

Christendom heard with horror of this supposedly communistic Christianity. The baronial and burgher Hussites in Bohemia began to yearn for the Church of Rome as the only organization strong enough to stop the imminent dissolution of the existing social order. They rejoiced when the Council of Basel invited reconciliation. A delegation from the Council, without papal authorization, came to Bohemia, and signed a series of “Compacts” so worded that complaisant Hussites and Catholics could interpret them as accepting and rejecting the Four Articles of Prague (1433). As the Taborites refused to recognize these Compacts, the conservative Hussites joined with the surviving orthodox groups in Bohemia, attacked and defeated the divided Taborites, and put an end to the communistic experiment (1434). The Bohemian Diet made its peace with Sigismund, and accepted him as king (1436).

But Sigismund, accustomed to crowning his victories with futility, died in the following year. During the chaos that ensued, the orthodox party secured the upper hand in Prague. An able provincial leader, George of Poděbrad, organized an army of Hussites, captured Prague, restored the Utraquist Jan Rokycana to he archiepiscopal see, and established himself as governor of Bohemia (1451). When Pope Nicholas V refused to recognize Rokycana the Utraquists meditated a transfer of their allegiance to the Greek Orthodox Church, but the fall of Constantinople to the Turks ended the negotiations. In 1458, seeing that Poděbrad’s excellent administration had restored order and prosperity, the Diet chose him king.

He turned his energies now to reconstituting religious peace. With the approval of the Diet he sent to Pius II (1462) an embassy requesting papal ratification of the Compacts of Prague. The Pope refused, and forbade the laity anywhere to receive the Eucharist in both kinds. On the advice of Gregor Heimburg, a German jurist, Poděbrad in 1464 invited the monarchs of Europe to form a permanent federation of European states, with its own legislature, executive, and army, and a judiciary empowered to settle current and future international disputes.¹⁶ The kings did not reply; the reinvigorated papacy was too strong to be defied by a League of Nations. Pope Paul II declared Poděbrad a heretic, freed his subjects from their oaths of obedience, and called upon Christian powers to depose him (1466). Matthias Corvinus of Hungary undertook the task, invaded Bohemia, and was crowned king by a group of Catholic nobles (1469). Poděbrad offered the throne to Ladislas, son of King Casimir IV of Poland. Then, worn out with war and dropsy, he died, aged fifty-one (1471). Bohemia, now Czechoslovakia, honors him as, next to Charles IV, her greatest king.

The Diet accepted Ladislas II, and Matthias retired to Hungary. The nobles took advantage of the youthful weakness of the King to consolidate their economic and political power, to reduce the representation of towns and burghers in the Diet, and to debase into serfdom the peasantry that had just dreamed of utopia. Thousands of Bohemians, during this period of revolution and reaction, fled to other lands.* In 1485 the Catholic and Utraquist parties signed the Treaty of Kutna Hora, pledging themselves to peace for thirty years.

In eastern Bohemia and Moravia the followers of Chelcicky formed (1457) a new Christian sect, the Jednota Bratrska, or Church of the Brotherhood, dedicated to a simple agricultural life on the principles of the New Testament. In 1467 it renounced the authority of the Catholic Church, consecrated its own priests, rejected purgatory and the worship of saints, anticipated Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith, and became the first modern church to practice Christianity. By 1500 it claimed 100,000 members. These “Moravian Brethren” were almost exterminated in the fury of the Thirty Years’ War; they survived through the leadership of John Comenius; they still exist, in scattered congregations in Europe, Africa, and America, astonishing a violent and skeptical world with their religious toleration, their unassuming piety, and their peaceful fidelity to the principles they profess.

IV. POLAND: 1300–1505

The maintenance of peace is difficult even in regions deriving unity and protection from geographical barriers; consider how much more difficult it is in states exposed on one or more borders to neighbors always avid, sometimes tempting, sometimes powerful. Poland in the fourteenth century was half stifled by Teutonic Knights, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Moravians, Bohemians, and Germans pressing upon her frontiers. When Ladislas the Short became grand prince of Lesser—southern—Poland (1306), he faced a multitude of enemies. The Germans in Greater—western—Poland rejected his authority; the Knights seized Danzig and Pomerania; the margrave of Brandenburg plotted to destroy him; and Wenceslaus III of Bohemia claimed the Polish throne. Ladislas fought his way through this sea of troubles by arms, diplomacy, and marriage, united Lesser and Greater Poland into a coherent kingdom, and had himself crowned at Cracow, his new capital (1320). Dying at seventy-three (1333), he bequeathed his uneasy throne to his only son, Casimir the Great.

Some might begrudge Casimir III this title, since he preferred negotiation and compromise to war. Resigning Silesia to Bohemia, and Pomerania to the Knights, he consoled himself by acquiring Galicia, around Lwów, and Mazovia, around Warsaw. He devoted his reign of thirty-seven years to administration, bringing his varied territories under one law, “that the state might not look like a manyheaded monster.” ¹⁸ Under his direction a group of jurists unified the divergent legislation and customs of the provinces into the “Statutes of Casimir”—the first codification of Polish laws, and a model of humanitarian moderation by comparison with contemporary codes. Casimir protected Jewish, Greek Orthodox, and other racial or religious minorities, encouraged education and the arts, established the University of Cracow (1364), and built so extensively that men said he had found a Poland of wood and had rebuilt it in stone. He so wisely promoted all phases of the nation’s economy that farmers hailed him as “the peasants’ king,” merchants throve in the security of peace, and all classes called him Great.

Having no male heir, he left his crown to his nephew Louis the Great of Hungary (1370), hoping to win for his country the protection of a strong monarchy, and a share in the cultural stimulus that the Angevin dynasty had brought from Italy and France. But Louis was absorbed in Hungary, and neglected Poland. To keep the proud nobles loyal to him in his absence he granted them, by the “Privilege of Kassa” (1374), exemption from most taxes, and a monopoly of high offices. A war of succession followed his death (1382). The Seym or Parliament recognized his daughter Jadwiga, eleven years old, as “king”; but disorder ended only when Jagello, Great Prince of Lithuania, married Jadwiga (1386), uniting his spacious realm with Poland, and bringing a masterful personality to the government.

The growth of Lithuania was a major phenomenon of the fourteenth century Gedymin and his son Olgierd brought under their pagan rule nearly all western Russia: Polotsk, Pinsk, Smolensk, Chernigov, Volhynia, Kiev, Podolia, and the Ukraine; some of these were glad to find, under the Great Princes, a refuge from the Tatar Golden Horde that held eastern Russia in fief. When Jagello succeeded Olgierd (1377) the Lithuanian Empire, governed from Wilno, reached from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and almost to Moscow itself. This was the gift that Jagello brought to Jadwiga, or Poland was the dowry that she brought to him. She was only sixteen at their marriage; she had been reared as a Roman Catholic in the finest culture of the Latin Renaissance; he was thirty-six, illiterate and “heathen”; but he accepted baptism, took the Christian name of Ladislas II, and promised to convert all Lithuania.

It was a timely union, for the eastward advance of the Teutonic Knights was endangering both the wedded states. The “Order of the Cross,” originally dedicated to Christianizing the Slavs, had become a band of martial conquerors, taking by the sword whatever terrain they could snatch from pagan or Christian, and establishing a harsh serfdom over lands once tilled by a free peasantry. In 1410 the Grand Master, from his capital at Marienburg, ruled Esthonia, Livonia, Courland, Prussia, and eastern Pomerania, shutting Poland off from the sea. In a ferocious “Northern War” the Grand Master’s army and that of Jagello—each, we are told, 100,000 strong—met in battle near Grünewald or Tannenberg (1410). The Knights were defeated and fled, leaving behind them 14,000 prisoners and 18,000 slain—among these the Grand Master himself. From that day the Order of the Cross rapidly declined, until in the Peace of Thorn (1466) it ceded Pomerania and western Prussia to Poland, with the free port of Danzig as a door to the sea.

During the reign of Casimir IV (1447–92) Poland attained the apex of her spread, her power, and her art. Though himself quite illiterate, Casimir ended the knightly scorn of letters by giving his sons a thorough education. Queen Jadwiga, dying, left her jewels to finance the reopening of Cracow University—which, in the next century, would teach Copernicus. Literature, as well as science and philosophy, used the Latin tongue; in Latin Jan Dlugosz wrote his classic History of Poland (1478). In 1477 Veit Stoss of Nuremberg was invited to Cracow; he stayed there seventeen years, and raised the city to a high place in the art of the time. For the Church of Our Lady he carved 147 choir stalls, and an enormous altarpiece, forty feet by thirty-three, with a central shrine of the Assumption as impressive as Titian’s painting, and with eighteen panels depicting the life of Mary and her Son—panels almost worthy, though in wood, to bear comparison with the bronze doors that Ghiberti had made for the Florentine Baptistery a generation before. For the cathedral of Cracow, Stoss cut in red mottled marble a superb tomb for Casimir IV. With these works Gothic sculpture in Poland reached its crown and end. In the reign of Casimir’s son Sigismund I (1506–48) Polish art accepted the style o the Italian Renaissance. Lutheranism seeped in from Germany, and a new age began.