At the beginning of November, 1414, Jan Hus, master of Prague University, popular preacher and leader of the socio-religious movement, arrived in Constance to attend the general council, the biggest medieval assembly of that sort, which was convoked to put an end to the Great Schism within Latin Christianity and introduce necessary Church reforms in capite et in membris. Traveling to the council, Jan Hus was under ecclesiastical excommunication which had been imposed by the papal court two years earlier. Regardless of his legal position, Jan Hus was determined to present his case to the council members and believed that he would be given a chance to rebut the charges of heresy. The condemnation of Hus on July 6, 1415, and his burning at the stake was a turning point in that half-year debate and drove a wedge between the opponents and followers of the Bohemian Reformation. The Catholic party started to propagate the image of Jan Hus as the worst heresiarch, who had been rightly condemned at Constance, whereas the Hussites promoted their leader as a saint and martyr who had been falsely accused and then burnt by the wicked clergy. In the following decades, these two opposing stories of the trial of Jan Hus at Constance gave birth to a number of narratives which spread throughout fifteenth-century Europe.
The lecture will analyze the proceedings against Jan Hus at Constance from the legal point of view. At the same time, however, it will present the vigorous debate on Hus’s trial both at Constance, in Bohemia, and in other European countries.
Paweł Kras is Professor of Medieval History and Head of the History Department at John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. His research focuses on religious movements (Waldensians, Beguines, Hussites) and the repression of heresy in the Later Middle Ages. In 1998 he published a book on the Hussites in fifteenth-century Poland; his second book deals with the system of the inquisition in medieval Europe (2006). He is currently working on ethnic and religious minorities in late medieval and early modern Poland.