The town was called by those who had moved to it Tabor. The name was one that broadcast a defiant message to its gathering enemies. In the Bible, it was recorded that Jesus had climbed a mountain to pray. ‘And as he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning.’2 The site of this miracle had long been identified by Christian scholars as a mountain in Galilee: Tabor. The radiance of the divine had suffused its summit, and heaven been joined with earth. Now it was happening again. The Bohemians who flocked to the lonely crag above the Lužnice were following in the footsteps of those crowds who once, beneath open skies, had gathered to hear the preaching of their Lord. ‘Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry.’3 These were words that the radicals among the followers of Pelagius had seized on, and which had been troubling the wealthy since the time of Paulinus; but no one – not Martin, not Francis, not Waldes – had ever thought to do as the Taborites were now doing, and attempt to build an entire new society upon them. As lords laboured alongside peasants, toiling day and night to provide Tabor with an impregnable screen of fortifications, they were not merely constructing a stronghold, but aiming to rebuild the entire world.
In this ambition, at any rate, they were following in well-worn footsteps. The immense edifice of the Catholic Church, raised in defiance of earthly monarchs, and fashioned with such boldness and effort to serve the needs of all the Christian people, stood as the ultimate monument to what a revolution might achieve. The lava of its radicalism, though, had long since set. By an irony that was not yet familiar, the papal order had become the status quo. Increasingly, three centuries and more after the heroic age of Gregory VII, there were many Christians who, when they contemplated the claims to a universal rule of the papacy, could no longer recognise in it an agent of reformatio. Instead, so they dreaded, it had become an impediment to the change that was so clearly and desperately needed. The shadow of divine disapproval was unmistakable. A third of Christendom, it was estimated, had perished of the plague. Wars were ravaging its most prosperous kingdoms. On its eastern flank, the Byzantine Empire – which, following the expulsion of the crusaders from its capital in 1261, had been struggling to recover from the terrible blow inflicted on it back in the pontificate of Innocent III – was imperilled by a yet more formidable enemy. A new Muslim power, the empire of the Ottoman Turks, had expanded across the Hellespont, directly threatening Constantinople. Its armies had even begun to probe the defences of Hungary. Yet nothing was ultimately more debilitating to the claims of the Roman Church to be the bride of Christ than the enduring abomination of the papal schism. Attempts to resolve it had only made the crisis worse. In 1409, a council of bishops and university masters, meeting in Pisa, had declared both rival popes deposed, and crowned a new candidate of its own – but this, far from delivering Christendom a single pope, had merely left it stuck with three. Small wonder, then, confronted by such a scandal, that a few bold souls, pushing at the very limits of what it was acceptable to think, had begun to contemplate a nightmarish possibility: that the papacy, far from holding the keys to the gates of heaven, might in truth be an agent of hell.
And that in particular it might be Antichrist. At the end of days, Saint John had foretold, a beast with ten horns and seven heads was destined to emerge from the sea; this same beast, according to venerable tradition, would be a false prophet, a blasphemy against the church, and destined to rule the world. Rival popes, recognising an obvious way to rally their supporters when they saw it, had not hesitated to hurl the name of Antichrist at one another; but there were some Christians, marking the propaganda war with contempt, who had scorned to back either side. Their dissidence, communicated via the very network of universities that provided the Church with its clerical elite, had reverberated across Christendom. It was in Oxford that the theologian John Wycliffe had openly dared to denounce both factions in the schism as demonic, and the papacy itself as lacking all divine foundation; but it was in Prague that these sparks of subversion had ignited the most explosive reaction. Already, by the time of Wycliffe’s death in 1384, the city was a tinder box. The Bohemian nobility, subject as they were to emperors who stood in a line of inheritance from Otto the Great, chafed under German dominance. Czech-speaking scholars at the university, similarly disadvantaged, nurtured their own grievance. Meanwhile, out in the slums, the resentment was of the rich. The most popular preachers were those who condemned the wealth of monasteries adorned with gold and sumptuous tapestries, and demanded a return to the stern simplicity of the early days of the Church. The Christian people, they warned, had taken a desperately wrong turn. The reforms of Gregory VII, far from serving to redeem the Church, had set it instead upon a path to corruption. The papacy, seduced by the temptations of earthly glory, had forgotten that the gospels spoke most loudly to the poor, to the humble, to the suffering. ‘The cross of Jesus Christ and the name of the crucified Jesus are now brought into disrepute and made as it were alien and void among Christians.’4 Only Antichrist could have wrought such a fateful, such a hellish abomination. And so it was, in the streets of Prague, that it had become a common thing to paint the pope as the beast foretold by Saint John, and to show him wearing the papal crown, but with the feet of a monstrous bird.
To imagine that an entire order might be overturned had rarely come naturally to people. In Babylon, the ideal of kingship honoured by its inhabitants had reached back millennia, to the very beginnings of civilisation; in Greece, philosophers had cast society as the expression of a divinely ordered pattern; in Rome, anything that smacked of res novae, ‘new things’, had invariably been regarded as a catastrophe at all costs to be avoided. Not the least revolutionary aspect of Christianity had been the sanction that it provided for the very notion of revolution. Yet the papacy, which in the age of Gregory VII had weaponised it as no other institution had ever thought to do, was now become the embodiment of the status quo. The moderni, those reformers who back in the twelfth century had proclaimed the world to be standing on the threshold of eternity, had turned out to be mistaken. Modernitas – the new age that, with its dawning, would herald the end of time – had failed to arrive. This did not mean, though, that it never would. The prognosis provided by the Book of Revelation was clear. To read in the cracking of the world the events foretold by Saint John was inevitably to feel a certain shiver of dread; but also, perhaps, to dream that upheaval and transformation might be for the best.
One man more than any other had come to serve as a lightning rod for the gathering storm. In 1414, when church leaders from across Christendom met in the imperial city of Constance, on the edge of the Swiss Alps, their agenda had been an especially demanding one. As well as the running sore of the papal schism, there had been a second challenge: the defiant heresy of Prague’s most celebrated preacher. Jan Hus, a man of immense charisma, intellectual brilliance and personal integrity, had emerged from the scholarly confines of the city’s university to become the toast of Bohemia. Denouncing both the church hierarchy in Prague and the German-speaking elites who had long been profiting from imperial favour, he had helped to bring an already febrile mood to boiling point. The more rapturously his teachings were greeted, the more radical they had become. Inspired by Wycliffe, Hus had openly derided the claim of the papacy to a primacy sanctioned by God. That he had refrained from going the whole hog and denouncing it as Antichrist had not prevented his excommunication; nor, in turn, had excommunication served to rein in his defiance. Quite the contrary. Enjoying as he did adulatory support both in the slums of Prague and in the castles of Czech noblemen, Hus had stood firm. Increasingly, it seemed that the very structures of authority in Bohemia were collapsing. If this was a cause of panic in papal circles, then it was no less so for the imperial high command. Particularly alarmed was Sigismund, a ginger-haired veteran of the Turkish front and prince of the royal blood, who in 1410 had been proclaimed emperor-elect. Desperate to secure a compromise that all the various factions in Bohemia could accept, he had invited Hus to travel to Constance and negotiate directly with the delegates. Hus had accepted. Leaving the castle in Bohemia where he had been sheltering from papal agents, he had done so under a safe conduct personally guaranteed by Sigismund. On 3 November, he had arrived in Constance. Three weeks later, he had been arrested. Put on trial, he had refused to recant. Sentenced to death as a heretic, he had been burnt at the stake. His ashes had been dumped in the Rhine.