Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History. Hugh Williams

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the Balkans.

       The European papacy saw itself as all-powerful.

      The European papacy of the Middle Ages saw itself as all powerful. In 1208, Pope Innocent III issued an interdict against England’s King John because the King had refused to accept his nomination for Archbishop of Canterbury. For a Godfearing people, an interdict was a serious imposition. It prevented them from observing everyday religious rites associated with such things as baptisms and funerals without which they were unprotected from salvation. In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII issued a bull entitled ‘Unam sanctum’ – a declaration of supreme Church power. It said that there was no salvation outside the Church and that those who resisted the Pope were resisting the law of God. Boniface felt the need to reassert the authority of his office because the French King, Philip IV, had begun to raid the Church for taxation and undermine the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts. The conflict between King and Pope resulted in Boniface’s capture and detention. Six years after he died, in 1303, the papacy moved from Rome to France, ending up in Avignon where it would remain for more than seventy years. Although housed in papal territory – Avignon was not part of France – the papacy inevitably fell under French influence. All the popes who took office during the period of the Avignon papacy were French.

       Power Corrupts

      One of the most famous aphorisms in the whole of historical writing was composed directly as a result of a discussion about the medieval papacy. In the 1880s the cleric and scholar, Mandell Creighton, later a Bishop of London, published a History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation. Creighton was lenient in his judgements of the policies and actions of the medieval Catholic Church. Describing the trial of Jan Hus, for instance, he acknowledged that Hus ‘had first deliberately asserted the rights of the individual conscience against ecclesiastical authority’, but added that it was ‘useless to criticise particular points in his trial. The Council was anxious for his submission and gave him every opportunity to make it.’ This careful, temporising approach irritated another scholar of the age, Lord Acton. In a famous letter to Creighton he told him that he could not accept the idea that popes and kings should not be judged like other men. He went on: ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.’ Acton believed that what he called ‘the inflexible integrity of the moral code’ was essential to the study of history. If debased history ‘ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the wanderer, the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of the earth, and religion itself, tend constantly to depress’.

      Political instability began to undermine the papacy. The Avignon court lived well: to many people it appeared to prefer the luxurious trappings of an earthly life to the spiritual requirements of religious devotion. A splendid new palace was built, the number of wealthy officials needed to administer papal business grew and the Church became richer as it sought, not only to establish its presence in its new home, but to look after the territories and possessions it had left behind in Italy. One of the Avignon popes, Clement VI, believed that largesse increased papal prestige. ‘No one ought to retire discontented from the presence of a prince,’ he said. ‘My predecessors did not know how to be popes.’ Such comfortable grandeur might have reassured the papal hierarchy, but it worried many of its subjects. Franciscan friars compared Avignon to the captivity of the Israelites in Babylon. Matters worsened when in 1378 Pope Gregory XI decided to return to Rome. After his death, the French cardinals refused to accept his successor, the first Italian pope since the exodus to Avignon, and moved back to France where they elected an alternative pontiff, called the Antipope. For nearly forty years the Church was divided by the Western Schism. The rulers of Europe took sides, supporting either the popes elected by Rome, or those chosen by Avignon. It was against the background of this confused, highly political situation that Jan Hus began to question the behaviour of the Church.

      Jan Hus was born in southern Bohemia. In 1398 he became a professor at the University of Prague where he was ordained and began to teach theology. His lectures and sermons in favour of clerical reform gathered widespread support, partly because many members of his audience were looking for release from the domination of Vienna and the German sovereignty of the Holy Roman Empire. Earlier in the fourteenth century, other Bohemian priests had begun to call for change. The Czech language and the individuality of the Czech people came together to form a nationalist movement that found expression in the language of its priests. Hus was influenced by the English cleric, John Wyclif, who had begun to identify a new approach to organised religion. Both men went back to the Scriptures, arguing that the Church should not own property or pursue wealth. The observation of religion should be founded on the teachings of its Christian founders, nothing else. The Church was a body of elected members predestined to enjoy salvation: Christ, not the Pope, was their leader. Hus’s views alarmed the Church authorities. In 1411 he was excommunicated and a year later forced to go into hiding where he wrote his most famous work, De Ecclesia. ‘The opinion of no man,’ he said, ‘whatever his authority may be – and consequently the opinion of no pope – is to be held if it plainly contains falsehood or error.’

       Hus’s death stands as a uniquely important event in the whole history of man’s desire to be free.

      In 1414 the Holy Roman Emperor, Sigismund, called a council in the German city of Constance overlooking the Bodensee. His main concern was to heal the schism that had divided the Church since Gregory XI had returned to Rome from Avignon. Aware that the views of John Hus had found favour with many of his subjects in Bohemia, he invited Hus to attend the gathering in order to explain his views. He promised him safe passage and Hus, against the advice of some of his closest supporters, decided to accept. Instead of participating in the theological debate he had expected he was arrested and tried for heresy. His accusers urged him to recant but Hus refused, arguing that the charges against him were inaccurate. ‘I stand at the judgement seat of Christ, to whom I have appealed,’ he told them, ‘knowing that He will judge every man, not according to false or erroneous witness, but according to the truth and each one’s deserts.’ In July 1415 he was removed from the priesthood and burned at the stake. He died singing hymns.

      Hus, caught up in the political turmoil of the schism that had divided the papacy at the end of the fourteenth century, found that those who had supported him deserted him in his hour of greatest need. In England, John Wyclif was luckier. His strongest supporter was John of Gaunt, the most powerful prince in the land who, although not always agreeing with some of Wyclif’s views, allowed him to die in peace in 1384 in the Leicestershire village of Lutterworth to which he had retired. It was not until after his death, at the Council of Constance more than thirty years later, that Wyclif’s works were condemned as heretical.

      While Wyclif was allowed to die quietly, his greatest apostle, Jan Hus, was burned. However the flames of change that Hus had set alight began a movement that was to change the Roman Catholic Church forever. In Bohemia his death was met with anger and rebellion. Between 1420 and 1436, the forces of the Hussites repelled the armies of the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor that were sent to subdue them. Inspired by Jan’s teachings and united by a sense of Czech nationhood, the Hussites fought successfully against the crusades launched against them by an enraged Catholic Church. The lessons that Jan Hus had taught his people did not die. He – and Wyclif too – were the forerunners of the Reformation that in the century that followed would finally destroy the universal power of the papacy and set Europe and the world on a new course.

       Hus’s decision to die for his beliefs towers over the time in which it took place, a permanent reminder of man’s desire for liberty.

      The death of Jan Hus stands as a uniquely important event not only in Czech history but in the whole history of man’s desire to be free. The Czech people have been some of the most oppressed in the history of Europe. Suppressed by the Habsburg monarchy of Austria-Hungary in what one writer called a ‘truceless warfare against the soul of a people’, they enjoyed a brief moment of independence СКАЧАТЬ