Hussite

Hussite, any of the followers of the Bohemian religious reformer Jan Hus, who was condemned by the Council of Constance (1414–18) and burned at the stake. After his death in 1415 many Bohemian knights and nobles published a formal protest and offered protection to those who were persecuted for their faith. The movement’s chief supporters were Jakoubek of Stříbro (died 1429), Hus’s successor as preacher at the Bethlehem chapel in Prague; Václav Koranda, leader of the Taborites (extreme Hussites named for Tábor, their stronghold, south of Prague); and Jan Želivský, who organized the extreme reform party in Prague.

The Hussites broke with Rome in using a Czech liturgy and in administering Holy Communion to the laity under the forms of both bread and wine. (The doctrine supporting this was called Utraquism and the more moderate Hussites were called Utraquists.)

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Under King Wenceslas (Václav) IV of Bohemia, the movement spread widely. In 1419, however, he died and was succeeded by a bitter enemy of the Hussites, his half brother Sigismund, king of the Romans and of Hungary. The Hussites would have acknowledged Sigismund had he accepted the Four Articles of Prague that Jakoubek had formulated: (1) freedom of preaching; (2) communion in both kinds; (3) poverty of the clergy and expropriation of church property; (4) punishment of notorious sinners. In 1420, however, Sigismund, who had failed to get possession of Prague, published a bull of Pope Martin V proclaiming a crusade against the Hussites. The Hussite union, which included the municipalities of Prague and other cities and the chief military power of Bohemia, deposed Sigismund and repelled two crusading attacks against Prague. Various crusades and battles against the Hussites failed for the next several years. In 1427 the Hussites, led by Prokop Holý, began a more revolutionary, rather than defensive, political program. Pope Martin V organized another crusade against them but did not live to see it decisively beaten by the Hussites in 1431.

Peace negotiations began in 1431, when the Council of Basel of the Roman Catholic Church agreed to negotiate with the Hussites on an equal basis, which Pope Martin V had refused to do. A Hussite delegation spent three months in Basel in 1433 discussing the Four Articles of Prague. The Council then sent a mission to Prague, which granted communion in both kinds to the Hussites. This grant split the Hussites, since the Utraquists were willing to make peace on these terms, but the Taborites were not. Utraquists and Catholics then joined forces to defeat the Taborites in a battle at Lipany in 1434, which ended the Taborites’ influence.

The Utraquist Hussites then resumed peace negotiations, and in July 1436 they obtained a peace treaty (the Compact of Iglau) that ensured all the principal gains of the war: communion in both kinds, the expropriation of church lands (which broke the economic power of the Roman Catholic Church in Bohemia), and an independent Bohemian Catholic church under Jan Rokycana as its elected archbishop. Although association with the Roman Catholic Church continued, the church of the Utraquist Hussites survived schisms and periodic persecutions until c. 1620, when it was finally absorbed by the Roman Catholics.

In the mid-15th century the Unitas Fratrum (Unity of Brethren) movement began in Bohemia among some of the Hussites, and it established its own independent organization in 1467. During the Reformation, the Unitas Fratrum was in contact with Lutheran and Reformed Protestants. Eventually, however, Bohemian and Moravian Protestantism was suppressed, and the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation was victorious after 1620, when the Protestant barons were defeated at the Battle of the White Mountain during the Thirty Years’ War.

Remnants of the Unitas Fratrum remained, however, and in 1722 a group of them fled Moravia and settled on the estate of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf in Saxony. A number of exiles from Moravia and Bohemia followed, and they formed the community of Herrnhut, where they were organized as the Moravian Church. There is also some continuity with 20th-century Czech Protestantism.