19931993
People :
Author : Raoul Vaneigem
Text :
Rome discovered in Bohemia a source of considerable riches. Half the land belonged to the clergy, which — exploiting it in the name of the Christ — aroused a popular hatred more lively than anywhere else, if that was possible.
In 1360, the ascetic reformer Jan Milic denounced in Prague the corruption of the Church, the veritable incarnation of the Antichrist, and vainly exhorted the priests to the voluntary poverty characterized as evangelical.
Upon the death of Milic, his disciple, Matthew of Janov, pursued his reforms. He opposed to the “body of the Antichrist,” served in the form of the Host during the communion of the corrupted Church, the eucharist of the Ekklesia, the true Church of the faithful. The commensality of the bread and the wine, (*) which Janov opposed to the abstract and mechanical ritual of the clerical communion, explained the exacerbation of the eucharistic quarrels in Bohemia during the Hussite, Taborite and Adamitic wars.
(*) The communion under the two kinds [especes] was started as a symbol hostile to Catholicism, in which one communed under a single kind.
Around 1380, the reformist doctrines of Wycliffe — in favor of which worked the clever hostility of England with respect to Roman power — began to spread.
John Huss, an admirer of Wycliffe, suddenly brought to his preaching a universal turn towards critiques that were until then cantonized within the limits of nationalist claims. The prestige attached to his function as Rector of the University of Prague conferred upon his voice an import that made it echo everywhere in Europe. He proved it when John XXII summoned to Prague the emissaries charged with preaching a crusade against his personal enemy, the King of Naples, and collected the funds necessary for the enterprise through a promotional sale of indulgences. In the name of the sacred Scriptures, Huss rose up against the cynicism of the Pope and condemned an attitude unworthy of Christian teachings.
Huss was neither a heretic nor a revolutionary. He simply pushed honesty to the point of imprudence when he denounced the economic and financial politics of the Church. His presumption incited him to bet upon King Wenceslas, who was favorable to him, but whose more powerful interests would divert him from his fate.
Excommunicated and summoned to the Council of Constance in 1414, Huss would respond accompanied by his disciple, Jerome of Prague, and thanks to safe-conduct guaranteed by Emperor Sigismond. He defended his thesis in front of the Council: the Christ was the leader of the Church, not the Pope. The council decided in his favor on one point: it deposed Pope John XXII (*) for simony, murder, sodomy and fornication, complaints that, all things considered, could have been made against the majority of the pontifical sovereigns.[410]
(*) In the Twentieth Century, so as to efface the memory of a Pope who did not count among the worst, another was given the title John XXIII.
On the other hand, the ecclesiastical dignitaries did not let themselves be stripped of their lucrative apostolic functions. Led by the French Cardinal, Pierre d’Ailly, who — a convinced millenarianist — remained attentive to his immediate interests, the councilist fathers excommunicated John and Jerome, and delivered them to the pyre in 1415. Emperor Sigismond, who had counseled Huss to retract his statements, in fact hardly desired that an independent Bohemia be created, the claims for which he perceived underneath the theological arguments. This was a bad calculation, because the executions of Huss and Jerome precipitated the insurrection.
While King Wenceslas broke with the Hussites on the insistence of Pope Martin V and his brother, Emperor Sigismond, the Church of Bohemia passed to secular control and was snatched by Roman domination.
In July 1418, when Wenceslas excluded from the government of Prague the representatives of the working-class [populaire] neighborhood of Ville-Neuve, weavers, workers, tailors, brewers and peasants seized the City Hall and defenestrated the new councilors. Under the pretext of hunting the patrician families hostile to John Huss, the uprising inscribed itself properly in the tradition of communalist class-struggles.
The guilds and artisanal confederations expelled the Catholics, expropriated the monasteries and confiscated ecclesiastical riches to the profit of the Council of Prague. Very quickly, the moat between proletarian radicalism and the notables hastily reconverted to Hussism was dug. A moderate party emerged, which, close to the Catholics, nevertheless distinguished itself by communing through bread and wine, that is to say, under two kinds. Its members adopted the name Utraquists.
In 1419, the radical wing of the Hussite movement organized itself on a resolutely autonomous basis. Located on a hill near the chateau of Bechyne, a group of partisans rebaptized the place in the name that the canonical Gospel attributed to Matthew brought to eminence by proclaiming that that was where Jesus announced his return before being elevated towards heaven: Mount Tabor.
The Taborites accorded to each person the right to interpret the Scriptures. They rejected purgatory, prayers for the dead, and the cults of the saints and the relics. Like the Vaudois, they refused to take oaths and were against the death penalty. Once more there intermixed (in favor of working-class demands) the themes of voluntary poverty, an egalitarian millenarianism and, in an antagonistic manner, the thrust of the Free-Spirit and the weight of extremist fanaticism.
In 1420, the news that the fire of God was going to descend upon the towns and villages started a great exodus towards the mountains, where five Taborite cities would be erected under divine protection, because “they would not deal with the Antichrist.”[411]
The preacher Jan Capek based himself on citations from the Old Testament to massacre the sinners: “Cursed is the man who restrains his sword from spilling the blood of the enemies of the Christ. Each believer must wash his hands in blood.”[412] Certain people, such as Peter Chelcicky, faithful to the principle of pacificism, reacted to the hysteria of such remarks and denounced the ruse of Satan, who was clever to suggest to the furious that they were angels tasked with purifying the world.
In March 1420, the truce between Sigismond and the moderate Hussites gave way to a merciless war in which the personality of the Chief Taborite, Jan Zizka, imposed itself. By crushing the German and Hungarian bands, the swords of which had the benediction of Rome, Zizka haloed himself with a prophetic glory. It fell to him to instaurate the millennium and to prepare, through the kingdom of the saints, the return of the Christ to earth. The social program had hardly changed: “All men should live together like brothers, none should be subjected to another.”[413] “All the lords, all the nobles and all the knights will be executed and exterminated in the forests as outlaws.”[414] As often happened, the first victims of the program of purgation were less exterior enemies than the radical wing of the Taborites, the Pikarti, who were decimated by Zizka in the name of the holiness of morality.
The collectivism of subsistance instaurated in the Taborite communities did not bother with an organization of the production of goods, and so the Taborites were soon reduced to conducting supply raids. The despoilation of the nobility and the clergy would be succeded by the exploitation of the peasants, who found themselves in a worse situation than under the regime of the lords.
In April 1421, Zizka annihilated the libertarian communities formed by the Pikarti and the Adamites. Nevertheless, their protests of egalitarianism did not cease to spread, and fomented peasant revolts in Bourgogne and Germany, where the peasants’ war would become endemic.
In 1430, armed Taborites attacked Leipzig, Bamberg and Nuremburg. Their victories provoked uprisings against the patricians in Mayence, Constance, Weimar and Stettin. Nevertheless, the moderate wing — the Utraquists — seceded and soon passed over to the enemy. In 1434, the Taborites were battered in Lipan by the Ultraquists of Bohemia. This was the signal for a slow debacle that came to an end with the fall of Mount Tabor in 1452. The majority of those rescued from the general massacre would return to pacificism and would found the community of the Moravian Brothers. For all that, the Taborite doctrine did not cease to propagate itself and would continue to keep alive in the towns and countrysides the flame of freedom that found a decrepit world to set on fire.
* * *
Around 1460, when Bohemia had just ended a long civil war, two nobles demonstrated the point at which the expectation of the millennium remained alive. Besides the usual chronological calculations of the Parousia, Janko and Livin of Wirsberg expounded an original conception of God in his relations with the world that he created. Through his imminent return, the Son of Man prepared to save not only humanity but God himself, paralyzed since the beginning of time by the sins of mankind. It was to be delivered from his own suffering that God appealed to the Savior. The idea of a divinity who is nothing without the men whom he created thus pursued its course.
How would this new reign, destined to restore God to his power, begin? With the extermination of the armed forces of the Antichrist: the Pope, his ministers, followed by all of their followers. Only 14,000 people would survive to found the Spiritual Church. The “sword” of the crusade was formed by the old Taborites, generally regrouped into bands of brigands. After the disaster at Munster, Jan van Batenburg would not act otherwise.
Centered in Eger, the movement would even exercise its influence on the Fraticelles of Italy. The year 1467, predicted as the return of the Christ in bloody majesty, would incite the legatee of the Pope to act with determination. Janko would escape the repression; Livin would abjure so as to escape the pyre and would die in the prison of the archbishop of Ratisbonne.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Chronology :
November 30, 1992 : Chapter 36 -- Publication.
April 26, 2020 : Chapter 36 -- Added.
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