The Black Death, the Great Schism and Hus

The Black Death and the killing of the Jews

In the autumn of 1347 Genoese ships returning from the Black Sea brought a plague to Sicily. In 1348 the Black Death spread through Italy, France and England, and by about 1351 it had reached almost every part of Europe. The same sickness swept the cities of the East, Constantinople and Cairo among them. Historians estimate that between a third and a half of Europe's people died, with great differences from place to place. To those who lived through it the psalm was close at hand, and hard:

You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the calamity that destroys at noon. Though a thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand, no harm will come near you.

Psalm 91:5-7

Wesley says that the pestilence walks in darkness "Invisibly, so that we can neither foresee nor prevent it" Wesley. Many priests and friars who brought the sacraments to the dying died with them; others fled. In 1348 and 1349 bands of flagellants went from town to town, whipping themselves in public to turn away the wrath of God. Pope Clement VI forbade these bands, which the church could no longer control, in 1349.

Fear looked for someone to blame. Rumour said that Jews had poisoned the wells, and confessions extracted under torture were taken as proof. In 1348 and 1349 Jewish communities in many towns, above all in the German lands, among them Basel, Strasbourg and Mainz, were burned or driven out.

At Avignon, Clement VI issued bulls in July and September 1348 that called the charge a lie, pointing out that Jews were dying of the same sickness and that it raged where no Jews lived, and threatened to excommunicate anyone who killed or robbed them Clement VI, Bulls in defence of the Jews. Yet in many towns the killing went on. On the Day of Pardon in March 2000 the Catholic Church confessed the sins Christians had committed against the Jews and asked forgiveness Memory and Reconciliation.

Two popes, then three

The papacy, which had lived at Avignon since 1309, returned to Rome in 1377 (see the Theology course's Late medieval crisis and the forerunners of reform). The next year, 1378, with the Roman crowd demanding an Italian pope, the cardinals elected Urban VI. A few months later most of the same cardinals declared that they had voted in fear and the election was void, and chose Clement VII, who went back to Avignon.

France, Scotland and Naples followed Avignon; England, most of the German lands, Hungary and Poland followed Rome. Holy people such as Catherine of Siena took one side or the other, and ordinary believers could not tell which pope was the true one. In 1409 the council of Pisa deposed both and elected a new pope, but neither gave way, and there were three.

The schism was ended by the council of Constance (1414–1418), called at the urging of Sigismund, king of Germany and later emperor. It deposed John XXIII of the Pisan line and Benedict XIII of Avignon, received the resignation of Gregory XII of the Roman line, and in 1417 elected Martin V. The Catholic Church counts the Roman line as the lawful popes, which is why Angelo Roncalli, elected in 1958, could take the name John XXIII again.

Jan Hus, the preacher of Prague

Before this, John Wycliffe of Oxford (died 1384) had set Scripture above the pope's authority, and in the 1380s his followers made the first complete Bible in English, from the Latin; his teaching is in Late medieval crisis and the forerunners of reform. His books travelled as far as Prague in Bohemia.

Jan Hus (died 1415) was a master of the university of Prague, and from 1402 he preached in Czech at the Bethlehem Chapel, rebuking the greed of the clergy. In 1412, when indulgences were sold in Prague to pay for a war of John XXIII, the Pisan pope, Hus opposed them openly. Excommunicated, with the city laid under an interdict, he left Prague to preach in the countryside of southern Bohemia, and there in 1413 wrote On the Church: Christ alone is the head of the church, and the church is the company of the elect. He tried to live by Paul's charge to Timothy:

Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and encourage with every form of patient instruction. … But you, be sober in all things, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.

2 Timothy 4:2-5

In 1414 Hus went to Constance with a safe-conduct from Sigismund, but within weeks of arriving in November he was imprisoned. Sigismund protested at first, then gave way to the council's claim that the trial of a man accused of heresy was not bound by a safe-conduct. At his hearings in June 1415 Hus said he would recant if he were shown his errors from Scripture, but that he could not recant articles he had never taught. His way was the apostles' answer: "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29).

On 6 July he was stripped of his priesthood and burned outside the city, and his ashes were thrown into the Rhine. The next year his friend Jerome of Prague was burned at Constance too.

After Hus, 1453, and today

Bohemia rose. The Hussites gave the cup to lay people at the Lord's Supper, and the chalice became their sign. From 1420 the popes and Sigismund sent crusade after crusade against them, defeated again and again by Hussite armies led by Jan Žižka and others; the Hussites too burned monasteries and killed. In 1436 an agreement with the council of Basel allowed the cup to the faithful of Bohemia.

In 1457, at Kunvald, followers of Petr Chelčický, who taught that Christians must not take up the sword, formed the Unity of the Brethren. Their heirs, scattered by persecution, gathered again at Herrnhut in 1722; they are the Moravian Brethren whom John Wesley later met (see The Great Awakening and the Methodists).

On 29 May 1453 the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II took Constantinople. Constantine XI, the last emperor, died in the fighting, and Hagia Sophia became a mosque. The union of East and West agreed at the council of Florence in 1439 had brought little help, and most Eastern Orthodox believers had refused it (see 1054: East and West divided). The Orthodox remember the day with deep sorrow; under a new patriarch appointed by the sultan, they kept their faith under Muslim rule.

These years show how fear turns people against their neighbours, how deeply the church can be divided, and how dearly one man paid for keeping his conscience under the word. On Paul's charge Matthew Henry writes, "Those who love souls must be ever watchful, must venture and bear all the painful effects of their faithfulness, and take all opportunities of making known the pure gospel" Matthew Henry. In December 1999 Pope John Paul II told scholars gathered in Rome that he deeply regretted the cruelty of Hus's death and the divisions it left in Bohemia John Paul II, Address to an international symposium on Jan Hus. A century after Constance, at Leipzig, Martin Luther would say that some of Hus's teachings were truly Christian; the next lesson, Wittenberg, 1517, tells that story.

Practice