settlement on Mount Tabor, by the moderate Utraquist nobility in 1434 was the Hussite threat lifted. But the remnants of Hussite armies, ready to be hired by anyone in search of manpower, were scattered over central Europe and hardly contributed to its stability. Pope Martin V had viewed the spectacle of Bohemian revolt with considerable anxiety, preaching a crusade against the heretics in 1427, to which other western kingdoms and principalities were invited to contribute both men and money. England was particularly solicited by the papacy, for it had been the root, the pope wrote, of the pernicious heresy first planted by John Wycliffe and which had spread to infect the kingdom of Bohemia. But the monarchies of the west had other preoccupations and calls on their military and financial resources and a proposed English crusading army was diverted to the siege of Orléans in 1428. Popes might preach the crusade but, as was clear after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the concerns of western rulers lay elsewhere. Dynasticism and the defence or acquisition of territory, rather than crusading expeditions against Bohemian heretics or Turkish infidels, absorbed the diplomatic, military, and financial resources of the national monarchies and princely states of northern Europe.

Besides the more dramatic outbreaks of religious dissent, less spectacular forces were at work within the Church. The search for a more deeply personal relationship with God, mediated through the saints, was a common phenomenon in the later Middle Ages. Heretics, while seeking such a relationship, erred in the eyes of the Church because too often the clergy were eliminated or their significance greatly reduced as sacramental mediators between man and God. It was through the administration of the sacraments--of baptism, confession, absolution, and the Eucharist or mass--by ordained priests that the individual and sinful layman was brought into a proper relationship with Christ's redemptive power. The reconciliation of tensions between the formal offices of the Church, especially the mass, and the desires and promptings of individual conscience and devotional fervour was not an easy task. But between the extremes of dogmatic orthodoxy and heretical error

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