anything more than an underground sect, though influential among the middle and lower strata of society. Infiltration of the Church by Lollard priests was stopped and the severe penalties laid down in the statute De haeretico comburendo ( 1401) gave England the equivalent of continental procedures against heresy, although the English Church and secular government, rather than the papacy or the Dominicans, exercised firm control over them. In Bohemia, the beliefs held by Jan Hus, scholar and preacher, were subsumed in a movement of more far-reaching proportions. Bohemian opposition to the papacy had grown since Charles IV's alliance with the popes at Avignon in pursuit of his political schemes and objectives. Bohemia was brought more fully into the western Church through the use of Czech benefices to reward German ecclesiastics. This could only fan the flames of Bohemian national sentiment which, when allied to religious fervour kindled by evangelical preaching at the Bethlehem Chapel of Prague, broke out in extreme form after Hus's condemnation and execution at the Council of Constance ( 1415). The Hussite revolt was many things--a political protest against the Emperor Sigismund, a doctrinal statement of the laity's right to take communion in both kinds, and a nationalistic assault on German immigrants in both Church and State. It threw central Europe into confusion and created the only alternative Church since the Cathars, out of communion with Rome, which northern Europe was to know before the sixteenth-century Reformation.
The challenge flung by the Hussites in the face of the Roman Church extended beyond the borders of Bohemia. A mass of organized peasant and town levies, officered by Bohemian nobles and gentry such as the knight John Žižka, were unleashed into territories held by the Emperor Sigismund and the German princes. Attacks on Austria and Franconia were launched by the Hussite armies, plundering and pillaging as they went, and the crusading forces of Catholic Christendom under German nobles met defeat at the hands of this common soldiery, armed with hand-guns as well as pikes and crossbows in their war-wagons. Only with the defeat of the Taborite extremists, who had formed themselves into a communistic
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