The letters of John Hus/"The Doctor of Biberach"; Shrewd Sale of Horses; Lodgings at Constance; The Council begins; etc.

by Jan Hus

From Nuremberg the direct road to Constance lay through Ulm, Biberach, and Ravensburg to the Lake. One incident of the journey has been preserved for us by Mladenowic. On the occasion of Hus disputing with certain persons in the little Suabian town of Biberach—at that time a free city of the empire,—John of Chlum argued so strenuously ‘with the priests and other men of culture on obedience due to the Pope, excommunication, and other matters, that the rumour spread through the whole town that he was a doctor of theology’; “Doctor Biberach,” as

Hus afterwards jestingly calls him in his Letters (see p. 159, n. 4).

On reaching the Lake, Hus and his escort would finish the journey by boat. With considerable shrewdness they decided not to take their horses with them to Constance, but to send them back for sale to Ravensburg. On arriving at Constance they discovered the wisdom of the step. The city of the Council, as Ulrich v. Reichental tells us in his famous Diary, cannot at this time have had fewer than twenty to thirty thousand horses in it. Reichental’s special duty, in fact, was to provide adequate stabling.

Hus entered Constance on Saturday, November 3, ‘riding through a vast crowd.’ There he lodged with ‘a certain widow Faithful in the street of St. Paul,’ who kept a bakery with the sign of the White Pigeon close by the Schnetzthor, or road to St. Gallen. From this house—still visible to the tourist—Hus never stirred until his arrest, as we learn on the direct testimony of Chlum.

The ‘vast crowd’ of which Hus writes was probably not due to curiosity only concerning the Reformer, but, as we learn from the Journal of Cardinal Fillastre, to a different cause. ‘On Sunday, October 28, the Lord Pope entered Constance in state, and took up his quarters in the Bishop’s palace. It was afterwards arranged that the Council should be opened with a procession and high mass on Saturday, November 3’—the very day on which Hus and his friends rode into the city. But on that Saturday, continues Fillastre, ‘Pope, cardinals, and all the prelates and clergy were gathered together in the palace, vestments donned, and the procession arranged. This was ready to start—in fact, the Pope had come out of his room—when illness seized him. He was obliged to go back, doff his vestments, and lie down on his bed.’ Two days later John had recovered, and opened the Council.^[1]

Three letters of Hus written from widow Faithful’s have been preserved for us, as well as a letter from John Cardinalis, all of them addressed to the friends in Prague. The gossip they retail on the whole turned out correct. But Benedict never intended to come to the Council, though he sent envoys, accredited to Sigismund, who arrived in Constance on January 8, and caused much stir by their claim to wear red hats. The Dukes of Brabant and Berg had succeeded by their threats in preventing Sigismund’s early coronation, and in driving him back in the early autumn from Coblenz to Heidelberg and Nuremberg. Their opposition had now been overcome, and on Sunday, November 4, Sigismund arrived in Aachen, and was crowned on the 8th. He fulfilled Hus’s guess by entering Constance at 2 a.m. on Christmas Day. As regards the number of Parisians at the Council, Hus was mistaken. On December 6 John wrote to expostulate with the French ecclesiastics because they had not yet arrived. In reality, the Paris deputation, with Gerson at the head, did not reach Constance until February 18 or 26—the exact date is somewhat doubtful, probably the latter (Finke, Forschungen, 259). The number of cardinals in Constance at this time was but fifteen out of twenty-nine. As John Cardinalis points out (p. 163), the outlook at Constance did not at first point to a large attendance. It was not until after the arrival of Sigismund that the princes of Europe sent their embassies.

With the ‘seller of indulgences,’ Michael Tiem, now Dean of Passau, we have met before (p. 68). The negotiations with John to which Hus and Cardinalis refer were characteristic of the Pope. John was too uncertain of the future to make up his mind, as yet, to a breach with Sigismund, while his future conduct shows that he was not sorry to find a subject which might possibly divert attention from himself, and embroil Sigismund in a conflict with the cardinals. So when, on the Sunday after their arrival, ‘Chlum and Lacembok waited on the Pope, informing him that they had brought Hus to Constance under the safe-conduct of Sigismund, and begging that the Pope would not allow violence to be done to him, the Pope replied that even if Hus had killed his own brother he should be safe’ (Mladenowic’s Relatio in Doc. 246).

That same night Hus wrote the following letter to his friends in Bohemia:—

 

1. See Fillastre in Finke, Forschungen des Kon. Konzils, p. 163.