Schism: The Utraquists

The red "Hussite core areas" is roughly the boundaries of the Czech-speaking portion of Bohemia. Bohemia was then ruled by the Luxemburg dynasty, which were German speakers.

The Utraquists were the first succesful schism of the Roman Catholic Church, and they occured in the Kingdom of Bohemia1 , modern Czechoslovakia, then a very mixed linguistic area2 . The new religion, which, like John Wycliff's ideas before and Martin Luther's after, was expressed in the vernacular, and was popular among all classes of Czech speaking people. This all occurred during the Avignon Schism which was dividing the Roman Catholic world by allegiance to two different Popes.

John Hus and Jerome of Prague, in part inspired by the work of Wycliff, and offended by the sale of indulgences and the common ignorance of the Bible by local priests, began a movement which exists to this day, often called Hussites or Utraquists3 . This movement occured in Bohemia, the modern day Czech republic, a multi-language region (Czech is Slavic) with centuries long associations with the German speaking Holy Roman Empire. "Hus's movement became an assertion of Czech identity against German-speakers in the Bohemian Church and commonwealth, and unlike Lollardy, it remained supported in all sections of society from the university to the village" 4 "Only a few German-speaking areas and a few royal free cities within the Bohemian kingdom retained their papal loyalty."5 . Hus and his movement did not create a Czech version of the Bible until the late 1500s, but Hus himself, burned at the stake by order of the Papacy in 1415, was very interested in language, writing De orthographica Bohemica , a book on how to correctly write the Czech language. In this case, the schism occured in Slavic speaking areas and not in the German ones.

Bohemia, later part of the Holy Roman Empire, got its Christianity from Byzantium through Constantine(Cyril) and Methodius, the Apostles of the Slavs, in the late 800s.6 Adjactent to German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire, and earlier having paid tribute to Charlemagne (early 800s), they were more closely associated with west by 1100, when Henry IV crowned Wratislaw II "King for life".7 8 Jon Hus and Jerome of Prague were burnt for heresy.

Footnotes1. "A generation later, George of Podiebrad, the first non-Catholic King in Western Europe [ed: since???], established the religion of Hus through Bohemia"
"Fifty years later the German Reformation burst upon Europe and brought Lutheranism, followed by Calvinism, into Bohemia"
"The truth was that Bohemia in the later sixteenth century was in the most dismal confusion. While Utraqists, Lutherans and Calvinists fought among themselves for privileges, the Hapsburg kings re-established Catholicism as the official relgion, granting the other three toleration only. Meanwhile a decline had begun; the old values based on land died hard in Bohemia, where there were no less than fourteen hundred noble families dividing a small country between them and each asserting social distinctions which had to be wastefully maintained. The greater number of these families were Lutheran, but fear of the fanatical Calvinist minority made them cling for safety to the Hapsburg government, Catholic though it was. In addition, the nobility were on equally bad terms with the burghers and the peasants"9 back

2. These quotes refer to Bohemia 200 years later: "German and Polish were spoken in Silesia, German and Wendish is Lusatia, German and Czech in Bohemia, Slovak in Moravia"
"The Czechs were divided from the Germans by language, and from the Slavs by religion and character;"
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7. "[W]hen they were later merged in the Catholic Church they maintained their native speech and services and adopted for their patron not one of the famous saints of Christendom but their own King Wenceslas, whose sanctity rested on scarcely better authority than popular affection."11 back