A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [313]
His most famous conflict came with the Church and ended in the canonizing of his victim. Its cause lay in the usual struggle of temporal versus ecclesiastical authority. Enmity reached a peak in 1393 when the Archbishop of Prague ordered his Vicar-General, John of Pomuk, to confirm the election of an abbot chosen by the monks over the candidate preferred by the King. Wenceslas in a fury threw the Archbishop, the Vicar-General, and two other prelates into prison; then, after releasing the Archbishop, tortured the others to extract a confession of the hierarchy’s hostile designs. Maddened by their silence, the King himself reportedly seized a torch to apply to the victims’ feet. Frightened by what he had done, he then offered to spare their lives in return for their promise on oath not to tell of their torture. When John of Pomuk proved too broken and suffering to sign the oath, Wenceslas, in a compulsion to destroy the evidence, had him bound hand and foot and thrown from a bridge into the Moldau to drown. John of Pomuk was subsequently canonized as a martyr and made the patron saint of all bridges.
The King’s troubles mounted through the 1390s. He was drunk a great part of the time but not so incapacitated as to fail to aggrandize his Bohemian possessions at the expense of the great nobles. In consequence, he succeeded in uniting them in antagonism for long enough to enable them finally to depose him as Emperor in 1400, although he remained King of Bohemia.
Wenceslas’ difficulties were not merely personal or temperamental. They were an epitome of his century. He too was lost in the dark wood of his time. Like Jean II of France, he was born to a task of government too heavy for him in an age when too much was going wrong. Like government, the Church in his country was failing in its task and giving rise to the strongest movement for reform in Europe. Taking its doctrine from Wyclif and named for Jan Hus, who was to be burned as a heretic in 1415, the Hussite rising opened the way to the Reformation a hundred years later. It also finished off Wenceslas by inducing an apoplectic fit of which he died in 1419.
In France the feverish atmosphere showed itself in 1389 when an impassioned controversy over the immaculate conception of the Virgin caused Dominican monks to be accused, like the Jews in the plague, of poisoning the rivers if not the wells. It happened that a Dominican, Jean de Montson, had propagated the view that the Virgin was conceived in original sin. He was condemned by the University of Paris, which upheld the opposite, Franciscan, view of her immaculate conception. When Montson appealed to Pope Clement, d’Ailly and Gerson went to Avignon to demand official approval of their opinion. Clement was in a dilemma. Montson’s view was that of previous orthodoxy approved by Thomas Aquinas. If Clement denounced it, his own orthodoxy would be challenged by his rival in Rome. If he upheld it, he would be contradicting the University and arousing popular wrath in France. In the heat of this situation, angry threats pursued the Dominicans. Afraid for his life, Montson went over to Rome, leaving Clement free to declare for Immaculate Conception.
While devotion to the Virgin could still arouse such feeling, disbelief and irreverence were common at the end of the century, if the complaints of clerics and preachers reflect the true case. Scolding the laity was the cleric’s normal occupation, but now the volume was rising. Many folk “believe in naught higher than the roof of their house,” lamented the future saint Bernardino of Siena. His fellow monk Walsingham reported that certain barons of England believe “that there is no God, and deny the sacrament of the altar and resurrection after death, and consider that as is the death of a beast of burden, so is the end of man himself.” Alongside evidence of failing faith may be put the unfailing succession