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This chapter examines the role of the Council of Constance in addressing not only the threat posed at both ends of Europe by the Wycliffite and Hussite heresies, but also the pent-up demand for reform in the Roman Catholic Church that had been mounting in urgency for at least a century and a half. Constance made a more effective response to the demand for church-wide reform than historians in the past were usually willing to concede. In order to comprehend the formidable nature of the challenges the council was to confront, this chapter looks at the fundamental and long-term disabilities under which the medieval Church had persistently laboured, as well as the immediate, near-term circumstances precipitating the crisis that finally overtook it in the late 14th century.

The Council of Constance was the largest and most magnificent of all medieval assemblies. Jerome was brought to formal trial here before all of Christendom where he was tried according to inquisitorial procedure and religious dissent was countered by ecclesiastical authority. The chapter discusses the problem of sources, the influence of the Jan Hus trial, the nature of inquisitorial procedure, Jerome’s initial recantation, and his persistent demands for a public hearing. Issues of theology, reform, heresy, and politics form a necessary context for understanding the council and the trials of religious dissenters. Jerome’s Shield of Faith, the objectionable aspects of Wyclif’s thought and the role of Gerson are crucial elements.

This chapter explores one particular instance of radical doctrinal discontinuity and its implications for the ultimate locus of authority in the Catholic Church: the profound difference between the position affirmed by the general councils of Constance (1414–1418) and Basel (1431–1449) concerning the ultimate locus of ecclesiastical authority in the universal church and that staked out in 1870 by Vatican I in its twin definitions of papal jurisdictional primacy and papal infallibility, both of which were unambiguously reaffirmed by Vatican II. It also considers the disputed papal election of 1378 and the unfolding of events at the Council of Constance on the origins, nature, and destiny of the conciliar theory. Finally, it examines ideological repression or ecclesiological self-censorship in the wake of Vatican I and how the lessons of Constance have been reintroduced into the Catholic ecclesial consciousness.

Throughout the 1530s, German Protestant authors carried out a multimedia assault against the argument that a universal church council to be assembled at Mantua could mediate the religious schism in the Holy Roman Empire. Jan Hus stood at the middle of this campaign, as his trial and execution at the Council of Constance was marshaled as evidence of past councils’ failings. The leading Lutheran author to make this case was Johannes Agricola, a schoolmaster and preacher whose polemical efforts to broadcast the story of Hus’s death to the German public included the first Lutheran history play: the Tragedy of Jan Hus. And it was in this drama, along with editions of Hus’s prison correspondence that proliferated at this time, that cast the Bohemian preacher not only as a witness to church councils’ subversion by the Antichrist, but also as a prophet of the Lutheran reformation.

The Inquisition and its connection to Jewish persecution figured prominently in the 1835 French grand opera La Juive by Eugène Scribe and Fromental Halévy. The opera's setting shifted from Goa, the capital of Portuguese India, where the Inquisition had been established in 1560, to Constance (Konstanz), the German city where the Council of Constance of 1414–1418 was held. Despite this change, La Juive continued to allude to the Portuguese (or Spanish) Inquisition in its metaphorical proximity to the Council and as a symbol of the despotism of the ancien régime with which the Catholic Church was closely associated. This chapter examines the significance of the opera's allusion to Inquisition and its symbolic relationship to the Council of Constance, as well as its depiction of the oppression of Jews on the stage in the early July Monarchy in France during the 1830s.

This chapter is a survey of the salient factors that brought Jerome to international prominence, caused sustained conflict in the religious and social worlds of the later Middle Ages, and revealed Prague as a hotbed of intellectual dissent. Of significance are the ideas of John Wyclif which played a key role in the intellectual development of a movement for reform in Prague at the turn of the fifteenth century, especially in the philosophical debates at Charles University. A basis for comparison with Jean Gerson is established as this becomes a crucial key for understanding the challenges Jerome presented to the church. While Jan Hus has been often studied in this connection, Jerome has been overlooked. His activities help to explain the commitment of the Council of Constance to addressing the problem of heresy. Also of importance are Jerome’s numerous travels and many university debates.

The problem of relations between Christian and non-Christian countries was the subject of a protracted public controversy at the Council of Constance (1414–18), when the conflict between the Kingdom of Poland and the Teutonic Order (Ordo Cruciferorum) over Poland’s relations with the pagan communities of Lithuania came up for consideration. This conflict would not by itself justify the special attention of historians of the law of nations were it not for the defence of Polish–Lithuanian co-operation by a prominent Polish theologian and lawyer, Paulus Vladimiri, who may be considered one of the forerunners of a progressive doctrine on the fundamental legal issue of the coexistence of the Christian world with non-Christian countries. This chapter focuses on the work of Vladimiri, which anticipates significant doctrinal developments in the law of nations (particularly connected with European–Asian relations).

This chapter begins with an account of the calendar-reform initiative spearheaded in 1411–17 by Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly at the Councils of Rome and Constance, followed by an in-depth look at the repeated efforts towards a new calendrical legislation made at the Council of Basel in the years 1434–40, which saw the matter debated by a specially created commission or task force. The final part continues the story into the second half of the fifteenth century, highlighting in particular the role of print technology in the dissemination of calendrical and astronomical knowledge. Special attention is given to the activities of the astronomer Johannes Regiomontanus, whose premature death in 1476 prevented him from assisting Pope Sixtus IV in preparing a reform of the ecclesiastical calendar.

The second case study shows how associative political culture shaped Upper Germany during the reign of King/Emperor Sigismund (r. 1410/11–37). What marked out these decades from earlier and later cycles of alliance-making, feuding, and mediation was the unusually prominent role played by the monarch himself, who was present in the southern Empire for most of the 1410s and 1430s. Sigismund judiciously cultivated relationships with key princely allies and tried to encourage leagues of towns and knightly societies to coalesce into peace-keeping coalitions that he could direct. The monarch proved the value of harnessing associative dynamics to his agenda in a war against his rival Duke Friedrich IV of Austria-Tyrol, who was overwhelmed and dispossessed by a network of Upper Rhenish and Swabian alliances which then turned against each other. Imperial efforts against the Hussites in the 1420s also depended upon associative coalitions, including a grand alliance of the prince-electors.

This chapter recounts the defence of the union by Polish and Lithuanian delegates at the Council of Constance against attacks from the Teutonic Knights. It considers Jagiełło’s relationship with the king of the Romans, Sigismund of Luxembourg. It stresses the success of the Polish-Lithuanian tactics, based on the intellectual achievements of the newly refounded University of Cracow. It relates the dispute between Poland-Lithuania and the Teutonic Order over Samogitia and the politics of conversion, and analyses the arguments of Paulus Vladimiri concerning the rights of pagans, and their often-overlooked significance for the process of union. The chapter concludes by considering the impact of Constance upon the international position of the union state.