II. Social Conditions in Bohemia before the Hussite Wars

With the exception of England, perhaps, no country exhibited so rapid an economic development during the fourteenth century as Bohemia. In England this was specially favoured by the wool trade, and by successful predatory incursions into France; in Bohemia by its silver mines, in which that of Kuttenberg ranked foremast. Opened up in 1237, it continued until into the fifteenth century to be by far the richest silver mine of Europe, its annual yield, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, amounting to about 100,000 marks of silver (a mark = ½ lb.).

The rapid development of Bohemia’s power at that time, and the splendour of the reigns of Ottacar II (1253-1278) and Charles I (Charles IV of Germany, 1346-1378) depended chiefly on those mines. Moreover, though they were supported by the Pope, both the latter king and his son Wenzel owed their succession to the imperial throne of Germany principally to the Kuttenberg mines, which supplied them with the means necessary for the purchase of electoral votes – a method often resorted to at that period.

Thanks to Kuttenberg’s capacity of production, trade and industry, as well as the arts and sciences, flourished in Bohemia, and above all in Prague, which at that period had become “golden Prague”, covered with splendid buildings and the seat of the first University of the German Empire (founded 1348). Nor did the Church go empty-handed. Its greed great, its scent keen; it knew where there was anything to get and moreover how to get it. Hence monasteries and churches in Bohemia were exceptionally wealthy, especially under Charles IV.

Æneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope Pius II, who was well informed concerning the possessions of the Church, writes in his History of the Bohemians: “I believe that in our age there was in all Europe no country in which so many and such magnificent and richly adorned places of worship were to be found as in Bohemia. The churches were heaven inspiring; ... their high altars loaded with gold and silver, enclosed the relics of the saints; the priestly vestments richly ornamented and embroidered with pearls, and the vessels of the most costly description; ... it was astonishing not only in the cities and market-towns, but even in the villages.”

But the exceptional opulence of the Church in Bohemia only served to increase its spoliation by the Pope.

Next to the Church and the King and his courtiers, the shareholders of the Kuttenberg mines derived the greatest profits from land. In the fourteenth century these shareholders were no longer simple mine labourers, but merchants of Prague and Kuttenberg, and capitalists who employed labour.

It was natural that the development of manufacture and trade should give rise to the same phenomena in Bohemia as elsewhere. Together with the great antagonism between the papal Church and the bulk of the population, there existed an antagonism between traders and consumers, between masters and journeymen) between capitalists and those engaged in house industries; while that between the large landed proprietors and small tenants was continually becoming more acute. It was not inconsistent with this antagonism that the universal tendency of that period should be towards raising the peasantry from serfdom by commuting labour-rents into money-rents, which existed even in Bohemia.

This phenomenon demands a more detailed examination. To make it comprehensible we must glance at the change in the condition of the peasantry which had been brought about by the development of the municipal system and of industry in Bohemia, as well as throughout Europe.

The growth of cities created a market not only for industrial but also for agricultural products. As towns increased in size, tradesmen and craftsmen became less able to produce all the necessary means of subsistence and raw materials. They purchased from the neighbouring farmers whatever these produced in excess of their own requirements, and in exchange gave their own or imported manufactures, or money. Thus the peasants became possessed of money. The natural result of this was an effort to convert their rents, which had hitherto been paid in produce and labour into money-rents, a change which would make them free men having complete control over their own possessions. The landowners themselves must often have wished for this change, as they also began to be in want of money.

It might be thought that this effort of the two classes towards the same goal would have produced only harmony and contentment.

Nothing can be less true. Under the system of payment in kind, farmers had no great incentive to increase their produce, as it was limited by the personal needs of the landlords and their retainers. The greed for money, on the contrary, is limitless, since it is impossible ever to have too much of it. From that time we find a far stronger impulse among the owners of property to increase the burdens of the peasantry, while a counter pressure sprang up simultaneously on the part of the oppressed. So long as the peasants could not sell the excess of their natural produce, it was a small sacrifice for them to give it up; but when there existed a market for it, the relinquishment of it to the landlord, or the giving up of the proceeds of its sale, meant a renunciation of pleasures which soon became necessaries.

There was another conflicting element between the two classes. Before the development of the town, the peasant had no asylum to which he could flee from an oppressor. Now the town offered a place of refuge of which many a one availed himself. Well-to-do farmers contrived to profit by the pecuniary embarrassment of their landlords, and in this way free themselves completely from their burdens. Thus the number of forced labourers became smaller, and the business of the manorial farms often suffered in consequence. Hence when the peasants, under the aegis of the rising towns, increased their efforts to throw off or diminish their burdens, the landlords simultaneously exerted themselves strenuously to bind their serfs more firmly to the manor, and to augment their compulsory service.

There was still a third element of antagonism. The moment agricultural produce acquired a market value, all land, whether under cultivation at the moment or not, possessed a market value. As soon as the towns had attained to power and importance, the time had gone by when the population was so sparsely scattered that the land was looked upon as practically boundless, and every one wishing to possess it – were he simply peasant, or mighty landlord with his tenants, or an association of monks – could easily obtain as much as he wanted, either from the lord of the manor, or from the Markgenossenschaft (the primitive society of the members of a commune holding land in common). Now, although the stage had not yet been reached at which every tract of arable land had been put under cultivation, yet the population had already become so dense that land no longer seemed inexhaustible. The possession of it began to be a privilege, and indeed a privilege so valuable that the most violent conflicts broke out concerning it. The Markgenossenschaft now proclaimed their collective land to be the private joint property of the families constituting the corporation. Side by side with the members of the Markgenossenschaft a class soon began to form itself, composed of the less privileged inhabitants of the commune.

On the other hand, however, endeavours were made by the lords of the manor, whose power in the commune was indeed preponderant, to seize these lands and convert them into their own private property, at the same time graciously conceding usufructuary rights to the fellows of the Markgenossenschaft.

The greater the strides made in economic development, the more intense became all these antagonisms, and the greater the embitterment between landlords and peasants. Conflicts were more easily excited between these two classes – conflicts which, in the majority of cases, were only local, but which in some cases broke forth simultaneously throughout whole provinces and even whole countries, growing finally into regular wars – peasant wars.

The fortunes of war sometimes favoured one side and sometimes the other. In general, however, it may be said that in spite of isolated defeats, the peasantry of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (earlier still in Italy) had permanently bettered their position.

The causes of this improvement may be understood in part from what has already been said. Legal methods, and even physical compulsion, were of little use when the towns lent their protection and shelter to the fugitive peasants. In order to retain for their own benefit the labour power of the peasantry, the lords of the soil were compelled, therefore, to treat them better, and make their existence endurable.

The financial embarrassment of the landlords also frequently aided the peasants. In the twelfth century Christendom had grown sufficiently strong, not only to defend itself against its enemies, but even to assume the offensive against the Orientals, whose wealth and high culture had excited the greed for plunder of the military and priestly castes of the Christian world. The Crusades began with the most vigorous union of the feudal lords of all lands, those adventure-seeking and booty-craving members of the higher classes. But initiated amidst great illusions, these wars ended lamentably, their results bearing no fit ratio to the sacrifices they entailed. They enriched many towns, especially in Italy, but they caused the ruin of a large part of the European nobility, and instilled into the rest of the higher classes those longings for the productions of a higher culture, which in Europe were not to be obtained without great expenditure. It is not surprising, therefore, that the financial embarrassment of the nobility rapidly increased. If in some cases this led to an effort to extort still more from the peasant, it often burdened the landlord also with a load of debt, and forced him to agree to absolve the peasant from his burdens upon the payment of a round sum. The higher nobility suffered comparatively little from these conditions, but the inferior ranks were rapidly ruined, and to all intents and purposes lost their independence.

One more circumstance must finally be noticed. While the population was increasing, the closing of the land-corporations and their absorption by the lords of the manor made it exceedingly difficult to find room for new settlers. The surplus population was, in consequence, compelled to seek a livelihood outside of agricultural pursuits, and especially in urban handicrafts, or in war-service. Together with the ruined lower nobility, sturdy country youths, whose services were not required at home, gave themselves up to the trade of soldiering, and flocked to the well-to-do towns, or to those nobles who paid them well and held out the prospect of rich booty. They sought service under princes, or such fortunate army-leaders as were beginning to make a business of war, and to contract for troops.

Side by side with the army of the feudal caste (the mounted men, or knights), another was now formed consisting of paid peasants, and foot-bands once more assumed a military importance.

But these levied peasants had not as yet become proletarians. They were farmers’ sons who, after completing their war-service, returned home to take part in the labours of the family, or to set up their own firesides. They brought with them the implements and weapons of war, and the veteran’s skill in the use of them. French knights of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries often enough had a taste of the quality of the English bow and the Swiss pike.

At the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries serfdom had in fact ceased in Bohemia as well as in England, but attempts were not wanting among the landlords to re-inaugurate the system; attempts which were a fruitful source of social discontent.

But the greatest discontent must have been among the members of the inferior nobility who, themselves not much above the higher class of peasants, possessed very limited sources of revenue and could not, like the great barons, squeeze anything of importance out of their tenants, but who, unfortunately, had formed their standard of life on the pattern of the great barons and wealthy merchants. At the end of the fourteenth century this class went rapidly to ruin. The royal power was already too strong in Bohemia to permit the formation of a body of robber-knights, although many earnest attempts were made to that end.

As Bohemia was a part of the German Empire, a profitable national war was impossible, hence the members of the Bohemian knighthood were driven almost exclusively to mercenary war-service as a means of retrieving their fortunes.

The development of silver mining was not only a potent factor in the encouragement of manufacture and trade, and, through these, in the growth of the above-mentioned antagonisms, but it produced, as a necessary consequence, a revolution in prices, by which they were especially embittered.

The discovery and working of the rich silver mines of Bohemia must have brought about a rise in the prices of all goods. It must have had the same effect in that country as was caused in Germany at the end of the fifteenth century by the rich yield of the Saxon and Tyrolese mines, and has been produced throughout Europe since the middle of the sixteenth century by the discovery and development of the gold and silver deposits in America. We have not been able to find proofs of this in the various histories of Bohemia, but if in this matter, as in others, the axiom holds good, that under the same conditions like causes produce like effects, there can be no doubt that in the fourteenth century there was a complete revolution of prices in Bohemia.

It was inevitable that the different classes should be affected in various ways by this revolution. Some were injured, others benefited; some were merely touched by it, others completely shattered; but in every circumstance of social intercourse in which a money payment was the medium, the social antagonism comprised in it could not fail to be intensified by this rise in prices. The greatest sufferers must have been those classes who received their incomes in money and did not possess the power to increase those incomes proportionately to its decreased value. In the towns these classes formed the lowest strata of the wage-earning population; in the country they were the petty nobility.

But above all these social antagonisms stood another still more potent – the national. In Bohemia the hatred of Germany was combined with that felt for the Papal Church. In the thirteenth century Bohemia was economically far behind the times. Its Western German neighbours were much in advance of it in social development. After the opening of the Kuttenberg mines, the marvellous progress in industry, trade, art, and science had been made possible in Bohemia only by the fact that its rulers attracted German emigrants thither. The two favourite monarchs of Bohemian patriots, Ottocar II. and Charles I., were the very ones who most encouraged the immigration of German peasants, craftsmen, and merchants, as well as German artists and savants.

Kuttenberg was a purely German town, and quite as much so were the other mining towns, such as Deutschbrod and Iglau. Together with these, however, numerous other towns had been either founded by Germans, or were so largely peopled by them, that the municipal authority fell into their hands, and this the more readily as they represented the well-to-do classes – the merchants and prominent handicraftsmen. The petty craftsmen, the mass of day-labourers, and other of the |ower urban population, were native-born Czechs.

The University was also under the control of the Germans. It was a self-governing institution, modelled after the University of Paris, and divided into four “nations,” each of which had a vote in the management. The Bohemians, however, were always in a hopeless minority, as they were opposed by the Bavarian, Saxon, and Polish “nations”, the last named being composed chiefly of Germans (Silesians, &c.). This is not an insignificant fact. In those times a university was a scientific and political power of the first rank, and had an importance equal to that possessed by the press and universities combined at the present day. Externally, also, it was a mighty organisation. Like those of Paris, the buildings of the University of Prague, together with the residences of the professors and students, formed a distinct quarter of the town, having probably its own surrounding walls , and as early as the beginning of the fifteenth century the number of students amounted to many thousands. Æneas Sylvius tells us in his History of the Bohemians that when, in 1409, the German students quitted the town, two thousand left in one day. Three thousand followed a few days later, and founded the University of Leipzig. It can be safely assumed, therefore, that the total number of students at that time in the university was not less than ten thousand.

There were also numerous establishments connected with the university, such as lands and buildings endowed for the use and enjoyment of the professors and poorer students; and all this wealth and power was in the hands of the Germans. Bitterly did the Czech professors complain that they were forced to starve as country schoolmasters, while their German colleagues obtained all the fat appointments in the University; and that whenever the interests of the Czech “nation” clashed with those of the German, the authorities invariably sided with the latter.

To all this was added the fact that the Church had become an institution of spoliation for the benefit of the Germans. The poor livings were, it is true, turned over to the Czechs; but the monasteries were for the most part in the possession of the Germans, as well as the higher appointments of the secular clergy.

Thus the animosity to the Church conspired with the hatred of the Germans in uniting the whole Czech nation in solid phalanx against those two spoilers.

This gave rise to the national feeling which suddenly appeared in Bohemia in the fourteenth century. But in its beginnings this feeling assumed the most diverse forms in different countries, being determined in each case by the special circumstances which called it forth. In Italy and Germany it sprang chiefly from a longing for political unity. Among the patriots of the former country it led to an adulation of the Papacy; in those of Germany to an enthusiasm for a powerful empire. In France and England the most prominent national feeling was a reciprocal hatred between the two countries. In Bohemia, on the contrary, it made its appearance as a special kind of class antagonism.

The peculiar form assumed by this antagonism can be easily understood from what has been said. The Germans expected and received the most lucrative appointments among the secular clergy, in the monasteries and in the University, the latter at that time an essentially theological institution. If the Czechs had every reason for rearing a barrier against the spoliation carried on by the Church, and for craving its possession, the Germans had quite as good grounds for resisting their efforts.

Such was the atmosphere in which the movement against the Pope and the Germans had its birth, a movement which has received the name of the Hussite War from its most prominent literary advocate, Johannes Huss.