Constance

When the council opened at Constance in November 1414 there were three men claiming the papacy: a Roman line, an Avignon line, and a third elected at Pisa in 1409 by a council that had tried to end the schism and had merely added to it. The gathering at Constance was summoned by the Pisan claimant under pressure from the emperor Sigismund, and it disposed of all three. John XXIII fled the city in disguise and was deposed; Gregory XII was allowed to convoke the council formally and then resign, a device that preserved the legitimacy of the Roman line; Benedict XIII refused to go, was deposed, and was abandoned by his remaining supporters.

In November 1417 the council elected Martin V, and a schism that had run for thirty nine years was over. To justify what it had done the council issued the decree Haec sancta, declaring that a general council holds its authority immediately from Christ and that everyone including the pope is bound to obey it in matters of faith and of reform, and the decree Frequens, requiring councils to meet at fixed intervals thereafter. Those two texts are the high point of conciliarism, and the papacy spent the following century dismantling the claim they made. Voting was by nation rather than by head, which prevented the large Italian contingent from carrying every question.

Jan Hus travelled to Constance with a safe conduct from the emperor Sigismund, expecting a hearing on the reforming case he had been preaching in Prague. He was arrested within weeks, held for months in poor conditions, and given a trial in which he was required to abjure articles drawn from his writings, several of which he denied holding. He refused to abjure opinions he did not hold and refused to abjure those he did, and he was condemned and burned on 6 July 1415; his ashes were thrown into the Rhine so that nothing could be gathered as a relic. His colleague Jerome of Prague was burned the following year.

The council also condemned the teaching of John Wycliffe, dead thirty years, and ordered his remains dug up and burned. The safe conduct question was answered at the time with the argument that no promise made to a heretic could bind, a position that did more damage to the reputation of the council than any of its decrees did good.

In Bohemia the execution turned a reforming movement into a national one, and the Hussite wars began within four years. In 1999 John Paul II expressed deep regret for the cruel death inflicted on Hus, at a symposium held in Rome, without reversing the condemnation itself, and the Czech churches continue to mark 6 July.