74 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
church in Bohemia which resulted. Although Utraquism in the form
accepted by the Compact of Basel did not differ radically from estab-
lished Catholicism other than in the taking of communion in both
kinds it was nevertheless separate, and indeed it is said to be the first
such division officially approved by the Roman church. Hence the con-
cept of separate Christian confessions had a head start in Bohemia by
the time Luther’s Reformation began to take hold, so that by 1600 only
a small minority remained truly Catholic. During the Hussite period
the Catholic church also suffered major losses of property, moving from
owning of the order of 30 per cent of the land to being left with very
little, while major ecclesiastical institutions often ended up as tenants of
the crown. Partly as a result and partly due to events during the revolt
the church also lost its position in the Estates of the kingdom, leaving it
with less of a political role than in most other countries in Europe.
The real beneficiary, however, was not the king but the nobility, which
managed to acquire land both from the church through support for the
Hussites, and from Sigismund as the price of their support for him in
the last stages. Its political standing was likewise enhanced, as it had
been evident throughout that noble support was crucial to the survival
of the Hussite cause. The nobility had previously engaged in a power
struggle with King Wenzel from 1394 to 1405, ending with a victory
whereby, among other gains, appointments to the royal council were
henceforth subject to baronial approval and the king was, some sug-
gest, reduced to merely the first among equals in the land. The Estates,
principally the nobility, had in the past made acceptance of a new king
conditional upon a formal capitulation, a series of promises extracted
from the prospective monarch regulating and limiting his use of power.
Following Wenzel’s death, however, matters had gone much further, as
the Hussite nobility had first negotiated with and then denied the crown
to the heir apparent, Sigismund, effectively keeping him from becoming
king for seventeen years, while it was the nobility which finally placed
him upon the throne.
Equally significant was the fact that the revolt achieved for Bohemia
a degree of religious freedom unprecedented at the time, and that wider
European influences were involved. Where in 1618 this would be inter-
national Calvinism, in the early 1400s it was Wycliffe’s thought and the
English Lollard movement to which it led. For example Peter Payne, the
then principal of the present author’s Oxford college, St Edmund Hall,
fled around 1413 to avoid arrest and possible execution as a Wycliffite
heretic, arriving a few years later in Bohemia, where as Peter Ingliss
(Peter the Englishman) he played a significant part in the councils of