Note 510 — Chapter VII · BOHEMIA.

Von der Hardt IV. 189, 209. Berger’s labored collection of safe-conducts and their comparison with the one given to Huss (Johann Hus u. König Sigmund pp. 180-208) prove nothing but his own industry. Huss went to Constance as an excommunicate to defend himself and his faith. Sigismund. knowing this, gave him a safe-conduct without limitation or condition. The only contemporaneous documents with which this can fairly be compared are those offered by the council and by Sigismund to John XXIII. when they summoned him back to Constance, May 2, 1415, and the one offered by the council to Jerome of Prague, April 17. Of these the first was limited by the clause “justitia tamen semper salva,” the second by “in quantum idem dominus rex tenetur sibi dare de jure et servare alios salros conductus sibi datos,” the third by “quantum in nobis est et fides exegit orthodoxa” (V. d. Hardt IV. 119, 143, 145). No ingenious reasoning can explain this away. The allusion in Sigismund’s safe-conduct to other letters already given by him to the pope refers to those which John had required of him and of the city of Constance before he would trust himself there (Raynald. ann. 1413, No. 22-3). These the council set aside as coolly as it did that of Huss. Sigismund, as we shall see, had no power to give a safe conduct that would protect a heretic, but Berger’s argument that he therefore could not have designedly issued an unlimited one to Huss (Berger, op. cit. 92-3, 109) is worthless in view of his readiness, which Berger freely concedes (p. 85), to enter into engagements which he knew he could not fulfil. From his indignation it is evident that he was unacquainted with the niceties of the canon law; but even if he were, his giving the letters is easily explicable by the fact, which Berger has well pointed out (pp. 100-1), that Huss’s certificates of orthodoxy, obtained in August, were laid before him (Palacky Document, p. 70). He could thus easily persuade himself that there was no risk of his pledge causing him trouble. It was of the greatest moment to him that Huss should be reconciled to the Church, and to a man of his temperament it was inconceivable that Huss’s delicate conscientiousness would in the end render martyrdom inevitable. Hefele (Conciliengeschichte VII. 234), following Palacky, calls attention to the absence, in the letter of the Bohemian magnates to the council, September 2, 1415, of any reproach for violating the safe-conduct, and he argues thence that they admitted that it could not protect Huss from judgment as a heretic. So little is this the case that they emphatically declare that Huss was not a heretic, and if there is no allusion to the safe-conduct this is evidently attributable to their referring to certain previous letters to Sigismund which the council had ordered burned, and which they defiantly desired to be considered as embodied and repeated in the present one (Monument I. 78). Anything they might have to say on the subject must have been said in those letters, which presumably were the occasion of the projected decree of September 23, 1415, punishing as fautors of heresy all who vilified Sigismund for permitting the violation of his safe-conduct.