Note 83 — Chapter XI · THE REFORMATION, POLITICALLY CONSIDERED

Opposition to the papacy on nationalist as well as on general grounds is nearly as well marked in Polish history as in Bohemian, from the pagan period onwards, the first Christian priesthood being chiefly foreign,83 while, as in Bohemia, the people clung to vernacular worship. In 1078 we find King Boleslav the Dauntless (otherwise the Cruel) executing the Bishop of Cracow, taxing the lands of the Church, and vetoing the bestowal of posts on foreigners.84 He in turn was driven into exile by a combination of clergy and nobles. A century later a Polish diet vetoes the confiscation of the property of deceased bishops by the sovereign princes of the various provinces; and a generation later still the veto is seen to be disregarded.85 In the middle of the thirteenth century there are further violent quarrels between dukes and clergy over tithes, the former successfully ordering and the latter vainly resisting a money commutation; till in 1279 Duke Boleslav of Cracow is induced to grant the bishops almost unlimited immunities and powers.86 Under Casimir the Great (1333–1370) further strifes occur on similar grounds between the equestrian order and the clergy, the king sometimes supporting the latter against the former, as in the freeing of serfs, and sometimes enforcing taxation of Church lands with violence.87 In the next reign the immunities granted by Boleslav in 1279 are cancelled by the equestrian order, acting in concert. And while these strifes had all been on economic grounds, we meet in 1341 with a heretical movement, set up by John Pirnensis, who denounced the pope as Antichrist in the fashion of the Bohemian reformers of the next generation. The people of Breslau seem to have gone over bodily to the heresy; and when the Inquisition of Cracow attempted forcible repression the Chief Inquisitor was murdered in a riot.88