prison. All Bohemia was burdened with the disgrace and shame of having an innocent man treated like a criminal. Sigismund, they alleged, was able easily to secure obedience to his will and have Huss released so that he might return “to us in Bohemia” with the same safety with which he had gone to Constance. The king’s honor as well as Bohemia’s peace and honor were bound up in securing this result.
In another document, signed by other Bohemian nobles and dated May 12, 1415,[1] an urgent call was made to the Bohemian and Moravian nobles at Constance to be insistent in interceding with the king not to permit the iniquity being perpetrated upon Huss to continue. As they heard, so they said, Huss “had been seized by royal authority and in the king’s city” in spite of his having been given public promise of security, they called upon the king to release him and to accord him the same full liberty to return to Bohemia he had exercised in going to Constance.
In these appeals, which the signers affirmed represented the views of the people at large, the high personal character of Huss is vouched for, as also his fidelity in preaching the Gospel. The arrest and imprisonment are treated as criminal injustice and in violation of solemn pledges. The ignominy put upon Huss is regarded as an insult to Bohemia. With unanimity, they put the same interpretation upon the meaning and intent of Sigismund’s passport—salvus conductus.
It would have been quite according to the inhumane usages of that age—usages also in vogue in later centuries—if, in spite of the high character of many of the churchmen met at Constance, Huss had been kept in prison, completely shut off from the world, until his death. Others, whose views were called in question though their piety was not denied, and some of whose names we know, suffered this awful fate; as, for example, Carranza, archbishop of Toledo, and Michael de Molinos, author of The Spiritual Guide, both in Rome.
- ↑ Doc., 554.
