‘Constantine From England and the Bohemians’: Hussitism, Orthodoxy, and the End of Byzantium

Abstract

THE historiography of Hussitism is littered with what-might-have-been speculations. One of the most engaging is the possibility of the Hussites uniting, or at least allying themselves, with the Greek Church in Constantinople against the Pope and the Roman Church. That this idea was considered is not fanciful. We know that in 1452 the Prague Consistory entertained the notion. To say that the timing was unfortunate is an understatement: a little over a year later, the Eastern Roman Empire was no more, and Constantinople had become the capital of the Ottoman Sultan, Mahomet II. In even less time the unconquered stronghold of the radical Taborite wing of the Hussite movement, Mount Tabor in South Bohemia, surrendered without a fi ght to an alliance of their Bohemian co-religionists and Catholic nobles. When Taborite power as a recognizable element within Bohemian religious and political life weakened and then, in 1452, disappeared, the vast majority of the movement accepted a limiting of the Hussite programme for change to the ambitions of the movement’s conservative wing (the Utraquists). Those ambitions can be summarized as persuading the Pope to accept the practice of Communion in both kinds (Utraquism) among existing Hussite communities, and to recognize John Rokycana as Archbishop of Prague. The former was accepted in the Compacts signed by the Hussites, the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, and the Council of Basle in 1436/37. Neither ambition was ever realized. Successive popes opposed the implementation of the Compacts culminating in their formal rejection by Pope Pius II in 1462. Moreover, in a bull published on October 28 1451, the Pope formally declared the Utraquists heretics. It is through documents relating to the visit of the mysterious Hussite known as Constantine in 1451–1452 to Constantinople that we know of the attempt by the Hussite and Greek Churches to explore the possibility of union between them. This subject has been discussed in numerous works since the historians Palacký and Hofl er treated it in the mid-nineteenth