A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

the consecrated wafer does not really turn into the flesh of Christ. For Wycliffe, it was self-evident
nonsense. But for the Church it meant that, if the blessed sacrament is a fraud, then a priest is not
necessary to administer it. The priest would be superfluous. This is why the Church wanted to burn
Wycliffe - who, fortunately, being in England, was beyond its reach. Besides, with two popes, the
Church was too divided to do much harm.
The Bohemian reformer Jan Hus was less lucky. He was deeply influenced by Wycliffe, and ten
years after Wycliffe’s death (in 1384) was delivering lectures at the University of Prague in which
he called for Church reform. The Church leaders were horrified, but the common people agreed it
was a time for change. In 1410, the archbishop of Bohemia became so incensed at the constant use
of Wycliffe’s name that he had two hundred copies of his books burnt on a bonfire. But two years
later Hus became rector of Prague University and went on repeating his heresies. There were, he
pointed out, now three popes claiming to be the head of Christendom - not all of them could be
infallible.
In 1414, the Church itself recognised that this farce of too many popes had to be brought to an end
as quickly as possible; so a council of bishops was convened at Constance. Hus was asked to go
and explain himself. He refused until the Holy Roman Emperor, who also happened to be king of
Bohemia, gave him a solemn promise that he had nothing to fear and a safe conduct. Hus went to
Constance, and was immediately arrested. Dragged into the council hall, he was ordered to
renounce his heresies. He refused, although he knew it meant death. The Church made this as
horrible as possible by burning him alive. The Church council went on to declare Wycliffe a heretic
in retrospect and ordered that his bones should be dug up and burned.
The Council of Constance finally healed the breach within the Church; Martin V was made pope.
He proclaimed a crusade against Hussites and Lollards (Wycliffites), and an army marched into
Bohemia, where the murder of Hus (and his friend Jerome of Prague) had aroused powerful
national feelings. But three ‘crusades’ all failed to break the resistance of the Bohemians; their land
was ravaged; all kinds of atrocities were committed; but the invaders were driven out.
In Italy, crime had become as commonplace and as widespread as in England before the Black
Death. In its state of constant war, things could not have been otherwise. In Parma in 1480, the
governor was intimidated by threats of murder into throwing open all the public jails and letting out
the criminals; the natural consequence was an epidemic of burglary and murder - some houses were
even besieged and demolished by the armed gangs. One priest called Don Niccolo de Pelagati
carried the materialistic principles of Pope Rodrigo to an absurd extreme. On the day he celebrated
his first mass he also committed a murder, but received absolution upon a suitable payment. He
then began a career of crime that included killing four men and marrying two wives, with whom he
travelled. As the historian Jacob Burckhardt says in his Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy: ‘He
afterwards took part in many assassinations, violated women, carried others away by force,
plundered far and wide, and infested the territory of Ferrara with a band of followers in uniform,
extorting food and shelter by every sort of violence.’ Don Niccolo was caught and hung up in an
iron cage outside San Giuliano in Ferrara in 1495. Yet he had done nothing that Cesare Borgia had
not done on a far larger scale.
In the year 1500, Pope Rodrigo Borgia declared a Jubilee, a year in which all pilgrims who made
the journey to Rome should receive total absolution for their sins. The idea, we may recall, had
been devised by Pope Boniface VIII, who needed croupiers to rake in the coins from the tomb of St
Peter. In 1500, Rodrigo Borgia needed money for Cesare’s wars and decided that some new