There had always been "heretics," even at the height of papal power in Western Europe. Southern France became a hotbed of religious reformation during the thirteenth century, though this movement was snuffed out by the Albigensian crusade. The Englishman John Wyclif had preached that salvation could be achieved by simply reading the Bible, without the intercession of an organized church. Many a theologian throughout Europe had personal or philosophical reasons for opposing central religious authorities; many a ruler resented the Pope's fleecing of their territory to enrich the coffers of Rome. The Pope's military and diplomatic intrigues angered Italian patriots such as Machiavelli, who wrote in 1513 that the Vatican was keeping Italy divided and weak. The medieval Church manipulated--and was manipulated by-- temporal powers, and demonstrated little restraint in promoting its own material interests, even at the expense of its ideological ones. The reputation of the Church had been severely damaged by its internal struggles during the fourteenth century. King Philip the Fair of France kidnapped Pope Boniface in 1302, subsequently establishing the so-called "Babylonian Captivity," whereby successive popes were ensconced at Avignon and made into agents of French interests. Damaging as this was to the reputation of the Papacy and the Church, the process by which it was undone exacerbated the debacle; rival popes, backed by national factions, fought one another for decades. The lavish worldly wealth of the Vatican inspired envy and anger; Rome's great Renaissance works of art and architecture were purchased with a fortune's worth of other people's money. Popes and cardinals freely indulged in conspiracies against rivals, extending even to murder. Early fifteenth-century Rome seemed less a center of piety than an urban version of the Augean stables awaiting a Heracles.

The Church's reputation was sullied not only by the greed and ambition of men, but also by an act of God. The Church's evident inability to stem the "Black Death," the bubonic plague that killed off nearly a third of Europe's population in the mid-fourteenth century, challenged religious beliefs in the way that all horrors do--i.e., if we are truly obeying God's will, how could He allow this to happen? The gradual accretion of Turkish power in the Mediterranean raised the same question.

In this world of doubt, a Czech theologian named Jan Hus crystallized the beliefs of those who opposed the existing religious order. Preaching in his native Bohemia, he proclaimed opposition to indulgences, the worldly possessions of the Church, and a host of abuses by the Church hierarchy. The Council of Constance invited Hus to express his views; despite his fears (the council's stated aim was to root out heresy), he accepted the Holy Roman Emperor's guarantee of safe-conduct to and from the Council. Hus, traveling under this protection, went to Constance, where he was promptly arrested and jailed. After months of imprisonment in a wretched cell, he was tried, convicted, and burned at the stake in 1415.

Hus's adherents were now ready for full-scale war against religious authorities and their royal patrons; and they enjoyed a combination of factors which contributed to their early successes in parts of Bohemia. They had a doctrinal basis for their views, as articulated by Hus and Wyclif. Their struggle against the supremacy of the Church coincided with a Czech national rising against Germanic domination and a class struggle against the nobility. They were fortunate to count in their ranks one of the foremost military minds of the age, Jan Zizka. Zizka was a veteran of many battles between Germans and Slavs, ranging from his native southern Bohemia to the Baltic Sea region. He was also a pioneer in the use of wagons in warfare.

Perhaps most potently of all, the Hussites had a martyr to their cause in the person of Hus himself. The descriptions of his imprisonment and death are ennobling, like the deaths of Socrates and Jesus. There is a histrionic element to the manner of his death which captures the heart of even a modern historian; knowing the danger he was in, he went to Constance to make his case before his peers, who arrested him on his arrival, then completed the betrayal by killing him. As I write this, I am surprised to realize that I know of no great theatrical production which retells Hus's story. Perhaps this grave omission will be rectified in our time.

History demonstrates that revolutions either expand or they die. When a revolution is confined within a highly restricted territory, the revolutionary entity becomes isolated and ultimately succumbs to external pressures. Revolutions have an intense, highly localized energy; but, like fire, if they are to sustain themselves in time, they must spread themselves in space. The Hussites were eager to share their message and break out of their ideological isolation. However, they failed to do so and thus to initiate a widespread Protestant Reformation.

It may be argued that Hussitism failed to spread due to the death of its leading exponent, namely Hus himself; but the martyrdom of Jesus in no way impaired the growth of Christianity. Hus had made a sufficient number of doctrinal points in his lifetime, and attracted enough followers, to provide a sound basis for the movement. Had Hus lived longer, he would have had to preside over difficult times for his followers, and his memory would almost certainly be less vaunted than it is today, at least by Czechs. Like Lincoln, he left the historical stage at just the proper time, and in the proper manner, so as to ensure everlasting fame and respect. A living Hus would have been a valuable voice for the movement; but the dead Hus embodied a spirit of pride and resistance which inspired the Hussites and steeled them for the coming doctrinal and military assault upon their beliefs.

Hus's followers were thus prepared to struggle for the liberty of their beliefs in Bohemia, which they did for decades to come; but they had no mechanism for spreading their revolution beyond the borders of their small kingdom. The Hussites could try to extend their influence by word of mouth, but this was an age in which travel was extremely arduous, and people rarely went more than a few miles from their place of birth in their entire lives. Slow conversion of localities beyond the Czech nation was hindered by nationalistic and linguistic tensions. Given the Hussite movement's hostility to (and seemingly interminable wars with) Bohemia's Germans and the surrounding German states, it was virtually impossible to indoctrinate the neighboring Germans to the new creed. Though the Bohemian Hussites tried with some success to instill their doctrine in the neighboring Czech Margravate of Moravia, they found themselves blocked in beyond the Czech lands.

To spread their doctrines further afield, where they might have greater chances of success, the Hussites needed to present their ideas in writing. Each page of propaganda had to be laboriously hand- copied. Once it was sent out, should it fall into the wrong hands, it would be swiftly destroyed and all of the work involved would have been for nought.

It was an age, like all prior to the modern era, in which it was quite possible and even easy to obliterate information. Book-burning, in an age of hand-copying, assumed a power which is altogether foreign to the modern mind. Books were scarce and prohibitively expensive; even famous works might have only a handful of copies extant. It was possible for a determined bibliophobe to seriously impair the spread of information, or to erase knowledge forever from history, merely by destroying a few volumes. Contrast this with a quite recent instance of book-burning, namely in Nazi Germany. Nazi bonfires of books with real or imagined Jewish content represented a horrifying symbol, and reduced the accessibility of such books within Germany. Still, even Hitler could not eliminate the ideas contained within them in an age of printing, when hundreds of copies of every volume already existed and more could be made with little difficulty. The books which the Nazis burned could be reproduced; it is the human beings whom they gassed who are irreplaceable. Since the advent of the printing press, it has become far harder for even the most evil of individuals or movements, however murderous they may be, to erase knowledge forever.

Even if the Hussites had been able to send out a great number of copies of affirmations of their beliefs, these would have faced an audience which was primarily illiterate. It was not until after the advent of printing, when books became affordable enough to be widespread, that literacy rates increased dramatically.

It may be asserted that the Hussites' barrier to expansion was linguistic, and that it was Hus's misfortune to be born to a small nation whose language was known to few foreigners, which impeded his ability to transmit his message to the wider European scene. This view is not borne out by the historical context. National consciousness was just emerging in Europe, and any educated person could read Latin (often to the exclusion of being able to read in the vernacular). Hus wrote in both Latin and Czech, reaching out both to his own nation and the wider European community. People were used to living cheek-by-jowl with speakers of foreign tongues; dialects such as Provencal, Venetian, and Low German littered the linguistic landscape, and mutual comprehension was limited even within areas that nominally spoke the same language.

Ironically, the printing presses that would have enabled Hussitism to spread existed in Hus's time, as they had for centuries, but only within the Chinese Empire. (Believers in the inherent superiority of Western culture would do well to reflect on the fact that throughout most of history, Chinese civilization has dwarfed that of Europe in terms of scientific and technical achievements.) But the Chinese printing presses were unknown to Hus, and his message-- anticipating Luther, Calvin, and their cohorts by a full century--was bound within the confines of its birthplace, ultimately to be smothered.

There is a larger lesson in the example of Luther and Hus. Radical ideas are entertained in every age, including the most conservative ones. But these ideas can only capture the minds of their contemporaries when they have a complete complement of the following attributes: an eloquent voice to express them, a communications device whereby they may be promulgated, and an audience that is both capable of and interested in understanding them.

Visionaries of social reform frequently focus solely on honing their voices and thus find themselves alone. The successful ones take advantage of advanced communications capabilities to spread their views. In our century, radio and television have been used to radically transform social orders, contributing greatly to the collapse of Communism. Iran's Islamic fundamentalists used telephones and tape recorders to smuggle their message into pre-revolutionary Iran, and are fond of radio broadcasts to this day. At the time of this writing, in the jungles of southern Mexico, a group of rebels calling themselves the Zapatistas are doing precious little fighting, but a great deal of faxing to the press. Their masked leader, Subcomandante Marcos, even has a home page on the World Wide Web. Other examples abound, demonstrating a singular point: all movements, even the most radical and anti-modernist, must make themselves masters of technology in order to change the course of history.