Jan Hus

Jan Hus was ordained a Catholic priest around the turn of the 15th century and rose to become master, dean, and rector at Prague's Charles University between 1409 and 1410. He began preaching against the Church's practices in Bohemia - its ecclesiology, simony, the Eucharist - and drew excommunication from Pope Alexander V, though he kept preaching anyway. When he condemned Antipope John XXIII for selling indulgences, the sentence was enforced, and he spent two years in exile. The Council of Constance summoned him in 1415 to answer for the dissension; he went under safe conduct, was arrested on arrival, and refused to recant when brought before the council. On 6 July 1415 he was burned at the stake for heresy. His followers, the Hussites, refused to elect another Catholic monarch and defeated five consecutive crusades in the Hussite Wars; Bohemia and Moravia remained majority Hussite for two centuries until a Protestant defeat in 1620 brought forced conversion under Habsburg rule.