CHAPTER VII - BOHEMIA

Summary

There is no historical foundation for the legend that Peter Waldo's missionary labors carried him into Bohemia, where he died, but there can be no question that the Waldensian heresy found a foothold among the Czechs at a comparatively early date. Bohemia formed part of the great archiepiscopal province of Mainz, whose metropolitan could exercise but an ineffective supervision over a district so distant. The supremacy of Rome pressed lightly on its turbulent ecclesiastics. In the last decade of the twelfth century a papal legate, Cardinal Pietro, sent thither to levy a tithe for the recovery of the Holy Land, was scandalized to find that the law of celibacy was unknown to the secular priesthood; he did not venture to force it on those already in orders, and his efforts to make postulants take the vow of continence provoked a tumult which required severe measures of suppression. In a Church thus partially independent the abuses which stimulated revolt elsewhere might perhaps be absent, but the field for missionary labor lay open and unguarded.

We have seen how the Inquisitor of Passau, about the middle of the thirteenth century, describes the flourishing condition of the Waldensian churches in Austria, along the borders of Bohemia and Moravia, and the intense zeal of propagandism which animated their members. Close to the west, moreover, they were to be found in the diocese of Ratisbon. That the heresy should cross the boundary line was inevitable, and it ran little risk of detection and persecution by a worldly and slothful priesthood, until it gained strength enough to declare itself openly.