In 1257, owing to a request by the King of Bohemia for aid in suppressing heresy, the Inquisition was, under episcopal sanction, established in his dominions, and two Inquisitors were appointed. The people evidently thought them more than sufficient, for when, in 1341, another ecclesiastic was empowered to act he was speedily slain by the angry populace. Bohemia was in the fourteenth century one of the most prosperous countries in Europe; but the state of its morals was far from satisfactory, the clergy in particular being worldly and depraved, and almost universally practising concubinage. The privileges of the Church were habitually sold for cash, and the land was full of vagrants, whose clerical immunities enabled them to gamble, brawl, drink, and rob at their pleasure. The demand of Innocent VI in 1354 for a tenth of the ecclesiastical revenues of the Empire to enable him to carry on his Italian wars threw Germany into an uproar. The scandalous moral laxity of the clergy passed almost unreproved, but an attack on the Church’s money bags was a much more serious matter. The clergy sheared their flocks without mercy, but they had the strongest objection to being shorn. Eighteen years elapsed before the Papal Inquisition was set up in Bohemia by Bull of Gregory XI, and it was then confined to five of the more important provinces, Prague being omitted. Many forerunners of the reformer John Huss appeared in Bohemia, and the general dissatisfaction with the Church had given rise to a powerful movement on behalf of liberty--a movement stimulated by the influence of John Wycliffe, whose writings were greatly esteemed in Prague. Wycliffe and his followers boldly taught that the Pope was Antichrist, and that excommunications might be disregarded. The clergy were vicars of Satan, their churches dens of thieves and habitations of fiends. It is curious that the Inquisition, relentless in its persecution of the Waldenses, appears to have seen nothing specially objectionable in the doctrines of Huss. At any rate, it took no official part in his trial, which, however, was modelled on the familiar Inquisitorial procedure. The controversy between orthodoxy and heresy now centred on points of doctrine rather than on the purification of the Church. The reformers contended that the Papal claim to the power of the keys was either essential to salvation or a cunning lie to gratify power and self-interest. Huss was excommunicated; and, although victorious in argument, his injudicious reliance on the Emperor’s honour led to his terrible end in 1415. Sigismund’s violation of his safe conduct was expressly recommended and defended by the clergy, on the ground that, under the law, a heretic could neither expect nor receive protection, and that the word of a king could not be allowed to prejudice the Catholic faith. Technically the contention was sound, for the law was largely an ecclesiastical creation, which reversed the accepted ideas of morality, and a word from