Chlum ignored me, a massive achievement. He spoke hotly to Cossa. `You endorsed Sigismund's safe conduct for Hus,' he said.

‘You guaranteed his safety. Is what you offer me now to be considered satisfaction?'

`Hus is my son, as you are. I sought his safety and I still seek it. But what has happened is there for, the world to see – he is being used as a pawn in a larger game.'

`Order his release!'

`These are delicate times, Chlum. The council is just beginning. I must move carefully.'

`You have breached your word,' Chlum said harshly,, 'I shall go though this city showing the king's safe conduct and your endorsement of it to all who can read. I will nail a manifesto to the cathedral door to charge you with vilifying the safe conduct and the protection which it granted to Master Hus.' He stalked out of the audience.

'Well,' Cossa said to me. `This looks like a bad start, but it could be worse. It is going to make far more trouble for Sigismund than it can for me.’

I repeated the conversation to Bernaba, who passed it to the marchesa, who shared it with Cosimo di Medici. `I cannot imagine Cossa taking such outrageous conduct from a common knight,' the marchesa said sadly. `Cossa isn't the man he was at Pisa. Not mentally or physically. His body has thickened with the weight of the gout and his mind, cannot rest long upon any choice he thinks he is making.'

`We will help him,' Cosimo said, smiling. `Nothing has gone right for him since Roccasecca. Besides, I don't think Hus is heavy on his mind. But he knows already what Sigismund has yet to find out: that the council is stronger than either of them. Hus is the one with the serious problem. Cossa doesn't dare to offend the council.''

Despite the commands of the pope and Sigismund's endless dispatches, Hus remained in custody in a cell eight foot square by nine foot high, under a leaking community latrine of the Dominican cloister at the edge of the lake. He wholeheartedly believed that some technical error had been made which would soon be put right. He knew he could trust John of Chlum to do all possible to rectify the error and have his freedom restored.

After a week, Hus fell sick with fever from the oppression of the dripping latrine. The vaguely seen shapes of men came to him in his delirium with extracts from his treatise De ecclesia demanding to know if he had written them. Slowly it came to him that there was not to be the academic discussion to which he had looked forward as he set out for Konstanz from Prague. These men seemed to be preparing to try him – so he rejoiced in the knowledge of the protection of his many friends. Not only were there the multitudes in Prague to whom he had preached, and who loved and revered him as a prophet sent from God, but there stood in his mind, above all others, the immense figure of Sigismund, who had granted him safe conduct.

The pope sent his own physician, Count Weiler, to treat Hus and he was soon restored to health. Hus applied for the counsel of a lawyer but it was refused. Under canon law no aid could be given to a heretic, so the preliminary inquiry was conducted by three judges appointed by the pope.

The witnesses these judges examined were, extraordinarily, only those men who had long held the opinion that Hus's beliefs were heretical. On 1 December, the council appointed a commission of greater powers to deal with the growing charges of Hus's heresy, made up of Piero Spina, Pierre d'Ailly. and Cardinal Chalant, assisted, by a Dominican, a Franciscan friar and six learned doctors of the law.

Hus's protector, King Sigismund of Hungary, King of the Romans, did not arrive in Konstanz until early Christmas morning. Hus could hear the great procession go by in the night as the king made his way to mass at the cathedral, but Hus remained in the underground cell at the monastery until 3 March.

50

When Sigismund's great train had reached Ueberlingen, a courier had been sent to the pope to ask him to delay Christmas mass till the next morning so that the king could be present at the cathedral. The city council of Konstanz sent greetings to Ueberlingen and ordered that the council chamber be heated. On Christmas Day at two o'clock in the morning most of Konstanz was awake to watch the royal fleet, lighted with innumerable torches, sweep past the island of Mainu and round the corner of the bridge within hail of the Dominican monastery. The enormous party came ashore: King Sigismund himself, Queen Barbara, Maria Louise Sterz, the Queen of Bosnia, who was the king's sister, Countess Elizabeth of Wirtenberg, who was Sigismund's niece, Duke Ludwig of Saxony, their households, and a thousand drunken Hungarian horsemen. It was bitterly cold. The king was to be lodged at the House with the Steps near the cathedral, but the royal party was first taken to the warm council chamber to thaw out for an hour, where they drank hot Malmsey wine, while the prelates awaited their arrival to begin Christmas mass in the icy cathedral.

When he was rested and refreshed the king and his entourage were escorted under canopies held by local nobles, through the torch-lit darkness to the cathedral, where he was welcomed by the pope under a mitre glistening with gold and precious stones. The procession made its way into the cathedral: the canons of Kreuzlingen, monks of Petershausen and of the Schotten monastery, and the priests of St Paul, all carrying candles. Members of the three begging orders, schoolchildren led by men carrying on golden poles the crest of each school, chaplains, monks, abbots, priors, archbishops and cardinals followed in the train. Behind each cardinal came, a priest who carried the hem off his gown. All were dressed in white overcoats and the cardinals wore unadorned white mitres; Then followed the pope's singers, a priest with the Cross and a priest with the Holy Sacrament, and small boys carrying tall candles: I was dressed as deacon, and walked immediately before my pope carrying a gold cloth held breast-high. Cossa was dressed as a priest in white, wearing two overcoats and a white mitre. Four citizens of Konstanz carried the golden canopy above him. King Sigismund followed with the electors, the queen, the princes, the Johanniter and Teutonic orders, then dukes, marquesses, counts, barons, knights, soldiers, people and women.

Cossa sat on a throne at the side of the high altar. At his right, the king sat among noble attendants who carried a golden rose donated by the city, the imperial sceptre and the drawn sword. The king had changed into the stole and dalmatic of a deacon to allow himself to take part in the holy office. The Holy Father celebrated the mass, but the king read the gospel. During the mass, the pope blessed the golden rose, and formally presented it to Sigismund. After the first mass, hymns were sung. The pope celebrated a second mass, Lux fulgebit, then the Prime, Terz and Sext were sung until six o'clock in the morning. The third mass, Puer natus est nobis, went on until eleven o'clock. After the last mass, the pope, Sigismund, eleven cardinals, other prelates and seven princes climbed the steep flight of stairs to the tower, from whose spacious balcony the pope showed the golden rose to the crowd and blessed the people with it. It was not until well past noon that the congregation dispersed.

'That will fix that son-of-a-bitch, for keeping the entire council waiting for an hour and a half until, he was ready to come out to a Christmas mass,' Cossa said to me as we entered the sacristy to change clothes.

The marchesa and her four daughters assembled at her house beside the papal palace, reaching it through a protected passageway between the two buildings.

'Good Cod!' the marchesa exclaimed as they entered the warm room. 'Ten hours in that icy church to watch Sigismund play priest! Three masses! Has Cossa lost his mind?'