The Czech Churches' Last Century (Utraquists and Unitas)

A century before Martin Luther, Bohemia already had its own reform-minded national church — the Utraquists, who insisted that the laity receive both bread and wine at communion, and the Unity of the Brethren who grew alongside them. Surviving as a tolerated, functioning body long after the Hussite wars that gave it birth. Its final century opens with real legal standing, the 1609 Letter of Majesty guaranteeing religious freedom, and closes in catastrophe: the 1620 Battle of White Mountain crushed Bohemian Protestant resistance, and by 1627-28 the Habsburgs had outlawed the church outright, forcing its bishop, the scholar and educator Jan Amos Comenius, into permanent exile along with much of his flock. In between, the church produced lasting work — the Bohemian Confession of 1575 and the Kralice Bible, the first complete Czech translation from the original languages — leaving behind a body of literature that outlasted the institution itself.