“Don’t sneer. Have you never wondered why such a fire flared up from a spark that leaped from the pyre in Constance here in Prague, in Bohemia? I’ll tell you. Do you know how many priests there were in the Prague diocese? Six thousand. How many monasteries? A hundred and sixty. Do you know that in Prague itself, every twentieth person wore a habit or a cassock? And how many parish churches were there in Prague? Forty-four. Wrocław, I remind you, has nine. In Saint Vitus’s Cathedral alone, there were exactly three hundred ecclesiastical positions. Can you imagine the fortune taken from prebendaries and annats? No, Scharley, it could not and cannot go on like that. The secularisation of church property is absolutely necessary. The clergy has control over too much worldly property. Such an immense concentration of wealth and power can only cause anger and social tensions. It has to end: their wealth, their tyranny, their hubris, their arrogance, their power. They must return to what Christ instructed them to be: poor and humble servants. And it wasn’t Joachim of Fiore who came up with it first, not Ockham, not Waldhauser, not Wycliffe and not Huss, but Francis of Assisi. The Church must be transformed. Reformed. From a church of magnates and politicians, braggarts and fools, obscurantists and hypocrites, from a church of Inquisitors, from a church leading a crusade of criminals, of creatures like, for example, our own Konrad, Bishop of Wrocław, it must transform into a church of Francises.”

“You’re wasted working in hospitals. You ought to be a preacher. With regard to me, you can ease off a little. We have enough—a surfeit, even—of preachers in the Tábor, and some of their sermons are enough to make one bring up one’s breakfast. So have mercy on the scrambled eggs and celery and rein it in a little. You’ll be denouncing simony and debauchery next.”

“Indeed! No one observes church vows or rules! From Rome down to the bottom, to the remotest parish, nothing but simony, dissipation, drunkenness, demoralisation. Is it any wonder there are comparisons with Babylon and Sodom and thoughts of the Antichrist? That the saying ‘omne malum a clero’ is doing the rounds? That’s why I’m in favour of reform, even of the most radical kind.”

Scharley tore his eyes away from the burned-down Knights Hospitaller’s priorate and the charred walls of the Church of Our Lady at the End of the Bridge.