Only a few German-speaking areas and a few royal free cities within the Bohemian kingdom retained their papal loyalty through the fifteenth century. These lonely outposts of obedience to Rome in Bohemia are worth noting, because they represented the only part of medieval Europe to which the description ‘Roman Catholic’ can be applied with any meaning. It may at first sight seem surprising that this term familiar in the anglophone world makes no sense before the Reformation, but it is clearly redundant when applied to an age when everyone outside Bohemia consciously or unconsciously formed part
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