The Emperor Charles, also King of Bohemia, had made Prague his capital, lavishing money on it to create one of the most spectacular ensembles of public buildings in central Europe, providing Prague not merely with the beginnings of a great cathedral but with a new university. Such a lively city, owing its beauty to Charles’s determination to make his capital a new Jerusalem for the Last Days of the world, was a natural breeding ground for urgent advocacy of Church reform even before the dean of the university’s Philosophical Faculty, the priest Jan Hus, became fired by Wyclif’s reforming
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