Blood on the Cobblestones: How Three Martyrs Sparked the First Reformation

Blood on the Cobblestones: How Three Martyrs Sparked the First Reformation

In July 1412, three young men in Prague made a decision that would change European history forever. When Martin, Jan, and Stasek interrupted church services to protest the papal sale of indulgences, they could not have known their executions three days later would ignite a religious revolution that would burn across central Europe for decades.

This meticulously researched narrative reconstruction reveals how a medieval indulgence campaign designed to fund the pope's Italian wars collided with an emerging reform movement led by the charismatic preacher Jan Hus. Drawing on chronicle evidence, theological treatises, and liturgical texts, the book traces the crisis from the arrival of papal bulls in May 1412 through the protesters' arrests, their rushed execution despite promises of safety, and the extraordinary funeral at Bethlehem Chapel where reformers claimed the right to declare martyrdom without Rome's permission.

The story explores how three ordinary believers became founding saints of the Hussite church, how their deaths radicalized a theological movement into military resistance that would defeat five papal crusades, and how the 1412 crisis established patterns of reform and resistance that prefigured Martin Luther's Reformation by more than a century. This is the forgotten story of martyrdom, betrayal, and the birth of religious revolution in medieval Europe