In Germany, unfortunately, there were many nobles who were ready to take advantage of the reforming movement to promote their own ends. That the clergy should live more simply seemed to these nobles a most desirable thing; and to help them to attain so satisfactory a condition, they proceeded to plunder their houses, and lay waste their lands. Such acts were utterly opposed to Charles’s intentions; and he checked these outrages so sternly that the Pope was once more forced to recognise him as his safest and strongest supporter. Perhaps this last circumstance made it easier for Charles to carry out his plans for reformation in Bohemia. In that kingdom, however, he worked by different methods, and with somewhat different objects from those at which he had aimed in his German schemes of reformation; for in Bohemia he trusted rather to the moral effect which could be produced by great preachers than to legislation or forcible repression.
The first of these preachers, whom the King summoned to Prague, was an Austrian named Conrad Waldhauser, who began to come prominently forward in 1360, the year after Charles’s attempt to reform the German clergy. Conrad’s preachings were largely directed against the luxury of women; but he also denounced the tyranny of the nobles and their usurious exactions from the peasantry. His fiercest attacks, however, were aimed against the Mendicant Orders, and specially against their simoniacal attempts to obtain ecclesiastical offices. It was these attacks that brought the greatest danger to the preacher; for the Franciscans were still strong in Papal support; and Conrad was summoned before the Legate to answer a charge of heresy. As both King and Archbishop stood by the accused, the attempts of his enemies were defeated; and he continued till his death in 1369 to exercise great influence in Bohemia.
But Conrad was a German, and preached, of course, in his native language; and Charles felt that, if the reformation were really to take hold of the people, they must be addressed in their own language. He therefore brought forward a preacher of a rather different type from Conrad. This was Milic of Kromĕr̆íz̆, a Moravian of rather plebeian origin. He had early attracted Charles’s attention, and had been already appointed to some office about the court in 1350. He had risen steadily in the king’s favour, and had been raised in 1363 to one of the chief posts in the Chancellery. An ascetic dislike to worldly honours now induced him to resign all these offices, in order to become a preacher. He at first retired to a living in a distant town; but, finding that the beautiful garden which was attached to the pastor’s house gave him too much pleasure, he returned to Prague, and began to preach at the Church of St. Nicholas in the Small District, and afterwards at St. Giles’s in the Old Town.