Jan Hus, the Bohemian preacher who had taken up Wycliffe's criticisms of clerical wealth and authority, travelled to Constance under a safe conduct from the emperor Sigismund to defend his teaching. He was arrested within weeks, held in poor conditions, tried, given the choice of recanting propositions he denied holding, and burned at the stake in July 1415. His ashes were thrown into the Rhine so that nothing should remain to be venerated. Jerome of Prague followed him to the fire the next year.
The council also condemned the writings of John Wycliffe, dead thirty years, and ordered his remains exhumed and burned, which was eventually carried out. Its treatment of the safe conduct was defended at the time on the ground that no promise made to a suspected heretic could bind against the church's duty, an argument that damaged the credibility of imperial safe conducts for a long time afterwards.
The consequence was war. Bohemia rose, the Hussite armies defeated repeated crusades sent against them, and the eventual settlement conceded the communion cup to the laity in that kingdom, the very practice at issue. Hus became and has remained a Czech national figure, honoured by the reformers of the sixteenth century as a forerunner, and the Catholic Church has since expressed regret for his death without reversing the judgment on his teaching.