The Council of Constance was a major ecumenical council of the Catholic Church called to resolve the Western Schism, which had left Europe divided between competing popes. In May 1416, the council condemned and executed the religious reformer Jerome of Prague by burning him at the stake for heresy, just a year after his associate Jan Hus suffered the same fate. These executions ignited the Hussite Wars and deeply fractured the religious landscape of Central Europe. The event highlighted the severe dangers faced by independent thinkers who challenged centralized ecclesiastical authority.

The martyrdom of Jerome of Prague and Jan Hus sparked a massive wave of clandestine religious poetry, protest songs, and vernacular hymns across Bohemia. These Hussite hymns served as a powerful oral and written tradition of resistance, bypassing official Church censorship and directly influencing the development of the Czech literary language. It demonstrated how poetry could become a literal weapon of spiritual and political rebellion.