Numerous foreigners had been allowed to settle in Moscow and to build for themselves a heretical church, and their strange unholy customs had been adopted by not a few courtiers and great dignitaries.
Again, the heretical Egyptian king Amenophis IV.
It was at just this period, when the rival popes were engaged in a life-and-death struggle, that heretical movements appeared in England, France, Italy, Germany, and especially in Bohemia, which threatened the whole ecclesiastical order.
The strongholds of these heretical opinions were the great towns, the centres of civilization, because there the growing sentiment of municipal independence, and the rise of a burgher class through commerce, created a spirit of criticism which was dissatisfied with the worldly lives of the clergy and their undue influence in affairs.
Among the first results of the changed order of things were on the one hand the election of Huss (October 1409) to be again rector of the university, but on the other hand the appointment by the archbishop of an inquisitor to inquire into charges of heretical teaching and inflammatory preaching brought against him.