The Council of Basel had one great achievement, the peace made in 1439 with the Bohemian Hussites. Thereafter the council skidded toward its unhappy demise a decade later. Well before then, Pope Eugenius IV's “ill-judged, hasty, and abortive” attempt to dissolve the council created a state of affairs “that was to render impossible the achievement at the council of truly significant and permanent church-wide reform.” Ideas there were aplenty, for the councils had promoted an intensive and fruitful exchange of reform principles, arguments, and agendas among the churchmen of Christendom. The central problem was agency. The pope's actions and the general council's failure presented reform-minded churchmen with a vexing question: How could a reform of “head and members” be achieved without either a pope or a general council at its head? How, especially, could it happen in the Empire, this vast kingdom with its weak monarch and its bishops deeply ensnared in its feudal governance? This was the German variation on a greater question: How could the Church be one and the churches many? On the reef of this conundrum most movements for reform foundered.