During the second quarter of the 15th century, a rag-tag mob of peasants, armed with modified farm implements, aided by a motley collection of disaffected lesser nobles, and led by the charismat­ic, blind holy warrior, Jan Ziska, spread terror throughout the military orders of central Europe. Fired by the populist religious fervor originally inspired by the teachings of the “heretic” John Hus (burned at the stake in 1415), mixed with a new­born Czech nationalism, they sought to wrest con­trol of the church from the German clergy then controlling it in their country. The Holy Roman Empire assembled a powerful coalition and pro­claimed a crusade against the Hussite upstarts. Confronted with a full-scale onslaught of mounted knights, Ziska’s infantrymen literally forged swords from plowshares. The battle-hardened invading armies were repulsed m bloody defeat after defeat.

Rise of the Hussites

The medieval German Drang nach Osten (Urge to the East) hammered against increasingly resilient Slavic confederations. In fact, the German drive decelerated to a crawl once the Slavic kingdoms of Poland and Bohemia formed. The latter was cen­tered on the large and fertile rolling plateau around the upper Elbe valley. It was open to German en­croachrnent on two fronts, though somewhat pro­tected by border mountain ranges. The Germans proved able to infiltrate, but not ingest, Bohemia.

During the reign of Otto the Great (936—973), the German empire became de facto suzerain over the Czechs. German clergy, merchants and peasantry gradually came to dominate the Bohemian infra­structure. Even the native Czech nobility began to adopt German ways, take German wives and speak the German tongue. Much as the Norman conquest in England relegated the Anglo-Saxon vernacular to the commoners, so the Czech dialect began to be confined only to the Bohemian peasants.

In 1306, the last of the native Bohemian royal line died and the Czech nobles offered the crown to foreign rulers. The House of Luxembourg accepted the offer and ruled for over a century. One of that line, Charles IV, fomented a revival of Czech cul­ture, founding the University of Prague in 1347 and cultivating it into a bastion of worldly learning and a repository of Czech culture. It became the first focal point of the German-Czech discord that even­tually swept across all of Bohemia.

Soon after the accession of Charles’ heir, the young Wenceslas, in 1378, a league of barons began a revolt against the crown. The struggle was made more complex by the fact Wenceslas’ younger brother, Sigismund, King of Hungary, sided with the rebel nobility. The feuding among the nobility expanded when the barons began to recruit merce­naries from among the lesser knights and squires who were only too glad to relieve their meager exis­tence with adventure and plunder. This expanding guerrilla element had the effect of spreading law­lessness throughout the Bohemian countryside.

Meanwhile, John Hus, a proctor at the University of Prague and follower of the English social reform­er Wycliff, began to stir many with his teachings. He stressed trimming the exorbitance of the clergy and endowing laymen with the authority to per­form certain rights of worship. Most significantly, Hus preached the Gospel in the Czech language, re­vealing the nationalism at the root of his thinking.

This simmering Czech situation further deterio­rated in 1415, when Hus, after having been offered safe conduct to a parley called by Sigismund (now also Holy Roman Emperor) to defend his maverick principles against the Pope’s charges of heresy, was arrested and burned at the stake. Four years later, when Wenceslas died, the Pope awarded the Bo­hemian crown to the now detested Sigismund.

That award became the final signal for all out rebellion that fused religious, national and econom­ic grievances into a single movement. The aroused Czechs, except for a few (albeit strategically placed) nobles and clerical holdouts, repudiated the Pope’s theology and his newly appointed autocrat.

Significantly, the tide of conversions to the Hus­site movement took in most of the flourishing arms manufacturing centers in Bohemia, particularly the new gun foundries. The indigenous armor and wea­pons manufacturing capability was fed by an eco­nomic bounty: the mining of large deposits of silver found in the 13th and 14th centuries meant the Czech princes were among the wealthiest in the German orbit. In this way the Czechs made them­selves into the most resilient hold outs against German expansion into central Europe.

Seeing all this, and clearly discerning the poten­tial threat the renegade Czechs represented to the Holy Church, Pope Martin V proclaimed a holy cru­sade against the Hussites.

The Hussite War

At the opening of the crusade in 1419, Ziska led his initial contingent of recruits from Prague to a training ground at labor. They soon repulsed an imperial probe at the Battle of Sudoner. Next, Czech and German royalists gathered a force larger than Ziska’s and enthusiastically assaulted the Hussites at Bor Pansky in southwest Bohemia. But their repeated charges failed to dislodge Ziska’s yeomen from their hilltop position, a check that kept the loyalist nobles in southern and eastern Bohemia from assisting Sigismund in his campaign of 1420.

That campaign was directed at Prague, where Ziska’s warriors held fast at the foot of Vitkov Hill (subsequently renamed Ziskov Hill). The imperial forces were rebuffed again at Vyschrad, an earlier capital of Bohemia. Then, during the winter of 1420-21, Ziska moved against Pilsen, an important communications link between the native royalists and their German allies. But Ziska’s ranks had been depleted by the earlier fighting and the change of season, so he decided rather than push the fight to a climax to retreat again to labor to regroup.

Sigismund returned in 1421, whereupon he was defeated by Ziska’s wagon forts at the Battle of Lutitz, where Ziska lost the sight in his remaining good eye. Now totally blind, Ziska still managed to continue his effective personal style of leadership in combat without overly depending on proxy com­manders.

In 1422, Sigismund invaded yet again, and was this time severely handled by Ziska in the Battles of Nevobid (6 January) and Nemecky Brod (10 Jan­uary).

During the next year, however, civil war broke out among the Hussites. The theologically more moderate “Ultraquist" faction, backed by many in Prague, were beaten at Horice on 27 April by Ziska’s more radical “laborite” block. After a brief and broken armistice, Ziska trounced the moder­ates again at Strachkowa on 4 August.

With the Taborites again in full and unchal­lenged control of the movement, Ziska undertook an invasion of Hungary in September 1423. He achieved some success, but was unable to break Sigismund’s grip on the throne, and then had to return to Bohemia in October to deal with a re­newed outbreak of civil strife among the Hussites. Ziska once more overwhelmed the Ultraquists at Skalica (6 January 1424) and Malesov (7 June). Impelled by his momentum, he marched on Prague to mop up that last bastion of resistance to his laborite group, but was stopped by yet another offer of a truce.

The Hussite groups thus united again to finish driving off the remaining adherents of Sigismund from Moravia. Ziska, however, was stricken with the plague and died on 11 October 1424, before even reaching the frontier. Upon Ziska’s death his fol­lowers began calling themselves the “Orphans,’ and are reported to have used his skin for a drumhead they beat during battle to inspire their troops.

For a time Hussite expeditions continued to overturn the established soldiery of Europe, reach­ing as far north as the German Baltic coast and east into Hungary. The dissipation of the Hussite tide was caused not by a cordon of foreign foes, but by yet another outbreak of disharmony within the ranks. At Lipany, on 16 June 1434, the Ultraquists lured the followers of the deceased Ziska from their wagon fort redoubt by feigning a withdrawal — a tactic that should have been well understood by the dead commander’s veterans — then turned on the Orphans and slaughtered them.

From that point on, the Hussites more often fell victim to turf battles among themselves and the re­maining vultures in the disintegrating imperial cru­sade. Within a generation, the Hussites had been absorbed into the various contending factions that continued the struggle for mastery of Bohemia.

Hussite Power

The main assembly point of the Hussites was at Tabor, named after an Old Testament site, a remote mountain retreat five days’ march south of Prague on the Luznice River. There they built a cadre of regular soldiers to fight the coming Imperial/Papal attempts to crush their heresy. Thus a standing professional warrior group soon separated itself from the popular levies, and was provided the wherewithal to train and remain on a permanent war footing.

The city of Prague formed its own Hussite militia to complement the labor group. This force re­tained the character of an authentic people’s levy, while the laborites grew into the professional field force of the Hussite military system. Each of these two principal forces occasionally drew on reserves from among the districts and burgs dominated by their followers. These special levies were called “house communities” or the “Old labor,” as com­pared to the standing field force, which was known as the “Great labor.”

Soon there were five “armies” in the Hussite order of battle: two permanent forces, and three emergency levies (including the Prague group) maintained at what might be called a standby level of readiness. Each force numbered between 5,000 and 6,000 fighters. By all accounts this untutored but impassioned mob developed into a military killing machine that brought fear to hardened war­riors who had previously faced down hard charging Tatar and Polish cavalry. Their inspiration was the character and combat experience of their mentor, Jan Ziska, and their tool was the battle wagon.

The Wagon at War

Hussites Part 2 (Saga 92)