The Hussite revolution Part 1

“Then on September 2 of the same year, marquises, barons, nobles, and other high-ranking persons of the kingdom of Bohemia and the margraviate of Moravia , [..], wrote letters under their own seals to the council of Constance for the unjust and unlawful sentencing to death of master Jan Hus, [..]. They claimed that the council had condemned him as an unrepentant heretic at the accusations, slanders and instigations of the mortal enemies [..] of the Bohemian kingdom [..], despite [..] not having proven against him any errors or heresies; and that, having condemned him, they punished him with a most harsh and shameful death, to the undying infamy and disgrace of the most Christian Czech kingdom [..].

[..] whoever, no matter what status, eminence or title, no matter his condition, position or professed religiosity, had said or claimed, [..] that the alleged errors and heresies had evolved in the kingdom of Bohemia [..] was lying, and [..] was a scoundrel, villain and a most perfidious traitor [..] and [..] such a man was himself a most pernicious heretic  and son of all malice and depravity, and even of the devil, who is a liar and the father of lies” end quote.

That letter, complete with 425 seals of many of the great nobles of Bohemia arrived in Constance in the autumn of 1415. And, did it change the attitude of the great princes of the church? Was there room for reconciliation between the reformers in Prague and those in Constance? Let’s find out.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 175 – Death and Defenestration, the Hussite Revolt, also episode 12 of Season 8 “The Reformation before the Reformation”.

“Then on September 2 of the same year, marquises, barons, nobles, and other high-ranking persons of the kingdom of Bohemia and the margraviate of Moravia , [..], wrote letters under their own seals to the council of Constance for the unjust and unlawful sentencing to death of master Jan Hus, [..]. They claimed that the council had condemned him as an unrepentant heretic at the accusations, slanders and instigations of the mortal enemies [..] of the Bohemian kingdom [..], despite [..] not having proven against him any errors or heresies; and that, having condemned him, they punished him with a most harsh and shameful death, to the undying infamy and disgrace of the most Christian Czech kingdom [..].

[..] whoever, no matter what status, eminence or title, no matter his condition, position or professed religiosity, had said or claimed, [..] that the alleged errors and heresies had evolved in the kingdom of Bohemia [..] was lying, and [..] was a scoundrel, villain and a most perfidious traitor [..] and [..] such a man was himself a most pernicious heretic  and son of all malice and depravity, and even of the devil, who is a liar and the father of lies” end quote.

That letter, complete with 425 seals of many of the great nobles of Bohemia arrived in Constance in the autumn of 1415. And, did it change the attitude of the great princes of the church? Was there room for reconciliation between the reformers in Prague and those in Constance? Let’s find out.

But before we start some Christmas related things. Yes, I did get some lovely presents and my family was most grateful for me being in for Yuletide rather than out there in the early 15^th century. And even happier that I did not sing. I hope I left you in good hands. If you have missed David Crowther’s episode on John Wycliffe, have a quick listen, I very much enjoyed it.

But I have not been completely idle. I have given the website some much needed TLC. It should be quicker and better organised than before. And I have found a solution to the Patreon issue. Just to say upfront, there is nothing wrong with Patreon itself just with the Apple surcharge of 30%. So if you are with Patreon at the moment or you prefer going to Patreon, nothing will change, just make sure when you sign up not to do it on the Patreon app.

But to future proof the system I have created a whole new membership site at historyofthegermans.com/support. You can sign up for membership there or you can make a one-time donation. All that goes to via Stripe, the ecommerce platform millions of other online businesses use and which crucially does not direct you to an app. The membership offer includes the existing bonus episodes and a member chat room which may take some time to kick off. I will however try to do some membership events in the new year which all members, those on Patreon and those on the website will be invited to. So, I hope you will join us at historyofthegermans.com/support as Alexander M., Klaus, Morten P., Justin B., Dr. Norbert K. and Thomas V. who have already done.

To resume our story, let’s just recap what happened in June/July 1415 in Constance. The great gathering of 10s of thousands from magnificent bishops to modest buglers had heard the arguments of Jan Hus, master of the university of Prague and preacher at the Bethlehem chapel, and dismissed them. His ideas about who was and who wasn’t a member of the church, the role of the pope and the superiority of scripture over canon law had been declared heretic and he himself was condemned to be burned at the stake, and his remains, even his clothes were all turned to ash and thrown in the Rhine river.

The Bohemians had already protested against the treatment of Jan Hus when he was arrested and anger was brewing throughout his trial. Hus hadn’t come to Constance on his own. Several noblemen, including the brave knight John of Chlum had come along to support him. One these man, Petr Mladenovics returned to Prague shortly after the trial and recounted the proceedings in every little detail, complete with copies of letters and other documents. And from that the Bohemians concluded that there had been foul play. Lawrence of Brezowa summarized the view in Prague as follows: quote “Then on Saturday,[..], 6 July, Master Jan Hus, the scholarly bachelor of Holy Scripture, a man of shining virtue in life and morality and a faithful preacher of the gospel was sentenced to death and unjustly vilified by the Council of Constance. This was based upon the false testimony of the witnesses and the relentless instigations of master Štěpán z Pálče, doctor of Holy Scriptures and Michael de Causis, parish priest of St. Voijtech,[..] representing the Czech clergy and the influence of king Sigismund. This was done despite the fact that he was not given a proper hearing in which to prove his innocence” end quote.

The villains were hence the “despicable clergy” of Bohemia, emperor Sigismund and the council as a whole that, as he wrote further down, had accepted bribes to bring about the conviction of this saintly man.

So on September 2, 1415, the nobles of Bohemia wrote the letter of protest to the Council of Constance I quoted at the top of this episode. A copy of this Bohemian Protest is now preserved at the university of Edinburgh. I put a link in the show notes so you can take a look because it is quite an unusual object. The manuscript has attached over 100 wax seals of every conceivable major Bohemian family making the whole thing look like a bibliographic medusa.

Bohemian Protest on Display | Rare Books & Manuscripts

And its content was equally unusual. These noblemen did not only blame dark forces from within Bohemia for the unjust and unlawful sentencing, but accused the Council of a miscarriage of justice. Such an accusation was again, within the context of the medieval church, heretic. It implied the council had erred when convicting Jan Hus, and a general council of the church was supposed to be infallible.

Such an act of defiance was dangerous. The church had already been concerned that Bohemia had become a center of  dissent, or to say it in their terms, a nest of heretics. By openly siding with the convicted heretic Jan Hus, the Bohemian elites only confirmed the suspicion, that Hus was not a sole actor but part of a wider movement.

This assessment was – as we know – not wrong. Bohemia had indeed become a place where controversial ideas about the role of pope and clergy were circulating, where the king, his wife and many of the senior nobles, even members of the senior clergy were sympathetic to a fundamental reform of the ecclesiastical organization.

So the Council was not unaware of the situation in Bohemia when it decided its next steps, it was just unable to predict the consequences of its actions.

On September 8, six days after the Bohemian protest, the council began the trial of Jerome of Prague, another master of the university and follower of Jan Hus. Jerome was less sure of his convictions and had tried to flee after Hus had been arrested and even recanted. But when it became clear he would never be released from prison, despite his recantation, his resolve stiffened, and he too was burned at the stake.

This created a second martyr for the cause of the Bohemian reform. Then and now martyrs, witnesses for the faith, are great rallying points. They turn from actual human beings with their own thoughts, ideas and contradictions into symbols, banners that can be raised on barricades and can be flown before armies. The image of Jan Hus burning at the stake was replicated over and over in manuscripts and leaflets, distributed all across Bohemia. If you go to the great square in the Old Town you see the enormous Jan Hus Memorial, erected in 1915 as a message of defiance against the Habsburg regime. And it remained a symbol of resistance, most recently when sitting at the feet of Jan Hus was a way to express opposition to the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. In 1985 I seem to have inadvertently joined the protest when I sat down below Jan Hus to smoke a cigarette and was chased away by police…so just for you kids out there, do not smoke, it is dangerous.

But Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague weren’t the only emblems of what was to unfold. Completely separately from the reformer’s ideas about church reform, the theologians in Prague, led by a man the Germans call Jacob of Mies and the Czechs call Jakoubek ze Stříbra [Stibro]. Apologies for my atrocious pronunciation, I am doing my best finding pronunciation guides on the internet, but I seemingly get that wrong at times. So forgive me, this is not meant as a sign of disrespect, just a case of a very difficult language.

Jakoubek of Stibro was a fellow master at the university of Prague and preacher at the church of St. Michael. He too had been heavily influenced by Wycliffe, but even more by the previous generation of Bohemian reformers, by Jan Milic and Matthew of Janow. This previous generation had emphasised the values of the early Christian church when preachers had been poor and solely dedicated to the spiritual side of things. For them and for Jakoubek of Stibro, the downfall of the church began with Gregory VII and his ambition to create a politically powerful, an imperial church that meddled in worldly affair. And whilst Jan Hus and other reformers focused on the role of the clergy or the ostentatious wealth of the popes and cardinals, Stibro zoomed in on something that had been a marginal topic so far, the offer of the eucharist in both forms, as bread and wine.

Stibro went back to scripture and read that Jesus offered both bread and wine to his disciples, and said, „do this in remembrance of me“. He could not find a passage where it said, give the congregation only the bread and reserve the wine for the priests who really appreciate it. For Stibro, taking the eucharist in both forms, sub utraque specie was the most important sacrament. He stated that it was not just a right of the laity to receive it, but an obligation to do so. This became known as Utraquism. U-T-R_A_Q_U_I_S_M, a word we will hear a lot more of.

Jakoubek’s proposal was rapidly picked up by the other reformers in Prague who already believed the common people should take communion more often as a way to bring more spiritual goodness into the world. And claiming the corrupt and money-grabbing clergy had deprived the people of the sacrament of the eucharist just hit the spot. Generally speaking, people do not tend to take up pitchforks to defend a complex point of ecclesiology. But if you tell them they had a right to the wine when St. Peter was in charge and that nowadays the crooked priests withhold it from them on the orders of popes dripping in gold, now that is a good enough reason to get up on the barricades.

In 1414 there had not yet been a need to turn ploughshares into swords in order to partake in the bread and wine, since the reform preachers in Prague’s New Town, in the Bethlehem Chapel and elsewhere were liberally offering the eucharist sub utraque specie.

And that could have easily continued without creating much unrest, had it not been for the debate it sparked at the Council of Constance. The offer of bread and wine had so far not really been a major theological issue. In fact until the 12^th century the catholic church did habitually offer it at mass and pope Gelasius I in the 5^th century had prescribed it as part of the standard liturgy. It was mainly for practical reasons that the catholic church changed tack on the matter and reserved the chalice, the wine, to the priests.

So the council could easily have decided that, yeah, if the churches in Prague want to offer the wine to the laity, just go ahead. And that would have dramatically reduced tensions. But they did not. Instead, on 15^th of June, a week after the hearings of Jan Hus, but before he was burned at the stake, the council of Constance decided that quote “although this sacrament was received by the faithful under both kinds in the early church, nevertheless later it was received under both kinds only by those confecting it, and by the laity only under the form of bread.[..] and since this custom was introduced for good reasons by the church and holy fathers, and has been observed for a very long time, it should be held as a law which nobody may repudiate or alter at will without the church’s permission. [..] Those who stubbornly assert the opposite of the aforesaid are to be confined as heretics and severely punished by the local bishops or their officials [..]” end quote.

That was not exactly the smartest available move. Stating that, yes, originally there was bred and wine, but now we have been cutting you guys off the drink for so long, it is now the law, was a brilliant way of saying, we the church know better than Jesus himself. It was oil on the fire. Even Jan Hus, who had been quite sceptical about Utraquism, switched over to Jakoubek’s position.

We now have a Bohemian population that was enraged by what they saw as the unlawful burning of Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague and had just received confirmation that the Council of Constance was indeed rating canon law, even just established practice above scripture. Whatever these guys were doing, they were not helping to pave the way into the afterlife.

Hence in Prague more and more parishioners moved across to those churches where the priests were offering both bread and wine. The chalice became the instantly visible demarcation line between the old school followers of the papal and conciliar doctrine and the group of reformers who were demanding change.

If you were the archbishop of Prague in 1415 you would probably consider a change in approach. Playing hardball with these reformer guys is clearly not working. You would write to the cardinals and bishops in Constance and suggest they tone it down a little.

Ahh – no. For the senior clergy assembled in Southern Germany, Prague was just a nest of heretics that needed to be exterminated. They ordered the archbishop to enforce an interdict on the city of Prague. All church services had to cease, no more sacraments were to be dispensed, the dying weren’t given the last rites, couples weren’t able to get married and nobody heard their confession.

Or that is what the church overlords wanted to happen. But that is not what did happen. The reform oriented priests in Prague who were already branded heretics for dispensing the bread and wine, for saying out loud that Jan Hus had been a god fearing man and for reading and sharing the books of John Wycliff, they did not care if “breaking the interdict” was added to the charge sheet. They kept their churches and chapels open. And since the catholic priests kept their places of worship closed, more and more citizens of Prague went to what we can now call Hussite churches to get married, baptise their children and receiving the eucharist.

There was little the archbishop was prepared to do to stop it. Konrad von Vechta, the prelate in question, had not bought the post in order to end his days dangling from a lamppost, so he just pretended that none of these things were happening. And as for the king, that king was Wenceslaus IV, the lazy. All throughout the 56 years o his life Wenceslaus had never been decisive or even moderately competent. Part of that was personality, but a 35 year career as a full-blown alcoholic hadn’t helped. He was going round in a perennial hate loop between his brother Sigismund, his overbearing barons, the corrupt clergy and his rebellious subjects. The chances that he would do anything other than having wild tantrums followed by heavy drinking sessions were slim. His wife, Sophie of Bavaria was a much more capable monarch. She understood the mood in Bohemia and sympathised with the Hussites all along.

And so did the majority of the King’s advisers and the barons who held the great offices of state. Many of these had signed the Bohemian protest letter from September 1415 and provided the military cover for the reforms that were now under way.

So, nobody did anything to stop the Hussites from building up a full scale new church organisation in Bohemia. To cover their tracks the king and the archbishop sent reassuring messages to Constance saying, all is going swimmingly, there is nothing to see here.

For the following 3 years, from 1416 to 1419 Bohemia shifted further and further towards the Hussite church. Though the interdict was lifted after a year, most parishioners had gotten used to the utraquist communion. They also enjoyed hearing the  sermon in Czech, even hearing some of the gospel being translated so that for the first time they could actually understand what their religion was really about. They also found that many of the Hussite priests took their job seriously, cared about their parishioners and were less preoccupied with money, clothes and the company of loose women.

I do not know whether you have listened to Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast but if you have, the next step in the process will sound familiar to you.

Jan Hus, as we discussed at some length had gone to Constance because he believed that there was at least a tiny chance that he could convince the council of his interpretation of the Holy Scripture. To him it was a theological question whether a corrupt pope had power over the faithful, not a political one. Hence he saw a path to reform that was based on cooperation and compromise with the papacy.

But the cardinals, bishops and doctors of Constance literally burned that bridge down and by condemning utraquist communion deepened the chasm even further. At which point the Prague reformers no longer saw a reason to take the catholic views into account at all. They were heretics whatever they did, So they may as well go the whole hog. They went looking for guidance in the bible itself. And in doing so they found that there was a whole lot of stuff in the church that wasn’t in the bible, such as confession, penance, monks, bishops, popes, indulgences, etc., etc., pp. Meanwhile there was a lot of stuff in the bible that as not a priority in the Avignon church, like blessed are the poor, turn the other cheek,love thy neighbour, though shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, wife, manservant, maidservant, ox, ass, nor anything that is thy neighbours, and so forth and so forth.

The downside of this freeing of the spirits was that it led to the inevitable splintering of the movement into moderates and radicals, and last week’s radicals or tomorrow’s moderates.

One of the more radical demands was the eucharist in both forms for children, i.e., giving not just adults, but children, even babies the sacramental wine. It makes sense if you believe it is a prerequisite to salvation, but not so much if you want your children to grow up without brain damage. Discuss!

And not only did the movement develop ever more radical ideas, it also spread outside Prague. And there is a genuine oddity about the Hussite revolt that makes it quite fundamentally different from most revolutions I can think of. Usually the epicentre of the most radical thought is in the big cities, whilst the countryside tends to be more conservative. Think of the Vendee during the French Revolution or the Russian peasants initial response to the October Revolution. Even in the American revolution the picture was quite mixed. In Bohemia the rural population embraced these new ideas enthusiastically and even went far beyond where the masters of Prague University were prepared to go.

There is a huge debate about why that was the case. In part it may have to do with the Bohemian barons many of whom had embraced the Hussite movement and provided some aircover for dissenters. The Marxist-Leninists pointed to the exploitation of the peasant population as a driver of radicalisation. One of the more intriguing ideas is that the Bohemian countryside might have been a refuge of the Waldensians. The Waldensians were the followers of Peter Waldo, a former merchant from Lyon who turned preacher in around 1100. What exactly they believed we will never know since like in the case of the Cathars, all documentary evidence if from the Catholic church who were determined to exterminate them. But given the complaints of heretic movements since time immemorial go along similar lines, we can assume they too believed that one should return to the text of the bible, that the church organisation was profoundly corrupt and much of its teachings, rituals and requirements were made up. The theory goes that some Waldensians had fled to Bohemia to escape persecution where their ideas spread in secret amongst the rural population until developments in Prague made them come out of hiding.

Maybe that was true, or maybe they were just simply better educated and more open minded in matters of religion than peasants had been elsewhere.

So out in the provinces farmers, serfs, farmhands and their wives and daughters but also nobles and artisans came together to pray, not inside a church but in private houses, barns or even under the open sky. Their priests went around wearing the same clothes as their flock. They rejected all these  plush vestments  and sacramental objects, the silver chalices and gold reliquaries as vain. Heavily decorated altars weren’t necessary. A priest could say mass on a table, on top of a cask or even just on the ground. Bishops they called locusts and coxcombs, the stone churches a den of thieves and concubines and that it was better to gamble their money away on dice than offer it to the evil prelates.

As the congregations grew, the ceremonies could no longer be held in private houses or barns. They gathered on the top of hills and mountains to hear the sermon and celebrate mass and received eucharists in both forms, everyone from babies to grandmas.

And they weren’t shy to let actions follow their words. They refused to buy the indulgences, to pay the tithes and dozens of ecclesiastical fees and charges. Things then tipped over into violence. Prelates houses were looted, the vicars and the members of their household thrown out onto the street, often naked and pelted with manure.

The same happened in Prague, where we hear of mobs breaking into churches, pushing out the catholic preachers and destroying the images. Yes Iconoclasm was also on the rise.

Whilst all this is happening, the city is shaken by raids on prelates and the hills are alive with the sound of sermons, the political arm of the movement, led by progressive Bohemian barons and many of the great officeholders of the state, organised into the Hussite League. The Hussite League swore to protect the rights of preachers to perform services freely, only supervised by their local bishops. In particular they are not to be made subject to foreign jurisdiction, namely papal or imperial. Interdicts and other punishments are only permitted when based on scripture as determined by the university of Prague.

Bohemia is about to shake off even the semblance of papal and imperial oversight. In the meantime, the council of Constance had run its course and put an end to the Schism with the election of pope Martin V. Church reform both as the Hussites would have understood it as well as the distributional flavour the council itself preferred was postponed until the next council which would not really get going for another 15 years. The pope was hence back in charge of church affairs as if nothing had happened and one of the things Martin V thought needed to happen was to stamp out this nest of heretics on the eastern border of the Empire. He tasked two men with this, Sigismund, the king of the Romans and heir of the Bohemian kingdom and Jan Železný (Schelesni), the bishop of Litomyšl, known as “the iron”.

Sigismund and the iron man did get to work unencumbered by even the slightest understanding of the situation in Bohemia. They leant super hard on Sigismund’ brother Wenceslaus, who was still at least formally the king of Bohemia though in actual fact he did whatever the last person he met had told him to do.

Sigismund and Iron man told him to implement 22 specific measures, intended to bring everything back to where it stood before even the first whiff of reform had been in the air. the churches were to be returned to its former priests, church discipline reestablished, tithes and other ecclesiastical taxes to be paid again and naturally an end to the heretic practice of offering the eucharist in both forms. To round it up, every preacher was asked to publicly declare Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague pernicious heretics who got what they deserved. Ah, and Bethlehem chapel was to be torn down.

Wenceslaus even in his drunken haze realised that this would be disastrous. He pleaded with his brother to take a more conciliatory approach to which Sigismund responded with an open letter threatening him with excommunication and the imperial ban, which would have meant Wenceslaus would lose his crown. So he caved and he issued the edicts.

Sigismund and the iron bishop Železný (Schelesni) were not completely insane though. They did have some allies in Prague. A number of the Bohemian barons had either remained good Catholics throughout or found  themselves shifted to the right not by moving themselves but by the Hussite movement shifting left at pace. The other group that sided with the Catholics were the class of German-speaking merchants and bankers. Though many of them believed church reforms were overdue and they had listened to sermons of Jan Milic and Jan Hus, they could not afford to be branded heretics. Their business was long distance trade and as long as their counterparts in Nurnberg, Augsburg, Vienna, Krakow and the Hanse cities remained catholic, they would risk their valuable networks by joining the Hussites.

These allies were still a minority, but a powerful one which the papacy believed could together with the might of an imperial army turn the clock back.

Initially things went alright. Wenceslaus removed Hussite advisors and officials from his court and the city councils, replacing them with catholic-leaning ones. He expelled Hussite priests from churches restoring them to their previous occupants. The inquisition moved in and hunted down heretics in Prague as well as in the countryside.

Until in the summer of 1419 events unfolded that would change the course of Bohemian and German history for good.

The first of these events was a gathering of allegedly 40,000 worshippers near the castle of Bechyne, halfway between Prague and Vienna. These people had come from all over Bohemia, fleeing the inquisition and willing to resist. They held a huge open air mass with sermons in Czech and the eucharist in the Utraquist manner. The priests were split into three groups, one preaching all day from morning to nightfall, another third was hearing auricular confession, again, all day long and the last third gave communion. And they had moved on ideologically as well. Again our chronicler reports that quote “There all called each other brother and sister, and the rich divided the food that they had prepared for themselves with the poor.” and “the multitude of them believed were of one heart and one soul; [..] they had all things in common [..] and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need” end quote. This was a deliberate refashioning of the  communism of the primitive church of the apostles, a million miles away from the reality of the late medieval church.  

The sincerity and determination these men and women on Mount Tabor was becoming very disconcerting for the conservatives in Prague, and even for relative moderates.

But they weren’t given much time to ponder this, because 8 days later, on July 30^th one of the more radical Hussite preachers, Jan Zelivski, led a procession through the streets of Prague. He preached a sermon outside the church of St. Stephens on Ezejiel 6:3-5 “Behold I, even I, will bring down the sword upon you and will destroy your high places, And your Alters shall be desolate , and your images will be broken; and I will cast down your slain men before your idols” andthen Jermiah 14:13 and the people shall be cast down into the street”. He would later say that he never intended what happened afterward nor had he called on the crowd to do it. These wee jus randomly chosen sections of the bible…

After the crowd had entered and ransacked the church of St. Stephen they moved down the enormous Charles square to the Town hall of Prague New Town. At the time Prague was comprised of four separate independent cities, the Old Town, the lesser Town on the other side of the Vltava, the royal castle district and the New Town. Each had their own town hall. That of the new town stood and stands at the North Eastern corner of Charles Square.

The reason they went to the Town Hall was to demand the release of some Hussites who had been apprehended during street violence the day before. It was a Sunday and under normal circumstances the Town Hall would have been empty. But that day it wasn’t. The new burgomaster and 12 of his council members, all recently appointed good Catholics, had gathered at the hall to plan how they would prevent the procession to turn into a massive street fight. It seems they had not come up with a good idea, because by 09:45 they were surrounded by Hussites loudly demanding the release of the prisoners. Messages had been sent to the royal castle demanding reinforcements which is why the city magistrates felt confident. Hey refused the release and according to some accounts mocked the Hussites, even throw stones at the monstrance that the preacher Zelivski was holding up.

The crowd first became restless and then as time went by and no prisoners were forthcoming, they became angry, very angry. Meanwhile the soldiers from the castle were slow in showing up. The Burgomaster and his councillors grew anxious as the pounding on the doors below became louder and louder, then suddenly quiet as the attackers applied levers followed by a crashing sound as the door broke out of its hinges. Dozens, then hundreds of violently angry citizens of Prague as well as refugees from persecution across Bohemia stormed the council chamber. Not even giving the Royal councillors the chance to speak they opened the windows and threw them down onto the street. The council chamber was on the second floor, so most of them were dead or unconscious when they landed. These were the lucky ones. They did not get to notice as the crowd tore them limb from limb, undoubtably shouting something about god’s will whilst Zelivski held the monstrance above their heads.

When the 300 soldiers from the castle finally got to the new Town it was occupied by the followers of Jan Zelivski. A militia had been formed. All citizens had been asked to come to the town hall and commit to the Utraquist cause, those who refused fled. A new city council was established and the town hall itself and houses nearby were fortified. The soldiers returned to their king to report that the Revolution had begun and taken half of the capital of Bohemia.

One man was amongst the crow, had probably led the men into the town hall, a man called Jan Zizka, a man who will make sure that this medieval storm of the Bastille did not become just another urban revolt as they were taking place around the same time in dozens of cities across the empire, in Flanders, Paris and England. But that is a story for another time, next time to be precise. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime if you want to check out my brand new membership website, go to historyofthegermans.com/support.