Season 09 – The Council of Constance and the Hussite Revolt (1356-1437)

by on

A story of slander

Barbara ist geil und ruchlos is the title of a 17th century description of emperor Sigismund’s second wife, Barbara of Celje and it goes on as follows:

“Barbara, was a German Messalina, a woman of insatiable lust; so nefarious / that she had no god / nor angel nor devil / nor heaven nor hell/that she believed in.

When her handmaidens  fasted and prayed / she scolded them / that they tortured their bodies / to worship a fictitious god.

Instead she admonished them / in her good Sardanapalian way / that they should in every way enjoy the pleasures of this life / because after this  there is no other to be hoped for.

This godless harlot / sought paradise on this foul earth in doglike lust / although she was already close to 60 years of age.” End quote.

But this is not where it ends. The Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu described her end, in an abandoned church in Styria thus:

“The features, though a hundred and fifty years had passed since her funeral, were tinted with the warmth of life. Her eyes were open; no cadaverous smell exhaled from the coffin. The two medical men, one officially present, the other on the part of the promoter of the inquiry, attested the marvelous fact, that there was a faint but appreciable respiration, and a corresponding action of the heart. The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic; and the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed. Here then were all the admitted signs and proofs of vampirism. The body, therefore, in accordance with the ancient practice, was raised, and a sharp stake driven through the heart of the vampire, who uttered a piercing shriek at the moment, in all respects as might escape from a living person in the last agony. Then the head was struck off, and a torrent of blood flowed from the severed neck. The body and head were next placed on a pile of wood, and reduced to ashes, which were thrown upon the river and borne away, and that territory has never since been plagued by the visits of a vampire.“

Excellent – HotGPod has its first sexually charged lesbian vampire…I suggest we take a bite at the reality of that story.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcast

Listen on YouTube

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 184: Barbara of Celje, the German Messalina, which also episode 21 of Season 9: The Reformation before the Reformation.

Barbara ist geil und ruchlos is the title of a 17th century description of emperor Sigismund’s second wife, Barbara of Celje and it goes on as follows:

“Barbara, was a German Messalina, a woman of insatiable lust; so nefarious / that she had no god / nor angel nor devil / nor heaven nor hell/that she believed in.

When her handmaidens  fasted and prayed / she scolded them / that they tortured their bodies / to worship a fictitious god.

Instead she admonished them / in her good Sardanapalian way / that they should in every way enjoy the pleasures of this life / because after this  there is no other to be hoped for.

This godless harlot / sought paradise on this foul earth in doglike lust / although she was already close to 60 years of age.” End quote.

But this is not where it ends. The Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu described her end, in an abandoned church in Styria thus:

“The features, though a hundred and fifty years had passed since her funeral, were tinted with the warmth of life. Her eyes were open; no cadaverous smell exhaled from the coffin. The two medical men, one officially present, the other on the part of the promoter of the inquiry, attested the marvelous fact, that there was a faint but appreciable respiration, and a corresponding action of the heart. The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic; and the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed. Here then were all the admitted signs and proofs of vampirism. The body, therefore, in accordance with the ancient practice, was raised, and a sharp stake driven through the heart of the vampire, who uttered a piercing shriek at the moment, in all respects as might escape from a living person in the last agony. Then the head was struck off, and a torrent of blood flowed from the severed neck. The body and head were next placed on a pile of wood, and reduced to ashes, which were thrown upon the river and borne away, and that territory has never since been plagued by the visits of a vampire. “

Excellent – HotGPod has its first sexually charged lesbian vampire…I suggest we take a bite at the reality of that story.

But before we start just a quick reminder that this show remains free of bloodsucking advertisers or paywalls. The History of the Germans is free for everyone to enjoy uninterrupted thanks to the generosity of our patrons who have gone to historyofthegermans.com/support and have either signed up for a membership or for a one-time donation. And our special thanks go to: Greg Dux, Brian W., Christine, Mine Spot, Ghill Donald (like the fish), Beth B., Mickeymarbh and Matthew G. who have already signed up.

Support the Show – Become a Patron

And with that, back to the show.

The subject of all these lurid stories is Barbara of Celje, the second wife of our long standing emperor Sigismund.

She was born in 1390, the daughter of count Hermann II of Celje. The counts of Celje were a family on its way up. They had started out as nobles of Soun, vassals of the dukes of Styria based on their castle of Sanneck, in modern day Slovenia.  They expanded their position and were elevated to counts in the 14th. By the beginning of the 15th century they had acquired material possessions in Hungary. And their position in the European nobility had received a boost. They were now related to the royal house of Bosnia and Barbara’s cousin Anna was married to king Jogaila of Poland.

During the long conflict that brought Sigismund to the throne of Hungary, the counts of Celje sided with the Garai family, the leaders of one of the three main factions. They initially supported Sigismund’s mother-in-law, the formidable Elisabeth but after having more or less caused her death in 1386, they rallied behind Sigismund. Episode 169 if you want to wade through that sea of murder and misery again.

As we know Sigismund’s reign in Hungary remained unstable during these first decades. In 1401 his magnates had lost patience with him and his attempts to centralize the kingdom, favoring foreigners for top jobs and spending a lot of time in Bohemia. They captured him and locked him up in a castle.

But then there was the question, what to do next. They were disappointed with Sigismund, but there wasn’t any ready alternative they could all agree on. So they did what you would always do in the middle ages, tie everything together in marriage alliances. Nicolas Garai married Anna of Celje and her sister Barbara married Sigismund. That arrangement made the head of the most powerful faction in the empire the brother-in-law of the king whilst one of the country’s richest landowners became his father-in-law.

This alliance of Garai, Celje and Sigismund kept the other parties down, in particular since their heads, John Lakfi and John Horvati were both dead and their possessions distributed amongst Sigismund’s followers.

Still Sigismund had married down, the son of an emperor sharing his bed with a girl whose great grandfather may have been a simple knight for all we know. How bad this was can be seen in the assessment by Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini, the future pope Pius II and someone well versed with imperial politics. quote: “Many thought it was monstrous since a king who married a countess married beneath his station. Moreover, at that time, the counts of Cilly were neither powerful nor illustrious, as they are now, for they were considered to be subject to the House of Austria. But Sigismund, who at the time was not very fond of the House of Austria, separated these counts from Austria and made them free and illustrious princes. This matter became the beginning and reason for many conflicts.” End quote.

Despite the difference in status, the happy couple was otherwise very well matched.

Here is how Piccolimini described the groom: quote “Sigismund was a man of distinguished stature, with shining eyes, a large forehead, pleasantly rosy cheeks, a long and plentiful beard, and a great mind.” Unquote. He was a tall and slim man and he emphasised his height by wearing a rather unusual fur cap. I am a bit at a loss how to describe this particular garment, but it was a fairly tall, round hat with enormous flaps on both sides and another, even more enormous front flap that was always folded upwards. This fancy gear must have made him even taller than he already was.

The advantage of wearing something nobody else did is that we can recognise Sigismund in many images from the time that weren’t meant to be portraits. Meister Francke’s  painting cycle of St. Barbara that was made for a trading city way up north in Finland very clearly shows Sigismund as the stern father of a gorgeous but sartorially deprived Barbara. As a very weird coincidence, we had discussed this picture already once here, way back in episode 127 – the Art and Culture of the Hanse though without me noticing the link to Sigismund.

 And about his wife the future pope said: quote: “Barbara was a beautiful woman, tall, white, but with some face blemishes. She ardently sought beauty. Unquote. As for sartorial quirks, there are various websites etc. that claim she wore black dresses and black gloves at all times. There is no evidence for that in any contemporary source nor in the confirmed depictions of her. Apparently she was just wearing what suited her, and judging by the imagery, quite a lot did suit her quite well.

Thus two very beautiful spouses were united. When exactly they got married is unclear. But if she was born in 1390, the earliest date for the consummation of the marriage would have been her 12th birthday, i.e., sometime in 1402. By that time her groom was already 32.

Sigismund, as we know from episode 169 did not have anything resembling a pleasant childhood. From the age of 11 he had been thrown into the snake pit that was Hungarian politics from which he emerged victorious after all his adversaries, male and female had come to an equally untimely as unpleasant end.

Getting married to much older and emotionally distant husband wasn’t anything unusual in this period. An aristocratic girl should not expect anything else. Here is our friend Piccolomini again: quote “He was passionate but inconstant, clever in speech, fond of wine, ardent in love, guilty of a thousand adulteries, quick to anger and ready to forgive. He did not hoard money but spent prodigiously. He promised more than he kept, and often dissimulated.”

Not a dreamboat, in particular if you add the deformation of his jaw that prevented him from closing his mouth. Still it seemed the two of them got on reasonably well.

Their first and only child, Elisabeth was born in 1409, already several years into the marriage. There would not be any more children despite sexual relations between husband and wife continuing with interruptions throughout their marriage. We obviously have no medical records, though we know that Sigismund suffered severely from gout which can negatively affect fertility. There are also no records of illegitimate sons from his innumerable affairs.

Some of Sigismund’s commentaries suggest that he was not expecting any more offspring after Elisabeth had been born, though he gave no further details.

One thing in which the couple differed quite dramatically was in their approach to money. As the queen of Hungary she had received a number of castles as her dower, as her personal property. Barbara was always very careful with her property. The overwhelming majority of documents that can be ascribed to her personally were demands for payment of dues and taxes sent to the various towns and villages she owned. Sigismund on the other had was always completely broke He was so down on his luck that at some point he pawned his crowns, his Order of the Garter, even his clothes. He rarely paid his courtiers and officers in cash. Instead he granted them lands and rights to the extent such was still available. The biggest such payout was to his close friend, the burggrave Frederick of Zollern who he made Margrave of Brandenburg and a Prince elector to pay off his enormous debts.

When he met Pope Eugene IV in Rome, he allegedly told him, “Holy Father, we are dissimilar in three ways and similar in other three: You sleep in the morning, I get up before dawn. You drink water, I drink wine. You flee women, I pursue them. But we are similar in this that you pour out the money of the Church, while I keep nothing for myself. You have bad hands, and I have bad feet. You destroy the Church, and I the Empire.”

One of the rather unusual dynamics that developed between Barbara and Sigismund was that she lent him money, and as time went by and Barbara became ever richer, the sums she lent him and the mining rights, taxes and properties she collected as security for these loans grew larger and larger in scale.  

Another point of difference between husband and wife was their relationship to the Habsburgs. The Counts of Celje had originally been vassals of the Habsburgs and they let Barbara and her family feel their inferior status at every opportunity. This was not just a source of irritation, but had also some material political implications. As we know Albrecht of Habsburg was Sigismund’s designated successor and was slated to marry their only child and heiress of the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary. At the same time the Celjes and Garais were essential for Sigismund’s rule of Hungary.

Despite the political differences, Sigismund gave Barbara a material role in Hungarian politics. She often served as a member of the regency councils that he put in place during his regular absences and for some periods she ruled the country more or less on her own. Most modern historians try to make her out as a sensible and successful ruler during these periods, though looking at the evidence of what she actually did, I would judge it at best middle of the road. She was no Margarete Mautasch who held her lands against Karl IV, one of Europe’s greatest tactician of the times. But she wasn’t a disaster either, just average.

This has been going for 10 minutes now, so where is the Messalina and vampire part.

The moment when it allegedly all went pear shaped was around 1415. We are at the Council of Constance where Barbara acts as the first lady of europe. She was given a splendid entry into the city and participated in all the great festivities laid on to entertain the thousands of senior princes and prelates.

A French nobleman who lived next door to Barbara during the council tells us that Barbara kept an open house, where anyone was welcome to come and go, enjoy the musicians and comedians she had brought on. He points out that quote; “Nowhere in the world is a more indulgent husband than Sigismund who not only lets his wife do anything she wants, but actively encouraged her to take part in public dances, speak with everyone, and relate to people in such a  friendly way that some who do not know her would not consider her a queen but as a woman of some lowly trade” end quote.

M. de Montreuil who wrote this was a bit of a bigot and a touch creepy. He actually got Barbara’s chambermaid to show him the queen’s bedroom.

Next thing that happened was that in 1415 Sigismund sets off on his journey to convince the last reluctant pope, Pedro da Luna, to resign. Barbara in turn goes home to Hungary. And then, nothing. She did not have a political function for the next eight years. She issued only very few charters in the first three years, but was still able to do certain financial transactions. In 1419 she dropped off the face of the earth. It will take until 1423 that she reappears in her role as queen.

According to Sigismund’s chronicler, Eberhard Windeck, the king had received malicious rumours about Barbara’s conduct at Constance and had decided to banish her. Piccolomini’s take was more explicit: quote “[..] since Sigismund often fell in love with other women, she, too, began to love others, for a cheating husband makes a cheating wife.” End quote.

As to the alleged lovers, no names are given in contemporary sources, but Frederick I of Brandenburg and Sigismund’s close collaborator Jan Wallenrode had been listed as well as a third person, a knight called Johannes Wallenroth.

Royal adultery was no laughing matter. If there was doubt about the legitimacy of any or all of the royal children, civil war was almost the inevitable result. Accusations of infidelity were usually taken seriously and investigated. Barbara’s cousin Anna, the queen of Poland had been subjected to such a  process and acquitted.

So far, naughty, but not exactly Messalina.

After 1423 the royal couple seemed to be reconciled. They go on several diplomatic visits together and Sigismund endows her most generously with castles, towns and mining rights. Over the subsequent 14 years, thanks to careful management of her estates and Sigismund’s eternal need for ready cash, Barbara became one of the richest landowners in Hungary.

In 1436 Sigismund finally becomes the fully recognised king of Bohemia and she is crowned queen with full pomp and circumstances. But as we know Sigismund was not allowed to enjoy the summit of his ambitions for very long.

A few days before Sigismund’s death, Barbara gets arrested. Why and by whom is heavily contested.

One story is that Sigismund discovered a conspiracy whereby Barbara was planning to marry king Wladyslav III of Poland upon Sigismund’s death and pass the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary to the Poles, sidestepping Albrecht of Habsburg and her daughter Elisabeth.

The other version was that duke Albrecht of Habsburg, Sigismund’s official heir, had her arrested to rob her of her possessions and to remove a potential opponent to his rule.

Here is our friend Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini again with what happened next: After Sigismund’s death, Barbara wanted to go to Poland, bringing with her an immense [treasure of] gold and silver, but on the way, she was held up and plundered. Now she has some castles in the Kingdom of Bohemia that belong to the queen’s estate. There she lives, not like an empress but not in poverty. End quote

Albrecht seized all her 30 castles and copious lands which amounted to significant more in revenue than the whole of the royal demesne. She would never receive that back, and was only granted a small dower as queen of Bohemia.

She lived for another 14 years, until 1451, spending her time with alchemy, trying to regain her lost fortunes by turning copper into silver or gold.

Sad, but still no Messalina.

Over the centuries writers seeking a thrilling or titillating story embellished these rather meagre facts and created a veritable monster. Her one potential fling with an unknown knight in Constance became a string of lovers, lovers who often came to a sticky end. There are some similarities to the stories about Elisabeth Bathory, the other Hungarian alleged serial killer from the 17th century.

The combination of sexual licentiousness and interest in alchemy coalesces in Carmilla, the very first vampire novel written in 1872, the one I quoted at the top of the episode.

In Croatia she is still known as the Black queen, on account of always wearing black and carrying a black raven on her shoulder. The story goes she had given her castle to the devil to protect her fortune and in the tunnels under the city she still resides as the snake queen.  

Moving away from the land of fables, the question is what really happened. Did she have an uncontrolled sex drive, or was it all politics.

Let’s start with the politics.

As we know Sigismund’s politics were extremely inconsistent. One day he was pursuing this objective with these allies and the other day, he was heading elsewhere. That was not entirely his fault, but was largely a function of the extremely convoluted political situation he found himself in.

As for Barbara, she was a lot more straightforward, in part because her main concern was Hungary and her family. She was arguong for a closer alliance with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its ruler, King Wladyslaw II, Jagiello. Why. One may argue that an alliance of Poland, Lithuania, Bohemia and Hungary was the best way to protect Hungary’s southern border against the rising Ottoman power. And she was opposed to a closer alliance with the Habsburgs. The latter was likely down to old family rivalry, but may also have been driven by personal animosity. We do not know, because she left no notes on her political thought.

As for Sigismund’s relationship with the Habsburgs, he did have a close link to Albrecht, the duke of Austria. So close in fact that little Elisabeth, barely a year old, was engaged to Albrecht. And if there was any consistency in Sigismund, it was his commitment to building Albrecht up as his successor.

Still, an engagement at such a young age was not much more than an option. Sigismund himself had been engaged to various noble ladies before he settled on Mary of Hungary when he was 6.

Therefore the Habsburg alliance wasn’t set and done until such time that Albrecht and Elisbeth would consume the marriage, which did eventually happen in 1422, once Elizabeth had turned 12. But in the meantime there was a lot of room for negotiations, and as we know, Albrecht had to pay the huge sum of 400,000 florins for his bride, money that went into the futile campaign in Bohemia.

It is therefore possible that Barbara had been exploring and supporting alternatives to the Habsburg marriage before 1422. Constance would have been a perfect stage to do that given the presence of dozens of princes and royal delegations, as well as prelates who could block and approve marriages on the basis of how closely related the bride and groom were.

So it is quite possible that the rift between Sigismund and Barbara had nothing to do with alleged infidelities, but actual political disagreements about who Elisabeth was going to marry. Once the marriage had been consumed and there was no way back, the couple could reconcile, which is what they did.

The second incident, the arrest in 1437 was a political act, irrespective which side one follows. I personally doubt that Barbara was indeed committed to marry king Wladyslaw III of Poland and disinherit her daughter. Apart from anything, the proposed groom was merely 13 years old at the time and she was 47. Not unheard of, but a bit far-fetched.

The idea that Albrecht had her arrested whilst concocting a conspiracy theory is a lot more credible. Albrecht needed Barbara’s castles and towns both to provide him with the financial resources to rule Hungary and for military strategic reasons. And Barbara would not have handed them over voluntarily.

A which point there emerges a good reason for the Habsburgs to damage Barbara’s reputation. Painting her as a cougar conspiring to satisfy her lust for a boy king of Poland was a great way to justify their illegal expropriation. And they did have a perfect weapon to do that with, our friend Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini, the future pope Pius II. This great humanist had been a close friend and supporter of the Habsburgs, in particular Albrecht’s cousin, the emperor Frederick III. Most of the lurid stories about Barbara can be traced back to Piccolomini and have been distributed by sources close to the Habsburgs.

So, she was framed.

That is at least what the vast majority of historians now believe.

There is however one last point that I would like to make. Many of these attempts to exonerate female figures in history have a habit of painting the victim of slander as a sober, almost prudish figure, focused on sensible matters.

I am not sure this is always true. In case of Barbara of Celje, she was clearly someone who enjoyed life, liked to dance, music, comedy and just conviviality.

And let’s put this into the context of the times. The court of Sigismund was a long, long way from Victorian England. He himself was clearly keen on all kinds of sexual adventures. And so were the people around him. His chancellors, Georg von Hohenlohe and Jan von Wallenrode were both bishops, but their behaviour was not exactly in line with the exigences of the ecclesiastical office. And then there is Kaspar Schlick. He was the son of a patrician from Eger, modern day Cheb. He had joined Sigismund’s entourage as a scribe and slowly but surely moved through the ranks before he became the very first ever chancellor not to be a prelate. He amassed a huge fortune in Sigismund’s service, some of it as direct donations, some as repayment of loans granted to the monarch at exorbitant interest and the rest through bribes and counterfeit documents. Towards the end of Sigismund’s life, the emperor arranged a marriage for his chancellor to a Silesian duchess and one of his own distant relatives. Five weeks before Sigismund’s death he was elevated to count of Bassano and prince of Wenden. And even after Sigismund passed away, “His versatile intellect and exceptional natural goodness made it possible for him to enjoy equal favour with three emperors of very different character.”.

What matters here is that Kaspar Schlick was not only an incredibly successful civil servant, but also a sponsor of our friend Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini who he helped to become bishop of Trieste which set him up for a career that ended up on the papal throne.

And in return, Piccolomini created a literary monument for his friend when he made him the main character of his book Historia de Duobus Amantibus. He is Euryalus, an imperial courtier and passionate lover of Lucretia, a married women in Siena. Let me give you a short excerpt from this rather unique work by a future pope: quote

“You are my Ganymede, my Hippolytus, my Diomedes,” said Lucretia.
“You are my Polyxena,” Euryalus replied, “my Emilia, you are Venus herself.”

Now he praised her lips, now her cheeks, now her eyes. At times, lifting the covering and revealing what he had never seen before, he gazed in admiration and said:

“I find more than I imagined. Just like this, Actaeon saw Diana bathing in the spring. What could be more beautiful than these limbs? What could be more radiant? I have already redeemed my perils—what is there that should not be endured for you?

O lovely chest! O breasts made to be pressed! Do I truly touch you? Do I hold you? Have you fallen into my hands?

O smooth limbs! O fragrant body!”

“Euryalus, where am I? Why did you not let me die? I would have died happy in your arms. Would that I could die like this before you leave this city!”

As they spoke these words, they made their way toward the bedroom, where they spent a night, we imagine, much like that of Paris and Helen after he carried her away to his high-prowed ships. That night was so delightful that both of them declared even Mars and Venus could not have known such joy.”

End quote.

That sheds not just some light on the youth of a pope who turned out to be a bit of a prude later on but also on the court of Sigismund. There was clearly a lot of partying going on there and it seems the women were participating with some level of enjoyment.

Is it therefore impossible to assume that Barbara did go out to have some fun too? She was an independently wealthy woman, backed by a powerful family without which Sigismund would be unable to rule Hungary, she beautiful, still just 25 years old and by then certain she would not conceive another child with Sigismund. So maybe she did believe that “they should in every way enjoy the pleasures of this life” as her enemies claimed.

All that is of course speculation. She did not leave any writings about what she did or did not do. But it is as much a viable speculation as the idea that she lived a life of an unimpeachable matron hoarding castles and riches.

After 30 minutes of talking about things we do not know, here is what we do know. The next season of the History of the Germans will begin on March 20th with an episode about the most senior of the Prince Elector, the Primate of Germany, the Archbishop of Mainz. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime, remember that there are already 184 episodes of the History of the Germans, plus a brace of bonus episodes. And given I can barely remember what was in it, maybe you will enjoy listening to them again too. If I can recommend some, what about

  • Episode 25 – Konrad II and the Construction of the empire,
  • Episode 35 “to Rome, to Rome” about emperor Henry IV taking revenge for the humiliation before Canossa,
  • Episode 47 Konrad’s Coup about the Hohenstaufen gaining the imperial throne,  
  • Episode 59 The City of Straw about Barbarossa’s last and fateful Italian campaign,
  • Episode 77 A Nail in the Coffin about Frederick II’s decision to let the empire be,
  • Episode 101 Gottschalk and Adalbert about the formation of Mecklenburg,
  • Episode 112 Grain and Beer about the Hanseatic trade in these commodities,
  • Episode 130 The Conquest of Prussia by the Teutonic Knights, and
  • Episode 146 Henry VII’s journey to Rome.

See you all on the other side and last thing, historyofthegermans.com/support is still available for anyone wanting to make a contribution.

by on

The consequences of the Hussite Wars 1419-1434

This week we bring the series about the reformation before the reformation to an end. It is time to take stock. What changes did 20 years of opposition to the established church and 15 years of war bring to Bohemia? How did Jan Hus, Jan Želivský, Wenceslas Koranda and Petr Chelčický influence Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Müntzer and von Hutten? How did Zizka’s reform impact the Swiss mercenaries and the German Landsknechte?

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcast

Listen on YouTube

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 183 – The Aftermath of a Revolution, also Episode 20 of the Reformation before the Reformation.

This week we bring the series about the reformation before the reformation to an end. It is time to take stock. What changes did 20 years of opposition to the established church and 15 years of war bring to Bohemia? How did Jan Hus, Jan Želivský, Wenceslas Koranda and Petr Chelčický influence Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Müntzer and von Hutten? How did Zizka’s reform impact the Swiss mercenaries and the German Landsknechte?

But before we go there just a very brief reminder. The History of the Germans is, was and will be advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons who have signed up on historyofthegermans.com/support. And this week we want to thank Sven Klauke, Frandookie, Carl J., Shannon S., Dennis, Travis D., Werner G. and Niv Gal Waizer who have already signed up.

Support the Show – Become a Patron

And with that mercifully short intro, back to the show.

Last week we came to the end of the Hussite revolution, which is usually set at 1434 the battle of Lipany that broke the power of the radical sects, the Taborites and Orebites, or 1437 the ascend of Sigismund to the throne of Bohemia as the universally accepted ruler of the kingdom.

This may be a sensible place to take a break and survey the outcome of these 20 years of upheaval.

Lets start with the toll in terms of human life.  

As always in the Middle Ages, numbers are very unreliable. Wikipedia has an unsupported but weirdly precise set of numbers indicating a loss of 1.3 to 1.8 million over the entire period all the way to 1526. However, the central academic estimate for the death toll of the Hussite Wars is around 100-200,000. The majority of the losses weren’t battle casualties, but civilian losses due to the devastation of fields and vineyards. In pre-modern times food supply was always precarious so that even temporary disruptions from foraging armes or deliberate destruction of fields could cause disastrous famines.  

That feels like a modest number compared to the millions who perished I the religious wars of the 16th and 17th century. But Bohemia is a small country so that modest number still adds up to roughly 10% of its population at the time. To put that in context, the French military deaths in World War One were 1.3-1.5m plus maybe another 0.5 to 0.8m civilian losses from starvation out of a population of 39.6 million, so roughly 5%. If you are looking for a death toll of 10% or more in recent times there is the Soviet Union which lost ~13.5% of its population during World War II, which included famine, genocide, deportation and disease.

As Laurence of Brezova, an eyewitness to these events, said quote: “As I consider the ruin, as varied as it is enormous, of the once famous and fortunate kingdom of Bohemia, [..[which [..] has been everywhere devoured as by a serpent and devastated by [..] internal conflict, my senses are dulled , and my reason, distraught with grief, declines from the vigour of its faculties.” End quote.

The recovery from this devastation took not only years but centuries. One key reason for this prolonged impact was the massive damage the Bohemian economy sustained during the conflict.

The pillar of the Bohemian economy in the High Middle Ages had been mining, specifically silver mining. We have been going on about the Mines of Kutna Hora so often, you must be tired of me taking about them. One of the outcomes of the conflict was that the trained mining engineers, most of whom had been German and catholic, left Kutna Hora in 1422 and the Czechs struggled to bring the production back to the levels they had been before the war. Plus the easier seams were exhausted and the remaining shafts were prone to flooding so that silver production dropped sharply. The other great mine in Joachimstal, the one which gave its name to the Thaler and ultimately the Dollar, opened only in 1512. So for much of the time during and after the Hussite wars, there was only moderate mining activity.

And we should not forget that in the 14th century Nürnberg devised a technology to separate silver from copper ore, something that yielded enormous profits for the city but left the localsy in Bohemia and Hungary with just the crumbs that fell off the table.

Then, before the Hussite Wars, Bohemia had not only experienced a massive building boom, in particular the construction of the New Town of Prague, the kingdom had also become more deeply integrated into the expanding European trade networks. Emperor Charles IV had tried to establish a new major trade route from Venice via Prague to Leipzig and into the Hanse territory as well as into Poland and Russia. Though this grand plan was only partially successful, mainly German speaking long distance merchants settled in Prague, Pilsen, Kutna Hora and many other cities.

As we have heard during the season about the Hanse, late medieval trade was largely based on trust. A merchant who sent his wares or his money to another city usually placed it with a dependable business partner or a branch of his own firm. These were pretty much the only options. The logistics of recovering  funds or merchandise lost to fraud were simply insurmountable. The duped trader would have had to go to the place where the fraud was committed, bring a case before the local court, in some cases under a legal framework different to what he was used to at home, and then hope the conman wouldn’t skip town. Hence we have trade networks like the Hanse which were based on a shared language, culture and social surveillance or the great Italian and Southern German firms with offices in all major trading centres.

By embracing the Hussite beliefs, even in its most moderate form, the Bohemians had made themselves suspects in the eyes of a still 100% catholic europe. Nobody wanted to trade with someone who had been labelled a heretic, whether justified or not. Once most Catholics had left Prague following the defenestration in 1419, the city was literally cut out of international trade. Staunchly catholic cities like Pilsen might have been able to maintain their relationships with the outside world, but the regular sieges and the incursions by Taborites and Orebites must have made things difficult. And for what that was worth, the Catholic church and the empire had issued a trade embargo on all of Bohemia.

After that embargo was lifted in 1437 and Catholics trickled back into Prague, reconstructing the old links remained a slow and painful process, often interrupted by the wild swings of Bohemian politics in the 15th and 16th century.

The second boost to economic activity that Charles IV had bequeathed the crown of Bohemia was the pilgrimage trade. He had placed literally hundreds of venerated relics into the churches of Prague and the great monasteries. The imperial regalia and the crown of St. Wenceslaus,  themselves objects of veneration, were displayed once a year in a grand procession that had brought in visitors from all across Europe.

But at the end of the Hussite wars, many of these relics had been destroyed and the monasteries burned down. The imperial regalia had transferred to Nürnberg. So that trade had also ceased.

Finally, the last great gift Charles IV had granted Prague had been the University. But the expulsion of the German nations in 1409, a withdrawal of the papal charter during the council of Constance, the burning of the books by the archbishop left the institution a mere shadow of its former self. Its role as the pre-eminent academic institution in the empire had initially gone to Heidelberg and Leipzig and many of the foundations of the 15th and 16th century still outpaced the oldest university in the empire.

To provide at least a little bit of silver lining, the translation of the bible into the common tongue and the emphasis Hussite beliefs placed on preaching, led to a rapid development of Czech as a literary language. As you may have noticed, I do not speak Czech, but I am sure some friendly Czech listeners may be able to point us to some interesting works from the period.

But overall, Bohemia lost touch with much of the early modern developments in art and philosophy. The emerging humanist ideas and writings took a long way to get there, as did the art of the early renaissance. At a time when Matthias Corvinus was creating his famous library in Hungary and Italian artists were busy embellishing Krakow, Bohemia clung to a late gothic style which I find very appealing, but wasn’t exactly cutting edge at the time.

As we are talking about philosophy and theology and in case you want to go deeper, I have an excellent Philosophy podcast for you! The Partially Examined Life is a philosophical podcast by 4 guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living. For each episode, they pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even have read the text they’re talking about to follow and enjoy! With a 13-year-plus catalogue of episodes, The Partially Examined Life has probably covered any philosophical topic you’re interested in, from practical ethics to the theoretical foundations of science. They go deep into the history of philosophy while making it personal and funny.

You can join the over 45 million downloads already pondering with The Partially Examined Life. Find new episodes wherever you find your podcasts or at partiallyexaminedlife.com

We have done population, economics and culture, which means we can now move to our more familiar territory of political history.

When a revolution comes to its end, it usually leaves behind winners and losers. And that is the case here too. The winners, by a wide margin were the barons, Hussite and Catholic alike. For one, they seized the vast majority of the former church lands and incorporated them into their personal property. It is quite remarkable that in the four articles of Prague it says explicitly that the church owning property is “to the disadvantage of their spiritual office and also of the temporal lords”. I will be looking out for a similarly blatant statement when we get to the Reformation.

Before the Hussite revolt, the church in Bohemia controlled around 30% to maybe even 35% of the arable land. At the end of the process, that had dropped to about 12%. And most of this land went to the barons and to a few members of the gentry who had become successful military leaders during the conflict. And it was not just the Hussite barons who salivated at the prosect of expelling monks from a rich abbey, the Catholics were at it as well.

Alongside the increase in wealth came another uplift in political influence. Bohemia was, as we know from way back in episode 146, an elective monarchy. That is how Sigismund’s grandfather, the blind king John gained the crown in the first place. Charles IV tried to shift this, but never managed to formally rescind the elective nature of the kingdom and had to confirm it in his Golden Bull. But like in the empire under the Ottonians and Salians, if there was a male heir who was competent, the election was more of a formality.

But now, after 20 years of war, which at least in part was a war over Wenceslaus IV’ succession, the elective element of the monarchy was put to the forefront. Sigismund had to confirm the right of the Land Diet to choose the monarch, and that diet was dominated by the great barons. The elective element would become even more important as Sigismund’s heir, Albrecht of Austria died after just 2 years on the throne in 1439, leaving behind a son who was born posthumously. And when that son died in 1457 without ever really taking control of Bohemia, the barons saw themselves entirely free to grant the crown to whoever they liked, which turned out to be one of their own, George of Podiebrad.

Beyond the right to elect their king, Sigismund had to make even further concessions. He had to accept the transfer of royal cities and castles to the barons, leaving the kings of Bohemia without resources. He passed a ban on promoting foreigners to any of the high offices of state and an obligation to consult the assembly of the kingdom on appointments, which turned into a de facto approval right. During the 1460s the barons also gained control of the local courts, rendering royal justice effectively defunct.

Since there wasn’t an effective king for almost the entire period between Sigismund’s death in 1437 and Georg of Podiebrad’s election as king in 1458, the running of the kingdom was in the hands of the Bohemian diet where the barons outnumbered the gentry and the cities.

Which then gets me to the cities. As we have seen Prague, Pilsen and Tabor featured as major players during the Hussite wars, fielding armies and signing treaties. Other places like Hradec Kralove, Kutna Hora etc. also mattered. These cities had developed a significant degree of autonomy, held something akin to elections to the city council, and in the case of Tabor and its affiliates, had a very distinct history and culture. Hence one would expect them to remain of importance post the revolution. But that wasn’t the case. The barons teamed up with Sigismund to strip the cities from the right to appoint their military captains. Without control of their military force and subject to the courts owned by the barons, the cities were defenceless and lost more and more influence.

That being said, the biggest losers were the peasants. In a republic of barons, you do not want to toil the land. Whilst in most of europe the Black dDeath had led to an increase in wages for labourers and a reduction in feudal obligations, in Bohemia, serfdom returned with a vengeance. Peasants who had fled into the cities, even into places like Tabor, could be forced to return to their previous home and bondage. In the persistent economic depression and the continued upheaval even free peasants were gradually pushed into submission under a tiny landowning elite.

Bohemia would be a land ruled by a few dozen barons who controlled the state and the royal assembly, up until 1618. When the Habsburg monarchs tried to impose not just religious but also political control on the Bohemians, it came to the second Prague defenestration, which triggered the Thirty Years war, a war even more devastating than the Hussite Wars.

Having done Politics, it is time to move on to the other topic one should never raise at a dinner party – religion. In the broadest of brushes, the situation developed as follows.

The formerly moderate Hussites moderated further and further as time went on. At the beginning of the 16th century there was really very little that distinguished the Hussite Utraquist church from traditional catholic Christianity, except for the offer of bread and wine during services and the veneration of Jan Hus as a saint. The formally catholic church had never disappeared from Bohemia, as we know several regions, around Pilsen and in southern Bohemia had remained catholic all throughout. But as part of the compacts of Basel catholic priests and monks were allowed to return. They reopened the monasteries and churches, collected endowments from the faithful and slowly and steadily rebuilt their presence. It is also important to remember that the crown of Bohemia comprised not just Bohemia but also Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia. These territories had in the main rejected Hussitism. That meant that as the crown of Bohemia reconsolidated, the overall entity was almost split 50/50 between the now very moderate Hussites and the old school Catholics.

Then what happened with the Taborites and Orebites and some of the even more radical splinter groups? Well, as we heard last week, their military power was broken at the battle of Lipany in 1434. However, they were able to continue their spiritual independence. They had their own bishop and their own liturgy. But that lasted only until 1452 when Tabor got caught between the political powers in the land, was besieged by king Georg of Podiebrad, defeated and turned into a royal city under the Utraquist church.

Those who did still yearn for a different approach formed the Unity of the Brethren. The Brethren were a lot closer to the original ideas of Jan Hus.  Their founding thinker was Peter Chelčický. He is another one of these people I would produce a whole episode on if this show was called the history of europe and not the history of the Germans. But briefly. He took his cues from the sermon of the mount. That led him to reject the institutions of the church and the state, but most importantly led him to reject any form of violence. He preached tolerance and turning the other cheek, not to repay evil with evil. He embraced many early Taborite ideas on communal living and sharing of resources.

The brethren being strict pacifists were tolerated within Bohemia until the counterreformation. After the battle of White Mountain in 1620 any non-catholic beliefs were persecuted so that the brethren were forced underground. Some moved to Moravia, others further afield. Of those who lived in hiding in Moravia, a small group left for Berthelsdorf a noble estate near Gorlitz in Saxony.  Its owner, Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf welcomed them and gave them land where they established a new village they called Herrnhut. The community thrived and triggered a revival of the Unity of Brethren. They became known as the Moravians and thanks to a proactive missionary activity are today a protestant community of over 700,000 with a strong presence Tanzania, the Caribbean and in the US. Their ideas had a major impact on Methodists, Baptists and the evangelical movement more broadly.

Which leaves the most important question for us, how did the Hussite revolt impact religious thought in the German speaking parts of the empire.

The first thing to say, and I believe that it is not at all controversial is that there are an incredibly large number of parallels between the ideas of Jan Hus, Jan Zelivsky, Wenceslaus Koronda, Petr Chelčický, the Taborites, Zizka, the Orebites etc. on the one hand and Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Melanchthon and so forth on the other.

Both demanded freedom to preach based on the bible in the vernacular language. They demanded a return to the church of the apostles, where priests did not yield temporal power or had enormous wealth. They offered the sacrament in the form of bread and the wine, dismissed the saints, the adoration of the Virgin Mary and had an iconoclastic bent.

And even some of the set piece events have an eery similarity. The offer of safe conduct to Constance and to Worms, an emperor present at the disputations. Then there was the expansion of Ottoman power that forced both Sigismund and Charles V away from the centre of religious dissent, giving the reformers enough breathing space to disseminate their ideas.

But as we bankers say, correlation is not causation. The fact that both movements came to similar conclusion could have been down to Luther, Calvin or Zwingli reading the books of Hus or the millennial sermons of the Taborites.  Or it may have been down to the fact that the bible is pretty unambiguous in its description of the primitive church and the gap between that ideal and the lived reality of the church in the 15th as well as the 16th century was totally obvious.

As you know we have not yet done the Reformation and my experience after four years of doing this podcast is that I usually regret statements I make looking forward in our timeline. Therefore, with the caveat that I have only read a limited set of sources, it is my understanding that Martin Luther had at best only a sketchy understanding of the Hussite revolt when he drafted his 95 theses. It was only when his opponent, Johann von Eck pointed out to him how close his ideas were to Jan Hus’ writings that he realised the similariies. He first read Hus’ main works, de Ecclesia in 1519 and it took him until 1522 before he publicly stated that Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague had been innocent.

It is therefore difficult to argue that the Hussite revolt directly influenced the Reformation. But it may well have had an indirect influence. Luther himself may not have been aware, but it is unlikely that such audacious ideas and dramatic events as we have discussed these last few weeks left no imprint in the collective memory of the empire. Or did it?

There is something that strikes me as odd. We have been talking about the relationship between empire and papacy for years now. And in this context we have noticed a strong anti-papal, if not anti-clerical undercurrent in the general opinion of the German speaking people of the empire. After all, a half dozen emperors had been excommunicated and could still rely on the support of their people, even their bishops. Ludwig the Bavarian was the most obvious example of an emperor who remained outside the church for most of his reign, was never legally crowned and gathered the Kurverein zu Rhense that rejected papal influence on the empire.

At which point one wonders why the Hussite ideas did not resonate with the German speaking peoples. Instead they mustered crusades against them and their ideas did seemingly not circulate broadly amongst theologians in German universities.

And that gets us to the bit which may become controversial. The idea that springs to mind is that the Hussite revolt had some very strong nationalist overtones. And that not just in 19th century historiography, but our friend Laurence of Brezova who write his chronicle right in the midst of these events, never misses an opportunity to paint the Germans as evil. And likewise, the towns and cities near the Bohemian border may not have looked fondly on to the Hussite armies that came across burning and plundering.

But I am not sure that Hussitism was really mainly a national movement for the Czechs that the Germans rejected as foreign.

Because the idea all Czechs were Hussites is obviously not true. Cities like Pilsen and barons like Ulrich von Rosenberg were catholic and undeniably Czech. The accusers of Jan Hus in Constance weren’t Germans but Czechs and their judges included more French and Italians than Germans. Meanwhile Prokop the Shaven, the military leader of the Taborites for 10 years was from the German minority in Bohemia and during the time of Jan Hus, sermons were also preached in German at the Bethlehem Chapel.

The reason the Germans in Bohemia sided in the main with the Catholics had probably more economic than spiritual reasons. Their networks as long distance traders or mining specialists stretched beyond the borders of the kingdom and if they wanted to maintain these links, they had to at least formally stay with the catholic church. That does not justify the massacres in Kutna Hora, but it does explain why this community in the main refused to join the Hussite movement.

So my thesis is a fairly simple one. The reason that Jan Hus and the other Hussite thinkers were unknown in German speaking lands lay in the fact that they discussed and published much of their ideas in Czech. Sure many foundational texts were initially written and published in Latin. But the scholarship that developed around it was conducted in Czech.

And if you realised one thing over the last few episodes, it is that Germans really cannot pronounce Czech words. And that may be the main reason Jan Hus revolutionary and I find profoundly convincing ideas did not make it to Germany. Luther had to find it out all by himself, like Peter Valdes, the Cathars, St. Francis, St. Peter Damian, Michael of Cesena, William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua and dozens and dozens and dozens of others.

There was however one thing the Hussites developed, that was unique and that the Germans embraced enthusiastically. And that were the military innovations of Jan Zizka. The transfer was not direct but went through the Swiss mercenaries who were the first to take on Zizka’s military doctrine of discipline, meritocracy and equal sharing of the loot. They replaced the Wagenburgs with pike and shot squares which are based on a similar idea of defending against cavalry attacks through interlocking units, low cost cut and thrust arms and the use of artillery.

Their version of Zizka’s ideas was then absorbed by the Landsknechte in Maximilian’s military reforms. I am sure we will discuss this change in military tactics and the subsequent change in the social hierarchy in more detail in an upcoming episodes, so I will not elaborate too much at this point.

Which brings us to the end of this episode and the end of this season. I hope you enjoyed our somewhat elongated excursion into Bohemia. We will almost certainly return when we discuss the rise of the Habsburgs and it is unlikely to be the last time our story will take us to foreign shores. It is one of the weird things about German history that a lot of the action consists of the key protagonists heading out to neighbouring places. For a long time the empire was simply too big for anyone to invade. But once they did, they did not stop for 200 years, and boy will we be busy talking about that.

But before we do any of this, we will do our little tour of the empire, taking it all in in its late medieval, half-timbered glory. I am still in the process of planning it so that I cannot guarantee we will start immediately next week. I might slot in a short episode on Barbara of Cilli or simply take a week off. Let’s see. I hope you will join us again…

And in the meantime, if you want to induce me to work harder and faster, there is always the historyofthegermans.com/support page where you can make a contribution.

by on

Reconciliation Between Hussites and the Catholic Church

We have a tendency to overlook the history of the smaller European nations even though they do quite often provide the laboratory where one could have seen the sign of things to come or calamities that could be avoided. One of these nations is Czechia, where events took place that could, should or did impact the History of the Germans, in 1989, in 1968, in 1938, in 1618 and in 1419-1437. Today we will talk about the very last one on this list, the moment when a complete confessional split was prevented, something Martin Luther, emperor Charles V and pope Leo X so disastrously failed to manage a hundred years later.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcast

Listen on YouTube

Video version

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 182 – The Return of the King, also episode 19 of Season 9 The Reformation before the Reformation

We have a tendency to overlook the history of the smaller European nations even though they do quite often provide the laboratory where one could have seen the sign of things to come or calamities that could be avoided. One of these nations is Czechia, where events took place that could, should or did impact the History of the Germans, in 1989, in 1968, in 1938, in 1618 and in 1419-1437. Today we will talk about the very last one on this list, the moment when a complete confessional split was prevented, something Martin Luther, emperor Charles V and pope Leo X so disastrously failed to manage a hundred years later.

I will also provide links in the show notes to books or podcasts relating to the other events in case you want to read ahead.

But before we start just another important warning. If you want to sign up on Patreon rather than on my recently revamped historyofthegermans.com/support website, be very, very careful not to do it on the Patreon app on your iPhone. If you sign up using your iPhone, Apple will add a shocking 30% surcharge to your contribution, which also attracts tax. That comes on top of an 8% Patreon charge, a 10+1% PayPal charge plus tax. What that means is that if you sign on at the highest, the Kurfürst level, as one listeners so kindly did yesterday, you may be charged $15, of which I will receive just $9.58 and that is before they rip me off on the exchange rate. If you were making the same contribution on the historyofthegermans.com/support page, my total expense would ~4%, meaning I would receive $14.4 from this exceedingly generous patron.

Note that the 30% surcharge only applies to new patrons and only if you use the patreon app on your iPhone. And it only kicked in this week. That is why I have not yet pushed you guys to move across to the new platform. However, it is be something you may consider.  One of the perks on the new platform is the History of the Germans Forum where you can discuss all matters relating to the podcast and German history with your fellow listeners and with me.

As for the website, it is being gradually translated into German as we speak. This may take a few months to get through, but it is in progress. I hope you enjoy this and you may want to send the link to some of your friends who prefer reading the history in German.  

Which gets me to my before last point. Many of you have responded to the question about what we want to do next. And whilst this is definitely not a democracy, if the overwhelming majority of you want to do a tour of the empire, we will do a tour of the empire. I am actually quite excited about it and have already done some initial research.

And all that, the website translation, the forum and the next season is only possible because so many of you have signed up on historyofthegermans.com/support. And in particular I want to thank  Harold W., The exceedingly generous Robert MacMillan, Lars S., Hunter T., Mari V., Peter K., Felix and Matthias T. who have already signed up.

Support the Show – Become a Patron

And with that, back to the show

Last week we ended on the death of Jan Zizka, the man who turned the Bohemians into a near invincible military force. Though the story of his skin being used as a drum that led his followers to victory is almost certainly fake, the Hussites remained undefeated for another 10 years.

The neighbors of the kingdom, in particular the empire mustered a total of five crusades to put an end to the heresy they found so difficult to accept.

The first crusade was led by Sigismund in 1420 and ended with the battles on Vitkov Hill and Vhysehrad. An alleged 150,000 crusaders returned without anything to show for, except some ransacked villages and burnt Hussite priests.

The second crusade in 1421 ended with the imperial forces running away when they heard a Hussite army approaching. Sigismund’s not quite simultaneous attempt ended with the battles of Kutna Hora and Nemecky Brod where his heavy cavalry drowned in the ice cold Sazava river.

The third crusade in 1423 was such a comprehensive failure that the only one to muster an army at all was king Eric VII of Denmark, who turned around before even getting to the Bohemian border.

The fourth crusade in 1426 ended with the battle of Aussig. Frederick the Belligerent of Saxony had invaded Bohemia in 1425 but got stuck in the town of Usti, or Aussig. His wife, the electress Katherine sent reinforcements, allegedly 30,000 men. This time the crusaders were a little more enthusiastic. They believed that the success of the Hussites had been down to the genius of Jan Zizka and that after his death things would be easier. And they had come up with ideas to break through the Wagenburgs. The knights had brought axes and hammers to break the retaining chains between the wagons. And they did indeed break into the circle of wagons, but found the Hussite cavalry had left around the back and was now attacking their flanks and their rear. This battle left a large number of Saxon, Lusatian and Thuringian nobles dead on the battlefield.  

Frederick I of Saxony the Belligerent died in 1428 and was succeeded by Frederick II of Saxony, the gentle, which must have calmed things down a lot on that border.

The fifth and final crusade got under way on August 1, 1431. Though Sigismund had initially promised to lead the effort in person, he ceded command to Frederick of Hohenzollern, the Elector of Brandenburg. On August 14 the army which had begun a siege of the city of Domažlice (Domaschlitze), heard the sound of Hussite warriors singing “Ye Who are Warriors of God” and ran, all 150,000 of them.

These were the major actions. But alongside those ran dozens of smaller ones. The main actors here were on the catholic side duke Albrecht of Austria who had received Moravia from Sigismund as dowry of his daughter Elisabeth, the Brandenburg and Saxon electors. Albrecht wanted to protect his dowry and the other two were trying to add to their property portfolio with a side dish of a free ticket to paradise.

But more significant than these incursions into Bohemia were the “glorious rides” the Hussite armies led into Franconia, Austria, Silesia and even Prussia. These took place mainly in the late 1420s and early 1430s. They could best be described as funding rounds. The armies or brotherhoods of Tabor and of Horeb were not only an extremely effective weapon, they were also a standing army that was extremely expensive to maintain. One way of funding them would have been to collect taxes in the territories the two radical factions controlled, but who would want to do that. The next best option was to rent them out as mercenaries in times Bohemia was comparatively quiet, and finally one could  fund them out of the plunder they made during their campaigns.

The problem with the latter option was that many of these initial campaigns had taken place inside Bohemia and after a decade of war, the economy was on its knees, the rich had lost everything or had fled and the country was utterly destroyed. Hence sparing their fellow Czechs and looting Austrians, Franconians, Saxons and Silesians was the patriotic thing to do.

These Hussite reizen were anything but glorious for their reluctant hosts. As we have heard, even battle hardened soldiers were terrified of the religious warriors from Bohemia. So they encountered barely any resistance to their ransacking and pillaging. Cities closed their gates and paid them off, whilst villages and open towns had to let them do what they wanted to do.

In July 1432 such a Hussite army lay before Naumburg, home to a bishopric and deep inside the empire. The citizens ware terrified and pleaded with Prokop the Shaven, the new priest leader and military commander of the Taborites. In their despair they sent out their children to the Hussite camp, the boys and girls wearing white shirts as a sign of submission and penance. They were singing and begging for mercy.

And here is their song – don’t panic, I will not sing it, I leave that to Rock on Stage from Naumburg

SONG

Just in case you were surprised about the upbeat tone of the song, here is the translation:

The Hussites marched before Naumburg

over Jena and Camburg;

all over the Vogelwies

you saw nothing but sword and spear,

about a hundred thousand.

Now when they lay before Naumburg

there came a great lamentation;

Hunger tormented, thirst hurt,

and a single lot of coffee

came to sixteen pfennigs.

It then goes on for a while and ends with Prokop the Shaven choosing not to massacre the little ones. Instead he gave them cherries and

“then drew his long sword,

commanded: ‘Turn right!

Leave Naumburg behind’

And ever since the city of Naumburg celebrates a Hussite Cherry festival at the end of June with medieval processions, a market and music.

Unfortunately the idea of the generous, cherry distributing Hussite general is as much made up as the idea you get a cup of coffee for 16 pfennig. The Hussites did not go to Naumburg in 1432, but Bohemian Mercenaries did show up in a war between the heirs to the duchy of Saxony 25 years later and the whole thing with the cherries came up in the 16th century as a festival. Still Augst von Kotzebue wrote a patriotic play that for very good reasons is no longer performed and Salieri wrote an entire opera, which is still performed and which you hear in the background. Ah, and Naumburg is not the only one celebrating these Hussite invasions. The city of Bernau, near Berlin has one too, as does Neunburg vorm Wald.

What is nice is that this whole rather blood-soaked story has turned not just into a number of jolly festivals, but has also brought several Czech, German and Austrian towns together to form the Hussitische Kulturroute where you can follow either Jan Hus’ journey from Prague to Konstance or do a tour of the major battle fields of the war, all in the spirit of reconciliation.

But the reality was still pretty horrific. These clashes between Hussites and their neighbors were terrifying the inhabitants of the border regions and inside Bohemia warfare never completely stopped..

It must have been clear to all observers that this conflict had no military solution. If it had not been obvious after Sigismund’s defeat at Nememtzky Brod, then Aussig should have made that abundantly clear. But some people still need another reminder, which came in the fifth crusade. After that pretty much everybody knew that this was it.

The only question that remained was the following|: Would Europe simply isolate the Hussites and leave them to live their lives under a different religion, or could there be a reconciliation that reopened the borders?

It was time for diplomacy. Some key players, like king Jogaila of Poland and margrave Friedrich of Hohenzollern had kicked things off before the fifth crusade had even started. The whole process took almost 6 years, but before we get into the who did or said what when, let’s just take a look at how incredibly convoluted the situation had become in the 1430s.

At the heart of all this stood the religious differences between the catholic church and the Hussites. The Hussites had been kind enough to narrow down their key demands into the four articles of Prague, which were:

  1. That the Word of God shall be freely and without hindrance proclaimed and preached by Christian priests in the kingdom of Bohemia
  2. That the Holy Sacrament of the body and blood of Christ under the two kinds of bread and wine shall be freely administered to all true Christians who are not excluded from communion by mortal sin.
  3. That since many priests and monks hold many earthly possessions against Christ’s command and to the disadvantage of their spiritual office and also of the temporal lords, such priests shall be deprived of this illegal power and shall live exemplary lives according to the Holy Scripture, in following the way of Christ and the apostles.
  4. That all mortal sins, and especially those that are public, as also other disorders contrary to the divine law, shall be prohibited and punished by those whose office it is so that the evil and false repute of this country may be removed and the well-being of the kingdom and of the Bohemian nation may be promoted.

These ideas, maybe with the exception of #4 had a sound basis in the way the original church of Christ and the apostles had been set up. There was not an awful lot in the bible the catholic church could use to refute these demands. However, these ideas would have been the end of the church organization as it had developed over the previous 400 years, basically since emperor Henry III had placed Leo IX on the papal throne and Gregory VII had laid down his Dictatus papae.

Basically the Hussites demanded the Catholic Church in its current form dissolves and the Catholic Church wanted the Hussites to give up on the demands of God.

This was an ideological rift as deep as that between communism and capitalism.

If history teaches us one thing, it is that political expediency can bridge even the deepest ideological divides, just look at the expansion of the Chinese economy, a country still at least nominally communist.

This is however a far as the China/America comparison goes, since the key negotiators, Sigismund and Procop the Shaven were no Richard Nixon or Deng Xiao Ping.

Let us start with Sigismund. The word that is most commonly associated with him is “ueberfordert” which is something like “overstretched” or “out of his depth” or “unable to cope”. I know, this is German efficiency, we need just one word to say all this.

What it relates to is the almost impossible situation he found himself in. Let me try to summarize his main problems in bullet points:

  1. The Ottomans were at the gates of Belgrade, had a much superior military and a huge appetite for land and treasure.
  2. The Venetians had left the seclusion of their lagoon and were taking control of territories along the Dalmatian coast, aka Croatia, and in the Northern Italian mainland. The former was part of Sigismund’s Hungarian kingdom and the latter was part of the empire he was also in charge of.
  3. The Teutonic Knights and Poland had entered their own 100 years’ war that only concluded with the dissolution of the order in Prussia in 1525. Sigismund was dragged into the conflict in his role as king of the Romans and hence protector of the order whilst Poland Lithuania was of huge importance for his Bohemian and Hungarian kingdoms.
  4. Then there was the expansion of the duchy in Burgundy. In 1428 duke Philip the Good took over the counties of Holland, Hainault and Zeeland, and added them to the Franche Comte, Brabant, Geldern and Luxemburg that had been picked up already. The dukes of Burgundy were nominally vassals of France, but vey much on the way to creating their own state. What they were not, was faithful vassals of the empire. Something that applied equally to the dukes of Lorraine, the counts of Provence and anyone else in the Rhone Valey. Basically the whole western side of the empire was sailing off into the sunset.
  5. Talking about the empire, Sigismund’s attempts to establish functioning institutions and a funding system for an army to defend it got stuck. Being busy with items 1-4 meant, the empire was left pretty much to its own devices resulting in the chaos we discussed in episode 179.
  6. Then we have the minor issue that Sigismund had not yet been crowned emperor despite having been elected 20+ years earlier.
  7. And then, finally, but most importantly, Sigismund was seen as responsible for the Bohemian mess, and not only by the Hussites, but by the Pope, the princes and cities as well.

These were only the major issues he had to deal with. There were a lot of other, minor issues, like a difficult marriage to one of the more interesting female figures of the age, Barbara of Cili, who may warrant her own episode.

What made his situation completely untenable was his utter lack of resources. The Hungarian kingdom would only grant funds for the defense of the kingdom, but would not pay for his efforts in any of the other theatres he was involved in. Of his father’s bountiful possessions, Bohemia, Moravia, Luxemburg, Brandenburg, Silesia all he still had was Silesia, the rest was in revolt, sold, pawned, enfeoffed or handed over as dowry of his daughter. He was almost constantly begging for cash, at one point he pawned his crown and he started a cash for honours trade where he – amongst others –  granted the Gonzagas in Mantua the title of margrave in exchange for 12,000 gold coins.

All he had going for him was his charm, intelligence and the prestige as ruler of the empire. In a world were might was right, that did not account for much, which makes what happened next so impressive.

Sigismund never had a very clear political direction. All these various challenges left him swaying this way and that, desperately trying to find a path through these complex scenarios.

But one thing was clear to him. If he ever wanted to regain the position his father had occupied in European politics, and that was very much what he wanted, he needed to have control of a rich and militarily powerful territory. And after trying all sorts of other routes to riches and military might, he settled on Bohemia as the rich and militarily powerful territory he needed to regain if he ever wanted to be an effective emperor.

But that came with an irresolvable conundrum.

He could become king of Bohemia on the back of the support of moderate Hussites and catholic barons if only he signed up to some version of the four articles of Prague. But if he did that, he would at a minimum be deposed by the Prince Electors of the empire and may even lose Hungary as well.

On the other hand, he had tried to take Bohemia by force which failed and after the debacle of the fifth crusade, there was an exactly zero chance of success down that route.

Which means the only viable way to become king of Bohemia and with it an effective emperor, was to forge a reconciliation between Hussites and Catholics which means getting the church to accept some version of the four articles of Prague as canon, whilst at the same time preventing any actual change in church institutions from happening.

And, assuming such language could be agreed upon, he then had to convince the Hussites, who hated him as the man who had burned Jan Hus, and the catholic church, who suspected him as a closet heretic to make him king.

Piece of cake!

There was one thing however that made it at all possible. There was a new church council under way. The old Pope, Martin V, the one that had been elected at the council of Constance had – after much hemming and hawing – finally allowed a gathering of the bishops of all of Christendom to take place. And at this council the delegates were to debate church reform. If you remember, the council of Constance singularly failed to make any material progress on that matter. (Episode 173).

This council, the council of Basel wasn’t off to a great start. When the papal legate opened the event in September 1431, there was hardly anyone there. Things only got under way properly when the new pope, Eugene IV tried to dissolve it. The council responded by reiterating that its authority was superior to papal powers  and by opening proceedings to depose pope Eugene IV. At that point a lot of bishops experienced a severe case of FOMO and made their way to Basel.

The situation was now quite precarious. This could easily end up in another schism,  dissolution of the council or, best case, a transfer of the council to somewhere in the papal states where the pope would have a lot more control.

If any of these things had happened, the reconciliation between Hussites and the Catholics would be off the table. Martin V and his successors had been working hard to turn the wheel of time back to the days before the schism. In their heart of hearts, they wanted to do away with church councils, church reform and if at all possible, the Hussites.

Which is what brings Sigismund on to the stage. If there is one thing he is good at, it is getting popes to recognize church councils. In 1432/33 he travels down to Rome. The journey was anything but easy given he was in an on and off war with Venice, had no money and his allies, the duchy of Milan and the Republic of Florence were weary of the fighting. But he made it down to the eternal city and on May 31st, 1433 he was finally crowned emperor, aged 65 and suffering horribly from gout.

This coronation, though sparsely attended and badly received by everyone, the Hussites, the church and even the imperial princes, did however guarantee the survival of the council. Pope Eugene IV’s main worry was that the council would depose him. That is why he wanted to dissolve it. Sigismund explained that he could control the council, in part through the strength of his personality, but mainly because he had troops stationed inside and around Basel. So, you, master pope, would be well advised to tie Sigismund to your side. Now, if you crown Sigismund as emperor, he would not only be in your debt, he would also be incentivized to keep you on the throne of St. Peter. After all, the last thing Sigismund wants is to come back to the Empire and find that the pope who had crowned him was illegitimate and with it the whole coronation as well. At which point he would have to go down to Rome again, and he really, really did not want to do that.

So they made a deal, the pope crowned Sigismund, Sigismund promised to keep him in place and Eugene called off the dissolution of the council, at least until that Hussite question was resolved.

And with that the first hurdle was taken. The Hussites had a negotiation partner that wasn’t the irreconcilable pope, but a council of theologians and the council’s decision would be binding on any future pope.

But this was only level one.

The theological problems remained.

A first round of negotiations had taken place in 1432 in the city of Cheb  which is called Eger in German. There both sides agreed that a resolution would be sought quote “by the Law of God and the practices of Christ, the apostles and the early church, along with the teachings of the Councils and the doctors confirming truly thereto” end quote. That was something both moderate and even the Taborites and Orphans could agree to. In fact the military and spiritual leader of the Taborites, Prokop the Shaven was at that meeting and signed on the dotted line. As did the four delegates of the council of Basel.

The Hussites were looking at this “the judgement of Cheb” as a great success. If this was the basis of the upcoming conversation at the council. Surely the whole of mother church would come round to their way of thinking.

In 1433 a delegation of four Hussite leaders came to Basel to hammer out the deal. This time Prokop the Shaven was not amongst them, his place was taken by an Englishman, Peter Payne, who had come to Bohemia way back in 1413 to live by the teachings of John Wycliffe and Jan Hus.

What followed was a slow and scholastic grinding down of the Hussite positions. It was the bishop of Barcelona, Juan Palomar, who described the Czechs as “wild horses who need to be have a halter put on their heads so that they could be captured, tamed and fastened to the manger”.

A statement not exactly dripping with respect for the theological  persuasiveness of the Hussite delegation.

So the negotiators played around with draft after draft, wearing the other side down until each of the articles was adorned with one of Palomar’s halters.

Yes, there will be communion in both kinds, but only to those who have already received it and only if the priest makes clear that the bread alone would be enough.

 Yes, sins shall be punished, but not by the individuals, only by the institutions of the state.

Yes, preaching is free, but only as long as it does not undermine the authority of the church.

And finally, the money question, i.e., should the church remain poor. Well, yes and no. There was no explicit restitution of the lands and properties of the church, but from now on the Catholics could receive endowments from the faithful again.

Even if you are neither a lawyer nor a theologian, it is pretty obvious what has happened here. Somebody had been – as the Germans would say – been pulled across the table. And the horse whisperer Juan Palomar was the one doing the pulling.

News of this compact as it would later be called were not received with enthusiasm back in Bohemia. The Taborites and Orebites saw right through this. That would be the end of their religious beliefs. And remember, for them the four articles were the bare minimum. Their creed went a lot further than that. A gelded version of the four articles were unacceptable to them.

At which point the civil war inside Bohemia resumed in full force. For the last years the foreign raids had provided an outlet for the more belligerent Hussites so that they left their homeland largely in peace. But with the compact, it had again become a question of defending the faith.

The Taborites and Orebites besieged Pilsen but found resistance stronger than anticipated. They also struggled to provision their troops as support amongst the local population had waned. A detachment sent out to procure food and material from across the border was defeated, the first such defeat since Zelivsky was mauled in 1422.

Things got even more precarious when the two cities of Prague went up against each other. After Zelivsky’s fall The Old Town had fully reverted back to its conservativism and its alliance with the Barons, whilst the New Town had shifted left again and allied closely with the Orebites. On May 5, 1434 the Barons brought their troops into the Old Town, pooled together with the councilors and attacked the New Town. The New Town could not hold out and was sacked by the soldiers whilst prominent radicals were arrested.

That was the call to arms. On May 30th, the Orebites and Taborites under Prokop the Shaven and Prokop the lesser lined up against the barons, catholic and Hussite, and the city of Prague to fight it out, once and for all. The commanders on both sides had fought together before, they had been pupils of Zizka and they knew how to handle this sophisticated, disciplined, deadly military machine.

The commander of the conservatives, Divis Borek of Miletinek had been the governor of Hradec Kralove Jan Zizka had expelled which had led to the previous battle between Prague and the radicals. This time he would not yield to the brotherhoods.

Both sides set up their wagon burgs near the village of Lipany. Divis was the first to attack. His infantry ran up the hill on to the Taborite and Orebite defenses and was repulsed. In apparent panic they retreated and fled down the hill. The two Prokops knew that this was the moment to strike. The two great brotherhoods came out of their wagon fortress and pursued the infantry of Prague.

But halfway down the hill they realized what a catastrophic blunder they had committed. Nobody had asked where the baronial cavalry had been. Well, it was hidden in the woods. And now that the brothers were out there in the open field they came out and pushed into their flanks. The fighting was over when the Taborite cavalry fled, leaving their infantry to die in the field. Those who put down their weapons were herded into several barns and pitilessly burned to death. Prokop the Shaven and Prokop the Lessert he talented commanders of the brotherhoods, undefeated until that day, both died in the midst of the battle. Divis Borek of Miletinek had his revenge.

One would expect that immediately after this defeat, the city of Prague would open its gates to Sigismund. But it would take another 3 years before that would actually take place. Sigismund had to yield many of the executive, fiscal and religious royal prerogative to the barons who had gotten used to life without a king.

The compacts, that rewriting of the four articles of Prague, were finally approved by the council and the Bohemian diet giving the kingdom a separate religious status but within the Catholic Church.

For the emperor, now 69 and suffering from regular brutal attacks of the gout, this was the long awaited moment when he took possession of the country of his birth, the kingdom and city his father had made into the envy of Europe but which now lay in ruins.

On November 10th, 1437 he put on his great vestments as emperor, wore his laurel crown and in his litter proceeded out of the city accompanied by his wife Barbara, Hungarian magnates, Bohemian barons, papal legates and imperial princes, followed by 1,000 knights, divisions of infantry and the whores who had been expelled from Prague due to the fourth article and headed home towards Hungary to die. He made it as far as Znojmo near the Austrian Border.

There he prepared his imminent death, instructed his daughter and son in law to take the Bohemian crown as quickly as they could, made his last will and testament, heard mass one last time in his imperial regalia and on December 9th, 1347 he died, sitting on his throne, Emperor, king of Hungary and Bohemia, margrave of Moravia and duke of Silesia.

He was buried in Oradea, modern day Romania, along the remains of St. Ladislas. But his grave was destroyed during the Turkish invasions, so that nothing remains of him except for a funerary crown now preserved in the Hungarian National Museum.

This is not going to be the last we hear of emperor Sigismund. When we will do our tour of the empire, he will almost certainly make an appearance. Next week we will look at the aftermath of the Hussite revolt, its implications beyond Bohemia and into the following two centuries when there was another, more famous, defenestration, the implications of which were even more catastrophic for the Germans. I hope to see you next week.

And until then, if you feel compelled to support what we do here, sign up at the historyofthegermans.com./support, and make sure you do not go anywhere near the Patreon app.  

by on

The Revolution Devours it’s children

“And anyone who would not want to keep and truly fulfil the above written pieces and articles, and would not want to help protect and defend them; such a one, without regard to person, we will not suffer amongst us and in this army fighting with God’s help, nor on the castles and in the fortresses, nor in the cities and in the towns, walled or open, nor in the villages and hamlets, no place excepted or exempted. But all persons we will everywhere admonish, advise, push, and urge toward this goodness with the help of our Lord God”.

That is how the Statutes and Military Ordinance of Jan Zizka’s New Brotherhood sum up their mission. And by Jove, you do not want to be one of those who are admonished, advised, pushed and urged by this new model army. Which leaves the question, who are those who do not “keep the written articles”, and – spoiler alert -they are not just the Catholics.

From now on the “raging torrent of the revolution disgorges its quantum of corpses”

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcast

Listen on YouTube

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the history of the Germans: Episode 181 – Zizka’s Drum, which is also episode 18 of Season 9 “The Reformation before the Reformation”

“And anyone who would not want to keep and truly fulfil the above written pieces and articles, and would not want to help protect and defend them; such a one, without regard to person, we will not suffer amongst us and in this army fighting with God’s help, nor on the castles and in the fortresses, nor in the cities and in the towns, walled or open, nor in the villages and hamlets, no place excepted or exempted. But all persons we will everywhere admonish, advise, push, and urge toward this goodness with the help of our Lord God”.

That is how the Statutes and Military Ordinance of Jan Zizka’s New Brotherhood sum up their mission. And by Jove, you do not want to be one of those who are admonished, advised, pushed and urged by this new model army. Which leaves the question, who are those who do not “keep the written articles”, and – spoiler alert -they are not just the Catholics.

From now on the “raging torrent of the revolution disgorges its quantum of corpses”

But before we get to the point where Ark is set against Ark, there is my usual plea for your munificence. You know the drill, so I do not have to repeat that this show is advertising free because some of you make generous contributions on historyofthegermans.com/support and have been elevated to the dizzying heights of an imperial knight or dame, a prince or princess, or even a prince elector. What is less well known is that if you are signed up on the new membership version on my website, you can put questions and ideas in the membership forum to discuss with your HotGPod friends and occasionally with me as well. In any event, we should all thank Jim L., Martin N., David McK, Max F., Chris B., Jim S. and Kevin M. who have already signed up

Support the Show – Become a Patron

Last week I have to admit to an error. I did stupidly say that the second year of the French revolution was 1792, when it obviously was July 1791. That was not yet the time when revolutionary tribunals were introduced, but it was the time of the massacre of the Champ de Mars when the revolutionaries split between those calling for the head of Louis XVI and those who wanted a constitutional monarchy. A turning point as well, but our Bohemians were clearly faster than the French when it came to revolutionary dynamics.

And with that, back to the show.

Last week we ended with the Batte of Kutna Hora when Jan Zizka extracted himself and the Hussite army from the trap laid by Sigismund’s great general Pippo Spano. As important as it had been to save the forces from destruction, that in itself was not a victory.

The victory came 12 days later. Sigismund believed Jan Zizka had fled and would not return. It was Christmas after all. With that I mind he allowed his army to retreat into winter quarters in the countryside.

Zizka on the other hand was not buying into the Christmas spirit. Instead of decorating trees and singing songs, he recruited men to fill in the gaps that had appeared following the battle and trained them to fight in his new formations. On January 6 he was ready and good to go. His scouts directed him to the place where a particularly large detachment of Sigismund’s army was resting with Stollen and biscuits. He attacked them and though the royalists tried to form a battle line, it took less than an hour before they were on a headlong flight to Kutna Hora.

Zizka then ordered his army to rout the various other locations where Sigismund had billeted his forces.

The soldiers who weren’t captured fled into Kutna Hora, Sigismund did not have the stores of food and ammunition to hold the city over an extended siege. So, he decided to retreat to Moravia. For the mostly German Catholic civilians who had overwhelmed the Hussite garrison at the battle of Kutna Hora, this decision was catastrophic. If they stayed, they would almost certainly be killed by the Hussites, if they left, they would lose all their worldly possessions. Many of them, including many women and children followed Sigismund and his men out of the town. As they left, they set their houses and the mint on fire. The fires were extinguished by Zizka’s troops who had reached Kutna Hora shortly after the last of the royalist forces had left.

Sigismund’s sudden retreat meant his army was in complete disarray. It took 2 days for soldiers to find their units again and sort out their equipment. Zizka and his men followed the retreating forces, harassing and taunting them to stand and fight.

With his forces back in reasonable order Sigismund felt he was in a position to make a stand. His generals disagreed, but having dodged battle last time Sigismund could not afford to run away again.

Here is what the chroniclers wrote happened next: quote:

“The King’s army puts up its troops in battle line. They plant their standards. Then there sounds a tremendous blast of trumpets, and manfully the Czechs run to attack them. The Hungarians turn their backs. [..] what profit could the King’s power achieve when God Himself sent [  ] terror into their souls? They desert their standards, they press their spurs into the flanks of their horses, and they flee like people to whom no other salvation is left but flight. Those however who cannot flee fast enough yield their bodies to Death.”

There may, indeed, not have been much more to it: a frontal attack which, in the first onrush, broke the enemy’s lines and completely shattered morale. The Royalist’s retreat turned into a wild, disorderly rout in which they left most of their heavy weapons as well as all of their supply train on the road and continuously suffered heavy losses in men. The Hussites kept on their heels all the time.

By nightfall, the King and his retinue reached the neighbourhood of the city of Némecky Brod (knejmetzki Brot), which translates as German Ford. He ordered this town to be defended so as to cover his own retreat in which he continued throughout the night. Thus, some of the Royalist troops that were still able to put up a fight tried for a last time to offer resistance outside the walls, and many were killed in this attempt. Under the cover of these brave men and of the descending night a considerable part of the army escaped into the town and thence over the bridge which crossed the Sazava River into safety. -But as crowds of soldiers jammed up in front of the narrow bridge orders were given for the cavalry to pass the river at other points by simply riding across the ice. For a while this worked, but when their ranks widened and began to include large numbers of heavy cavalry the ice gave under the heavy load. Soon a long stretch of the river was alive with hundreds of men and horses desperately trying to work their way out of the freezing water, being crushed by the ice floes or pulled down by the weight of their armour. In the dark of the night it was difficult to give any help. In the following days 548 heavily armoured bodies were dragged from the river.

Zizka then proceeded to besiege the city of Némecky Brod (knejmetzki Brot) which was, as its name suggests, largely inhabited by Germans. It was also the last significant city in eastern Bohemia not yet in the hands of the Hussites. As usual, he succeeded. Still this action would haunt him for a long time afterwards, as he lost control of his soldiers. After breaching the walls his men began one of the worst massacres of this war on the inhabitants of the city as well as on the refugees of Kutna Hora who had not been able to get away.

After this complete and utter defeat Sigismund would never again lead a major military action into Bohemia in person. This does not mean that there would not be any more attempts to force the Hussites back into the bosom of mother church at the point of a sword, but the lead for these actions would go to princes like the elector of Saxony, Frederick the Belligerent or Federick of Hohenzollern, now margrave of Brandenburg. Even the initiative for these crusades would go from Sigismund to the imperial diet and the papal legates, often times simply ignoring the king of the Romans in their planning. Sigismund’s efforts to gain the crown of his father were from now on mainly diplomatic. It would take the other participants a further 10 years to realise that they had no chance against the armies that Jan Zizka had created.

Still there was a way back for Sigismund into Bohemia and for Bohemia back into the Holy Catholic church.

The seed for this, you may call it a reconciliation or a failure of the revolution was laid at the same time this most decisive battle of the war was fought, and it happened way back in Prague.

The city of Prague as we mentioned before was socially divided between the patricians who dominated the Old Town and the artisans and labourers who mainly lived in the New Town. The New Town was more radical in their Hussite beliefs than the Old Town.

The leader of the more radical wing of the Hussites in Prague was none other than Jan Zelivsky, the priest who had led the mob that threw the royal councillors out of their windows 2 years earlier, the event that had kicked off the whole revolution.

Zelivsky was a great orator, one of those men who can really stir up a crowd, leading them to do his bidding, for good or ill. In the intervening years Zelivsky had deepened his control of the two cities, the Old and the new Town largely through these kinds of events. He had forced the councillors of the Old Town to resign and then called upon his followers to elect new ones by acclamation. In that way he had risen from influential cleric and theologian to the actual master of Prague. Around 1422 his populist rule slid into outright dictatorship. He used the threat of the second crusade that just got under way as a pretext to place one of his followers as military commander of the city with executive powers.

And that is also when things went wrong for him. As we have seen, the Hussites are very, very rarely defeated, but Zelivsky manages to botch an engagement. The enemy, in this case an army from Saxony, had already offered to surrender but Zelivsky did not want to let them get away with their lives. These German mercenaries, staring death in the face either way, struck out in a last desperate attempt and overwhelmed the Hussite forces, killed many and got away. Zelivsky was quite rightly blamed for this.

And one should not forget that the 4 articles of Prague, the fundamental tenets of Hussite beliefs set forth that priests should refrain from temporal power and wealth. That meant for many of the faithful, the spectacle of a preacher as actual lord of the city of Prague was an abomination.

Then a new player mounted the already somewhat overcrowded political stage. As you may remember at the diet in June of 1421 almost the whole of Bohemia had got together and had deposed king Sigismund. They had also decided to offer the crown of Bohemia to Jogaila, the king of Poland-Lithuania. Jogaila had passed the honour on to his brother, Witold, the grand duke of Lithuania. For the house of Jogaila, this offer was very much a double-edged sword. On the one hand, becoming Kings of Bohemia had been a dream of Polish rulers since the days of Boleslav the Great (see episode 18). On the other hand, both Jogaila and Witold had only very recently become Christians. And them becoming Christian had been their argument that the Teutonic Order no longer had any purpose in Prussia. The risk was that accepting the crown of Bohemia from a bunch of heretics would prove the grand master in Marienburg ‘s argument that they were fake Christians and that the armed crusades against Lithuania should continue.

That was a tricky one. The solution for Jogaila and Witold presented itself in the form of their nephew, Zygmunt Korybut. He was close enough to the family to be loyal, but distant enough to provide plausible deniability for anything he may do amongst these fanatic dissenters. He was sent down to Bohemia with a small army as Witold’s representative.

Korybut was not only ambitious, but also smart and engaging. Rather than going straight to Prague, he expelled Sigismund’s garrison from one of the Hussite cities in Moravia. He immediately signed up to the four articles of Prague. And then he spent the next few months meeting people and getting the lay of the land. Being an engaging and energetic man, willing to commit to the cause, Korybut convinced many of the Hussite leaders that he and his family could provide the unifying glue that stitched the kingdom back together. One of those who signed up to this idea was Jan Zizka, whist Jan Zelivsky, the master of the city of Prague did not.

Zelivsky was not only a religious radical, he was also motivated by social issues. He thoroughly disliked the Bohemian barons. He saw many as turncoats who had defected to Sigismund every time he had shown up and had one very notable baron executed for treason. He also believed the nobles had gorged themselves on church property that had been expropriated under the third article of Prague rather than give the land to the poor. A return of the monarchy under Witold or Korybut would strengthen the legitimacy of the barons, which is why he opposed Korybut as regent.

And quite frankly he wasn’t wrong on any of these points. But still Korybut had gained a lot of support. After years of a complete embargo on Bohemian trade, Korybut’s promise of more normal relationships with the neighbours and an economic recovery appealed not just to the merchants but also to Zelivsky’s constituency amongst the artisans of Prague.

His final problem was that he had not been tough enough on the Pikharts, these ultra radicals who thought the eucharist was only a commemorative ritual rather than the manifestation of the body and blood of Christ. Rumours were going round that he was sympathetic to their view, might even support it.

It is not clear whether Zelivsky realised that his situation was getting under ever more pressure and that is why he tried to expand his level of control, or whether he did not realise that and just got ever more power hungry. 

 Still, what he did was trying to gain sole control of the Hussite church on top of control of Prague. If you remember from last week, the Hussite church had called a synod in the summer of 1421 and established a committee of four directors who were to decide on all matters of dogma. Zelivsky had been elected as one of these directors.

Another was Jakoubek of Stibro. If the name means something to you, it is because he had appeared before, in episode 175. He was the theologian who had raise the issue of the chalice, of receiving the eucharist in both forms, way back in 1415. This had made him the godfather of the revolution and a highly respected doctor of the university.

After that he had been preaching in Prague and writing treatises, but he had not taken a major political role in the revolution, until now. Zelivsky’s takeover of Prague and sympathy for the Pikharts dragged him back into the limelight. He accused Zelivsky of being overbearing, of replacing conservative preachers without due process, of sympathy to Pikharts. Jakoubek too organised mass gatherings on squares to preach against his opponent.

Things were put to a decision when the army came back to Prague from its great victories at Kutna Hora and Némecky Brod (knejmetzki Brot). 19 military leaders were tasked to investigate and decide what should happen in the administration of Prague and in the committee of directors of the Hussite church. There were several sworn enemies of Zelivsky amongst these commanders, namely the Hussite barons who had fought against Sigismund. But Zelivsky expected that the Taborites, in particular Zizka would be on his side. The vote of the victor of Kutna Hora would sway everyone else.

But Zizka did not side with Zelivsky. Despite both of them being part of the more radical wing of the new faith, there were many things the blind old general did not like about the aggressive preacher. He did not like that a priest had seized political power, a priest who did have a soft spot for the Martin Houska, the man Zizka had insisted should be burned for his Pikhart beliefs. And Zizka thought Korybut would help stabilise Bohemia.

Bottom line was that the military commanders almost unanimously decided to end the military dictatorship Zelivsky had established, removed the councillors who had been Zelivsky’s followers and elected a new city council. And with that the preacher’s political power collapsed.

The new councillors were in the main conservatives. Two barons were made captains of the city. Within just days the resources and power of Prague that had been aligned with the radicals in Tabor had swapped sides. A baron called Hasek of Waldstein and a knight William Koska emerged as the new leaders of Prague and the conservative wing of Hussites. They quickly occupied all the leavers of power. Zelivsky’s supporters were stripped of their posts and sometimes of their property as well. The counterrevolution is under way.

John Zelivsky may have been stripped of temporal power, but he still had his chancel in his church Maria of the Snow, and he was still one of the four directors of the Hussite church. He used both of these positions to push his political and religious ideas. Crowds were again gathering to listen to him speak.

Hasek of Waldstein was now determined to get rid of that troublesome priest. The opportunity arose when Jakoubek of Stibro, the old preacher and opponent of Zelivsky repeated his accusations, and this time asked for formal legal proceedings.

Zelivsky was invited to come to the city hall of the Old Town, not to stand trial, but to give advice on military matters. He arrived with several of his followers. Waldstein began a discussion about where to deploy Prague’s forces next. Zelivsky felt that he was back in the midst of things and asked more of his former colleagues to join the conference. Everything was going swimmingly, until the mood suddenly changed. Soldiers appeared from all corners and shackled Zelivsky’s friends. They were given the opportunity to confess and then Zelivsky and 9 of his friends were beheaded without even the pretence of a legal proceeding.

Prague was now firmly in the hands of Waldstein and his conservative colleagues. A wide gap has again opened up between Prague and Tabor.

But that was not the only falling out. There was another gap that opened up, between Tabor and its greatest defender, Jan Zizka himself. What exactly had brought this about is unclear. It may have been a disagreement on matters of faith. Tabor was by now a genuine theocracy, run by its bishop and its priests. Though the military commanders, most prominent amongst them Jan Zizka, were of course important. But most of the time they were out on campaign, either defending Bohemia against Sigismund or breaking castles and cities of either the catholic baron Ulrich of Rosenberg or the Pilsener Landfrieden.

Whilst Zizka had been away, the Taborites too had developed Pikhart sympathies, something as we know Zizka had absolutely no time for. There may have also been some personal animosity between Zizka and Wenceslaus Koronda, the firebrand from Pilsen or disagreements over military strategy. We do not know what exactly it was.

When Zizka left Tabor, he joined another community of radical Hussites we have not mentioned before, mainly because they had played only a minor role in proceedings to date. These were the Orebites. Like the Taborites, they had named themselves after a mountain in the bible, in their case the Mount Horeb where Moses had received the 10 commandments.

They had not created an entirely new city as the Taborites had done, but had occupied several towns in eastern Bohemia, namely Hradec Kralove. Their leader, a priest named Ambrose was more to Zizka’s liking. He was an old skool Hussite, not a conservative, but also not as radical as the Taborites after recent shifts toward Pikhartism. 

Once he joined them, he got to work on what he was best at, creating a powerful military force. And to do that he produced his military doctrine. This document, and his implementation of it is the last great military reform he devised. This Statutes and Military Ordinance of a New Brotherhood is not about weapons or tools, this is about discipline.

Discipline is nothing new in European warfare, but by 1423 had gone out of fashion in a major way. Knightly armies tended to attack and fight more or less at will, seeking individual glory in line with chivalric ideals. Only the orders of knights operated as coherent entities which is what accounted for their success in places like Prussia.   

Zizka extended this kind of discipline to the whole army. He insisted that every soldier marched in good order with his platoon and behind his standard, that they followed the orders to the letter, that they did not plunder uncontrollably, but shared booty on an equitable basis and that anyone leaving the fight without permission is punished most harshly. Talking about harsh discipline, quote “Brother Zizka and the other lords, captains, knights, squires, townsmen, craftsmen, and peasants named above, and all their communities, with the help of God and of the Commonwealth,  will punish all such crimes by flogging, banishment, clubbing, decapitation, hanging, drowning, burning, and by all other retributions which fit the crime according to God’s Law, excepting no one from whichever rank and sex, be he a prince, a lord, a knight, a squire, a townsman, a craftsman, or a peasant, or a man whatsoever” end quote.

It is on this basis that Zizka builds his Orebite army, one of the first standing armies in europe since Roman times. They have all the kit he had developed over the years, the war wagons, the flails, the howitzers and pistols and the discipline to follow their blind commander wherever he asks them to go, always in good order and full of confidence.

Tabor will adopt much of the ideas about military discipline and they too create a standing army, a brotherhood.

Looking at Bohemia in 1423, there are now quite a few political centres vying for supremacy. On the Hussite side we have the city of Prague, now run by the conservatives, the barons and patricians who also have an ever-tighter grip on the university. Then we have the theocratic state of Tabor which controls a large chunk of southern Bohemia. Also in Southern Bohemia is Ulrich baron Rosenberg, the largest of the barons and a staunch catholic. In the west we have the Pilsener Landfrieden a league of catholic cities and barons. Then there is Zygmunt Korybut, technically regent of Bohemia on behalf of grand duke Witold. Korybut sits in conservative Prague but wants to be the unifying force. Then we have more barons, Catholic and Hussite who run their own little shows, sometimes aligned with one or more of the other parties. Sigismund is crowned king of Bohemia but has given up. The neighbours, in particular Albrecht, duke of Austria is and wants to remain margrave of Moravia, whilst the elector of saxony wants to pick up some juicy towns and villages on the border whilst getting absolution for his sins as a crusader. And last, but not least, the Orebites with Jan Zizka were operating in eastern Bohemia.

So far, i.e., until 1423 these different shades of Hussitism were fighting the various shades of Catholicism.

But the Orebites were upsetting this precarious balance. Until Zizka had shown up and pumped them full of military vigour, the Orebites had been vassals/allies of the city of Prague. Now they did no longer want to be subordinated to the great city, in particular not after Prague had turned conservative. Things went from tense to tactile when Zizka used the time the Prague forces were fighting duke Albrecht in Moravia to remove a conservative governor from a town that belonged to the Orebites.

The army of Prague immediately abandoned the defence of the realm and headed back to fight Zizka. For the first time two armies, both flying the Ark, the banner of the Hussite chalice fight each other. The only thing that is familiar about this battle is that Zizka won. The encounter is followed by some more skirmishes, until both sides signed a kind of armistice that lasted 12 months.

In the meantime, the Polish uncles, Witold and Jogaila end their dithering and at a meeting with Sigismund decide to end their little adventure. Korybut and his Polish forces are called back home.

Korybut and his Poles gone, the conservative Hussites in Prague look for new allies. And they do materialise in the form of – drumroll – the catholic barons. Despite 4 years of war between the supporters and the enemies of the chalice, these men have a lot in common. For one, they are in the majority barons, often members of the same extended families. They also have similar economic objectives, namely to acquire the church lands made available during the revolution and the suppression of peasants. The patricians of Prague too want an end to the war with the empire and a return of trade with Nurnberg, Leipzig and Vienna and they are prepared to compromise on matters of religion.

It is a match made in heaven. They come together calling a diet for the whole of the kingdom, and, though none of the radicals attended, created a new regency council, made up mostly of barons and led by Waldstein, the captain of Prague.

Hearing about the consolidation on the right, the forces on the left, the Orebites and Taborites too join forces.

A confrontation between the two sides became inevitable. It took a few months, but in June 1424 it was time. The two Hussite armies met at Malešov, a small town not far from Kutna Hora. As always, Zizka had taken care that his army occupied the high ground. Sitting on a plateau they could watch as the army of Prague was crossing the little stream below. And again, Zizka had a new idea for his battle plan. He had a number of wagons filled with stones and placed between the cavalry regiments that made up the first line. The Praguers approached this battleline, going up the hill, but just before the two sides clashed, Zizka’s cavalry retreated, and the soldiers pushed the carts full of stones down the hill, breaking the enemy’s formation. Then the guns fired into the melee followed by a cavalry attack that broke whatever was left to the enemy’s morale. The baron’s army fled, leaving behind their guns and wagons and 1,400 dead.

This was potentially the largest and bloodiest battle of the Hussite war, and it was a war between mainly Hussite forces. It was also a decisive encounter that shaped the course of events for the next decade. Most of eastern Bohemia fell to the Taborites and Orebites, including Kutna Hora, the cash machine of the Bohemian kingdom. Their armies had proven to be for all intents and purposes undefeatable and would remain so until 1434.

As for Prague, the city was still the largest settlement in Bohemia and one of the largest in the empire. It remained conservative, as did the barons. Despite the guns and the military discipline, the radical brotherhoods were still not strong enough to break either Prague or completely wipe out the baronial castles.

For 10 years everybody will be at everybody’s throat. Orebites versus Prague, Tabor against Rosenberg and other Barons, the Pilsener Landfrieden against the radicals. Korybut returned, not as regent for his uncle but to become king in his own right, but he did not manage to unify the country.

3 more crusades were called, the last one allegedly sending 150,000 men into Bohemia, but every single one of these 150,000 great warriors ran away in panic when they saw the dreaded Hussites appear. To maintain the standing armies of the brotherhoods, their new military leaders, Prokop the Bald and Prokop the Short led them in raids into Austria, Hungary, Silesia, Bavaria and beyond. They attacked Naumburg and even get as far as the shores of the Baltic. Only one trade thrived, Bohemians were much in demand as mercenaries.

We will get a bit deeper into this and how the conflict was eventually resolved next week, but we should end this episode with the end of the hero of the Hussite revolution, Jan Zizka.

After the victory at Malešov, the Orebites and Taborites sign an armistice with Prague and baron Waldstein. The parties agree that instead of killing each other, they should finally go and free Moravia, the other half of the kingdom and a place where the Hussite faith is still suppressed by catholic lords, duke Albrecht and the cruel and unnatural king Sigismund.

The largest Hussite force ever assembled sets off under the overall command of the undefeated, blind old general. When they got to the castle of Pribislav, halfway between Prague and Brno, a small royalist garrison, seemingly intent on suicide offered resistance. The army halted the march, put the guns in position and began the slow and boring work of cracking the masonry of a medieval castle. The whole process should not take more than a few days.

Here is our chronicler, quote:

“There [before the castle of Piibyslav] Brother John Zizka fell sick with a mortal sickness from the plague. And in making his bequest he told his dear, faithful brethren and Czechs, the Lord Victorin, Lord John Bzdinka (Hvézda) and Kune, that they should go on fighting for the love of God and should steadfastly and faithfully defend the Truth of God for eternal reward. And then already Brother Zizka recommended his soul to the dear God, and thus he died and ended his life on that Wednesday before St. Gall (October 11, 1424). And there his people took for themselves the name Orphans, as if they had lost their father. And they conquered the castle of Pribyslav, and they burned the people who fought back at them in the castle, about sixty men in arms, and the castle they also burned and demolished.” End quote

Now what happened to his body? The by far most famous account is that by Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini, the future pope Pius II. He was a great admirer of Zizka’s genius, but he could not end his admiring account on the brilliant career of the great general without a final turn: quote: “Struck by the plague he expired, the detestable, cruel, horrible and savage monster. Whom no mortal hand could destroy, the finger of God extinguished him. When asked in his illness where, after his death, he wanted to be buried, he commanded that his body be flayed, the flesh thrown to the birds and beasts, and a drum be made from his skin. With this drum in the lead, they should go to war. The enemies would turn to flight as soon as they heard its voice.” End quote

As much as I would love this story to be true and as much as it has become part of Czech lore, this story, the best of them all, is made up. Piccolomini wrote this decades after Zizka’s death. And we have earlier records that stated that the priest Prokupek (Prokop the Lesser) and the priest Ambrose conducted him, when he was already dead, to Hradec Kralové, and there they buried him in the Church of the Holy Ghost by the main altar. But later he was conveyed to Caslay and there buried in the Church [of SS. Peter and Paul].” End quote. And there his grave stood for nearly 200 years until it was destroyed by the Catholics following the battle on White Mountain, wanting to eradicate any memory of the military leader of the first successful reformation. But instead of wiping out his memory, the destruction of his grave gave credence to the legend of Zizka’s drum und his invincible armies that is being passed down amongst the Czech people to this day.

With Zizka dead and the Hussite revolution limping to its conclusion the question is what we want to do next. We could go straight to the rise of the House of Habsburg, or we could take a tour around the Empire, dedicating an episode to each of the seven electors and to the territories we have not yet spent much time on, namely Baden, Hesse and Württemberg. Let me know what you think and if you want to discuss it, join the HotGPod community by signing up at historyofthegermans.com/support where you find the forum to discuss these issues with your fellow listeners.

by on

The Adamites and the Battle of Kutna Hora

The Czech language has been a severe impediment to my storytelling this season and you may have noticed that I often avoid to name places and people, instead I talk about a major baron or a medium sized city. There are however two Czech words I have no difficult pronouncing, Howitzer and Pistol. Which may tell you what we will be talking about today, the battle of Kutna Hora, when a blind general saw an escape route that change the world irrevocably.

But on the way there we will hear about an accelerating spiral of brutality and attempts at reconciliation, about austere dress and debauched dancing in the woods. This is another one of these episodes that has it all, and some.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcast

Listen on YouTube

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 180: Nude Dissenters and Blind Inventors, also episode 17 of Season 9: the Reformation before the Reformation.

The Czech language has been a severe impediment to my storytelling this season and you may have noticed that I often avoid to name places and people, instead I talk about a major baron or a medium sized city. There are however two Czech words I have no difficult pronouncing, Howitzer and Pistol. Which may tell you what we will be talking about today, the battle of Kutna Hora, when a blind general saw an escape route that change the world irrevocably.

But on the way there we will hear about an accelerating spiral of brutality and attempts at reconciliation, about austere dress and debauched dancing in the woods. This is another one of these episodes that has it all, and some.

And now is your opportunity to frantically press the 45 second forward button, just be sure you do not get too far. Because I can be brief if need be, like today. So here we go. The History of the Germans, after all these years and for all the years yet to come, appears on your doorstep every Thursday morning, fresh and advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons who have signed up on historyofthegermans.com/support. I am talking specifically about Philip T., Waverley, Christopher M., Alexander K., Andrew, Matthew L., and Andreas B.-H.

Support the Show – Become a Patron

And with that, back to the show

Last week we looked at the period 1421 to 1423 from the perspective of imperial politics and Sigismund’s role as the head of this almost collapsing political entity. This week we will look at what happened inside Bohemia and for that we will go back to the aftermath of battle of the Vyšehrad in the summer of 1420.

Sigismund was comprehensively defeated and had returned to Kutna Hora to lick his wounds. He fought one more action when he relieved the city of Tachov in the westernmost part of Bohemia, just across the border from Bavaria. This campaign ended in an even deeper humiliation when he ran away from a Hussite army without firing even a single shot.

With Sigismund and the Bavarians gone, the Hussites could roll up the areas of Bohemia they had not yet brought under their control. They started with the city of Pilsen which surrendered within a few weeks. The one-year truce they agreed to left Pilsen pretty much unscathed, not even having to receive a garrison inside its walls.

But soon after that, the gloves came off. This is a religious war and religious wars have a tendency to descend into levels of brutality that political wars rarely do.

These are conflicts where either side believes itself to be in possession of incontrovertible truth which makes their opponent’s position simply incomprehensible.

If you were a Hussite and you read your Corinthians 11:25 where Paul writes: “This cup is the new covenant in My blood; do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.” This is so abundantly clear, there is no conceivable way the chalice could be denied to a Christian. Which means those who refuse to take the chalice must be deluded or at a minimum hoodwinked by the despicable priests of the catholic church. Therefore burning catholic priests was not only permissible, but a good thing, because they were deceivers leading their followers away from the pearly gates.

If you were a Catholic you checked on your Matthew 18:18 where Christ gave St. Peter and his successors the keys of the kingdom of heaven and told him that “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” This is so abundantly clear there is no conceivable way a Christian can refuse to obey the Holy Father. Which means those who refuse to obey the pope must be deluded or at a minimum hoodwinked by the despicable priests of the Hussite church. Therefore burning Hussite priests was not only permissible, but a good thing, because they were deceivers leading their followers away from the pearly gates.

As a consequence for 2 years now the Bohemian hills were alive with the smell of burning clerics. By January 1421 the level of brutality goes up a notch.  

A Hussite garrison of about 700 men were defending a small city called Chotěboř. It was attacked by royalists under Nicholas of Jemniste, the mint master of Kutna Hora and all out Blofeld of this war. The garrison surrendered under terms, but Jemniste did not honour the agreement. These were deluded heretics and promises made to them were therefore non-binding. He had 300 of them burned, not just the priests, but all of them. The remaining 400 were forced into a hunger march to Kutna Hore, during which many died from exhaustion or were clubbed to death. Whoever survived the journey was thrown down the infamous mine shafts where they too perished.

Retribution was swift. A month later a Hussite army killed all male inhabitants of the royalist city of Chomutov, even those offering to convert. The only immunity was granted to jews prepared to be baptised, but many of them preferred to be burned. In their fury they did not spare the women and children. The accounts of the number of victims vary, but it was somewhere between 1,400 and 2,500 out of a city of a few thousand.

News of these atrocities spread not just across Bohemia but we find reports as far away as Nurnberg and Magdeburg.

For all Bohemians, Hussites and Catholics alike survival had become a function of immediate surrender and let’s call it religious flexibility. Almost every city that saw an army appearing before its gates, irrespective of Hussite or Catholic, immediately surrendered and handed over whoever the besiegers intended to have captured, killed or burned. The city of Beroun handed over 34 priests and 3 masters of the university for execution after no more than token resistance. Others did not even pretend to fight.

Even Kutna Hora, the centre of silver mining, the jewel in the crown of Bohemia and bulwark of Catholicism surrendered. In a very evocative and also incredible medieval scene the citizens came out before the walls and knelt in front of the Hussite army. Their leader, the priest Zevilsky, he who had led the mob at the Defenestration 2 year earlier, preached to them and -as they repented- forgave them. Remember, this is Kutna Hora where hundreds, if not thousands of Hussites had been thrown down mine shafts to die of hunger, thirst and sheer panic, the city of Nicholas of Jemniste the mastermind behind the massacre of Chotěboř.

Forgiving the citizens of Kutna Hora was a sign that not everybody wanted an ever accelerating cycle of brutality, that there were many on all sides of the argument who wanted to reconcile, to stop the meaningless, incessant slaughter.

This time, the summer of 1421 might be the highpoint of the Hussite revolt, not the point of greatest military success, but the moment where the Hussite movement is most unified in its beliefs and has its widest reach. Tabor and Prague are working together, not exactly hand in glove, but they agree on strategic targets and run coordinated campaigns. There is a basic understanding between the main social groups, the barons, the city patricians, the artisans, labourers and peasants. Even the catholic barons, including the eternal turncoat Cenek of Wartenberg and the catholic stalwart, Ulrich of Rosenberg have called off their allegiance to king Sigismund. The authority of the university of Prague is, at least in principle, recognised by all.

And then there is a another, major, completely unexpected move. In all this chaos we still have an archbishop of Prague, a German from Bremen called Konrad of Vechta. He had taken the job way back in 1413 and was a Catholic royalist, something that sort of came with the job. In 1420 he had crowned Sigismund in St. Veits cathedral.

But then something must have happened, well it is quite clear what happened, the Hussites were winning. At which point Konrad saw only two options, join his impecunious king in his exile, or make a deal with the Hussites. Konrad, who liked the good life and the income of his archbishopric, chose to make a deal with the Hussites and signed up to the four articles of Prague. That was a total shocker. The catholic archbishop of Prague reconciled with Europe’s most prominent heretics, people who are subject to a papal crusade. The pope immediately dismissed him from his post, but did not have the power to appoint a new archbishop of Prague – for the next 140 years.

Things were changing, changing faster and further than anyone could have imagined 2 years earlier.

If we were in the 19th century, the next step from here would be to call a national assembly, right. Absolutely right. Then we are not in the 19th century, but we still get a national assembly.

On May 18, 1421 the cities of Prague, the old Town and the New Town together with archbishop Conrad and several of the important barons sent out invitations to all the significant players in the crown of Bohemia to come to a diet in the town of Čáslav.

This diet was a remarkably harmonious and effective affair. It lasted just 5 days and ended with  a manifesto signed by all the participants. And these participants were, in order of pre-eminence:

  • The Burgomaster and councillors of the Old and New Town of Prague
  • Conrad, by the Grace of God Archbishop of the cathedral of Prague and Legate of the Papal See, or so he described himself,
  • The Lords of the Kingdom
  • The regents and people and towns of Tabor
  • The Mint Master of Kutna Hora ( of course no longer Nicolaus of Jemniste)
  • The Knights and Squires of the Kingdom
  • Other Towns and Communities

This is a most unusual ranking. The Bohemian kingdom had been dominated by the barons since time immemorial. Prague was stripped of its freedoms during the reign of the Blind King John. Karl IV and Wenceslaus had spent their time in a perennial struggle with the Rosenbergs and Wartenbergs and Lichtenbergs, rarely thinking about the cities. But now Prague was in the driving seat. Why, because the victory at the Vyšehrad had been first and foremost a victory of the city of Prague. The Taborites, the few of them actually present at the time of the battle, had not really taken part. The victories in western Bohemia too were brought about by the reinforcements Prague made available to Jan Zizka. Add to the university and the sheer size into the mix and Prague becomes the pre-eminent political entity in Bohemia.

The barons meanwhile were divided into Hussites and those who until very recently had fought against the Law of God. Their list was headed by the richest of them, Ulrich of Rosenberg, until recently staunch catholic and fierce supporter of emperor Sigismund and Cenek of Wartenberg, the eternal turncoat. No surprise that the councillors of the cities of Prague were taking the lead over them.  

On the other end of the spectrum we have Jan Zizka as the leader of the Taborite delegation and Jan Želivský the firebrand preacher from Prague.

But they all agreed on certain basic items. First up, they repeated the four articles of Prague, i.e., freedom to preach, the eucharist as bread and wine, the poverty and moral probity of priests and the prohibition of all sins and other unruly things.

And then comes a fifth point that quote “we should not accept the Hungarian king Sigismund as our king or hereditary maser until the end of our or his life, as it was he and his helpers by whom we and the entire Czech kingdom have been deceived most, and by whose injustice and cruelty great damage had been caused. [..] This king is an obvious abuser of the holy truths [..] and a murderer of the honour and persons of the Czech language.”

Point six sets forth that “we have together and unanimously elected 20 wise, stable and faithful men from our number [..] to administer, and to manage the various matters of the crown of Bohemia.” End quote.

The general assembly of Bohemia has hereby deposed the king Sogismund and established a government without royal assent. Whilst this is not a democratically elected government by any stretch of the imagination, but still, it is a government without a king, in the Middle Ages, not in a city state, but in a feudal kingdom. Only 5 of its members were barons, 2 former royalists and 3 established Hussites. Half of the 20 members represented cities, 4 for Prague, 2 for Tabor and 4 for the other towns, of which two had remained catholic so far. And then there were 5 squires, i.e., members of the lower gentry. This was not the usual regency council of the most powerful magnates, this was a government of national unity, aiming to reflect the wide range of views prevailing across Bohemia.

Sigismund had tried to influence this event. He was allowed to send representatives who were asking for peace and reconciliation, even making the claim that Sigismund had not yet made up his mind on the four articles. Well, as we know, given the strains on his government in the empire at the time, he had no option to recognise the four articles, even if he had wanted to. And nobody believed him anyway.

This council then began its work of pacifying the country and preparing for the next wave of invasion that was being prepared across the border at the imperial diet in Nurnberg as we discussed last week.

Part of that pacification was to take out the remaining fortresses of catholic barons, a task that fell to Jan Zizka and his Taborite forces. These castles were small and their fall wasn’t ever really in doubt. But they were still fortresses of war full of soldiers trained in archery and the use of guns. Jan Zizka was a general who led from the front. And that came with risks, including the risk of getting shot in the eye, the one eye that he was left with. It was a miracle in and of itself that he survived at all given the risk of infection, the  total incompetence of medieval doctors and the fact they transported him all the way to Prague on country roads. He made it through though. But he was now blind, completely blind.  Some historians would later try to construct some argument that he retained at least some minor ability to see at least shapes. But all contemporary accounts are adamant, the greatest of the Hussite generals was blind, completely, Germans would say blind as a mole. I think the British expression is blind as a bat, which is weird given bats can see using echolocation. No, Zizka did not have echolocation either. He was thrown into total darkness.

There are two famous blind warriors in European history and both are linked to Bohemia, Jan Zizka and the Blind King John of Bohemia, one the epitome of chivalric valour and the other the military genius who put an end to the dominance of the armoured rider.

The question is, how could Zizka operate on the battlefield without being able to see anything. We can only guess. He had his trusted lieutenants who knew their leader well and understood which bits of information he needed and which they could leave out when describing a situation. Moreover, Zizka had been travelling and fighting across Bohemia for decades and most potential battlefields were familiar to him. And finally, medieval armies, even the much more organised Hussite forces, left a lot of initiative to the commanders on the ground. They did need some guidance and coordination from headquarters, but nowhere near as much as a modern army would.

Then there is the question what it did to him psychologically. Again not much can be asserted, but he appeared more gruff, more set in his ways and less prepared to accept different religious views.

And that is very much in line with what is going on more broadly. The Hussite revolt had been going for 2 years, so if we take the timeline of the French Revolution we are in the summer of 1792, the time Robespierre introduced the Revolutionary tribunals to deal with “traitors” and “enemies of the people”. In other words, the time when new ideas could be brought up and freely discussed was over. It is time to establish and define exactly what is inside the permitted set of beliefs and what is not.

In Bohemia this task was given to a synod of the Hussite church that met shortly after the great assembly. The synod established 23 articles of religious faith and appointed a commission of four eminent masters of the university, to adjudicate on Hussite doctrine. But not everybody endorsed these wholeheartedly.

One of those who took a fundamentally different view were called the Pikharts. They were called that as their ideas had emerged from a group of immigrants from Picardie who have settled in Bohemia during the reign of Wenceslaus IV. Who they were exactly and what their beliefs were specifically is a bit vague. One thing where they definitely deviated from basic Hussite beliefs was the significance of the Eucharist. The Pikharts, or more specifically one of the Bohemian priests usually associated withthem, a certain Martin Houska, believed that the celebration of bread and wine was just commemorative. Christ was present in all and everything anyway and did not need some hokus pokus by a priest to materialise in the host and wine.

Given the huge importance the Bohemian reform movement ascribed to the eucharist since the very beginning, this was horrific for all Hussites from moderates to radicals. Houska had already been apprehended back in February, but had abandoned his belief seeing his comrades being burned for their reluctance to see the error of their ways. In summer 1421, Martin Houska lived in Tabor as a free man but out of fear the synod would condemn him, fled towards Moravia. He was caught and interrogated. He was then handed around between different authorities and priests for weeks. Despite weeks of torture making Houska did not retract. That create a bit of a dilemma. He still had many friends amongst the masters of the university and was no fanatic, more of a thoughtful theologian, a bit like Jan Hus. So, nobody wanted to go the whole hog and burn him.

It was Zizka himself who took charge of proceedings. Zizka was no priest or theologian, but was motivated by his beliefs and in particular the importance of the chalice. Houska’s ideas somehow got under his skin. Despite having no business to do so, he demanded Houska to be burned on Prague’s Old Town square. The authorities refused because they feared an uprising of the Pikhardts hiding amongst the population. So Houska was eventually burned in smaller town controlled by the archbishop. Still a huge crowd gathered for the event. And Houska’s last words, “not we are in error, but you who kneel before a piece of bread”  would continue to resonate amongst the more radical groups in Tabor.

That was however not the only piece of religious cleansing the blind general went after. There was another group of religious dissenters that were associated with the Pikharts and Martin Houska, though the link seems a bit tenuous.

These became known to history as Adamites. These were probably only a few hundred people who believed that they had regained the state of innocence, i.e., before Adam bit the Apple. Basically they were already living in paradise. There was no authority to obey, no captains or leaders. Nobody owned anything in person, but everything was communal. So far, so old skool Hussite, but what made them completely unpalatable for Zizka and the puritanical Taborites was their attitude towards clothing. For them it was not only optional but frowned upon. As was marriage or any kind of monogamy. Refusing someone’s sexual advances was considered not just rude but against holy scripture.

A very indignant Lawrence of Brezova wrote quote: “their law is based on pimping, as it says in Matthew 21:31: pimps and prostitutes will precede you on the way to the heavenly kingdom. Therefore they did not want to accept anyone who was not a pimp or a whore. [..] They implemented their law like this: All of them, men and women, undressed and danced naked around a bonfire and sang the ten commandments as an accompaniment to the dance. They, [..] looked at each other, and if any of the men was covered, the women pulled his clothes off and said: relieve the prisoner, give me your spirit and receive my spirit. [..] they performed the devil’s act, and then they bathed in the river.” End quote.

I did check Matthew 21:31, it did not say pimps and prostitutes but “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.” Apart from that everything else is almost certainly true, or probably an exaggeration.

Zizka, on one of his patrols came across them and quote “motivated by the zeal for the law of god, attacked them immediately without stopping to rest, catching them by surprise; and though all of them defended themselves, both women and men, [..] they captured 40 of them of both genders and killed the rest, sparing only one man so he could tell the world of what had been done” end quote. The other 39 captives were burned to death.

Frederick Heymann who wrote the seminal biography of Jan Zizka summed it up best when he wrote quote: “The number of people who during those years of war and persecution, had to die for their faith cannot be counted, nor can their suffering be measured. Most of them were little people whose names were never remembered, people who did not ask for it but were caught and crushed between the millstones of history.” End quote

All this now takes us to the late autumn of 1421. As we heard last week a crusade had set off from Eger towards Prague but turned tail as soon as a Hussite army appeared. By now news of the effectiveness and relentless brutality of Hussite armies had spread far and wide and often crusaders ran for cover when they saw the war wagons arrive.

Unperturbed, Sigismund made another attempt to regain Bohemia for the catholic faith as we have also heard last week. And last week I promised to talk more about this battle, which turns out to be a crucial moment not just in Bohemian or German history, but in the history of europe, if not the world.

Sigismund had gathered a sizeable army, mainly Hungarians, eastern Slavs and Romanians. under the command of his field marshal, a highly respected Italian condottiere, veteran of dozens of campaigns against the Ottomans and the Venetians. His name was Philip de Scolari, count of Ozora, usually called Pipo Spano. He was famous enough to be painted by Andrea del Castagno as one of his “illustrious men” alongside Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and two other great Florentine commanders.

The initial goal was to take back the city of Kutna Hora, the centre of silver mining in Bohemia and hence source of much of the ready cash of the kingdom. Kutna Hora as we mentioned earlier had submitted to the Hussite forces after a long period as a bulwark of Catholicism. Its inhabitants still contained a large group of German mining specialists who operated the complex system of shafts and elevators as well as the smelters and minting machinery. Though these Germans were in the main catholic and supportive of Sigismund, they had not been expelled by the Hussites. That may be in part because the Hussites believed they had changed their mind on the chalice and/or because they needed them to keep the mines going. In any event, they were still in the town, the town that was officially a Hussite city.

Zizka who had taken charge of the combined Hussite forces and had made the defence of Kutna Hora the cornerstone of his strategic plan.

So both armies converged upon that city. Zizka arrived first. He decided not to bring his army inside the city, in part because he wanted to avoid frictions between the citizens and his radical Taborites. His army came with the now famous war wagons. These have by now come close to the final design with reinforcements that protected the defenders and the car itself, the shields to protect the gaps between the wagons and crucially a large number of artillery pieces. These include long-barrelled gins on the wagons as well as Howitzers, short barrelled pieces mounted on wheels. Howitzer is by the way a Czech word, as is pistol, another weapon they had plenty of.

Zizka set up camp outside the walls, waiting for the enemy to arrive.

On December 21st Zizka received news that Sigismund was approaching with his sizeable forces from the west. I spare you the numbers, which I believe are all nonsense, but it is likely that Sigismund’s army was materially larger and comprised a large cavalry force.

When the royalists appeared, the Hussite militia of Kutna Hora and all regular soldiers safe for a small garrison came outside the walls to join Zizka and his men.

Zizka needed to block access to the city and therefore established his forces on an elevation that stretched from the road in the west that Sigismund was coming down on in a crescent shape all the way over to the second major access road in the east that led to the Kolin Gate of Kutna Hora.

The royalists set up a position opposite Zizka, mirroring the crescent shape of Zizka’s position. Given Sigismiund’s army was larger and had more cavalry, its crescent was longer, stretching beyond Zizka’s flanks. As far as the blind general was concerned, this wasn’t a major issue, since the city in his back was well fortified and the royalists would be mad getting into the gap between himself and the city where they would be squashed from both sides.

The battle began with a series of cavalry attack on the Hussite positions that were repelled with the various field guns and volleys of arrows. The royalist lines were now stretched so far that they had to fill the gaps with cattle to give the impression of more riders than they actually had. At that point it looked like a rerun of many of the previous battles. The royalists had superior numbers but no way to overrun the wagon fortresses of the Hussites. As the sun was about to set the revolutionaries saw themselves if not as victors, but very much en route to another success.

This was December21st, the shortest day of the year. Dusk set in around 3:30 in the afternoon and that is when the plan of Sigismund’s cunning field marshal, Pipo Spano kicked in for real. These frontal cavalry attacks that had been running for the last few hours had not been for real. They were a diversion meant to keep the militia of Kutna Hora out in the field.

Do you remember the Germans inside Kutna Hora? Well, they had never really given up their catholic and royalist affiliations. And they were many, they were determined and they had been in touch with Pipo Spano. All they were waiting for was the sign to strike against the Hussite garrison. And that sign was a large detachment of cavalry that went around Zizka’s position on the eastern flank, making for the city gate.

The militia guarding the gate had been made up entirely of Germans. As the riders came closer, they opened the gate. The knights rode in and a fierce slaughter of the Hussite garrison and all armed men not knowing the password ensued. Within less than an hour that the city of Kutna Hora was in the hands of the royalists.

Whilst this was going on, Pipo Spanio sent another cavalry regiment around Zizka’s western flank, closing the last remaining exit route for the Hussite army. Zizka and his men were now trapped between the city of Kutna Hora in the back, the gros of Sigismund’s army in front and the two flanking regiments in the east and the west, like the Romans at Cannae.

Zizka rearranged the wagon fortress to cover all four angles. This fortress was still almost unassailable and he and his men could get some much needed comfort from that following this sudden and dramatic turn in their fortunes.

But this was only a temporary reprieve. They had counted on the support from Kutna Hora and had therefore brought only limited provisions and ammunition out to the battlefield. If they stayed where they were, at some point the next day or the day after at that, they would run out and would have to surrender. This army was the largest, the best equipped and the most experiences force the Hussites had. The commander of the only other Hussite army was a young, eager but not very experienced general who would not stand a chance in hell against Pipo Spano. Unless Zizka and his forces make it out of here before sunrise, the road to Prague would be open and the war would be over. It is now all about getting out of this trap.

How did he do it? At this point I would have liked to quote Lawrence of Brezova, but all his wonderfully vivid and somewhat ridiculously biased chronicle gives us is: quote “And then [..] they approached the place that the king had occupied with his army and having squashed the king’s cannon, they drove the king together with his army from their position. And then morning came…” end quote. And that is literally the last sentence of the book.

Not useful. So let’s go with Frederick Heyman the biographer of Jan Zizka: quote “Of course, so we might think, having artillery, Zizka would use it to open the way through the enemy ranks. But this was far from a matter of course. On the contrary, we have, in these few words, the first clear proof of a tactical use of field artillery; the use of fire weapons for a tactically offensive operation. [..] Otherwise artillery had, up to this time, always been used in a purely static way.; in besieging towns, in defending them and in defending entrenchments in the field as in Grunwald (Tannenberg) in 1410. Even the use of artillery in wagon fortress was still stationary in a tactical sense [..].

Here, however, the guns shooting from Zizka’s wagons, which stopped rolling only to fire,  as well as the howitzers, [..] were given the specific task and had the specific effect which field artillery was to have in battles for centuries to come: not just to block or discourage an enemy approach, but to destroy the enemy’s chance or will to stay where he was; to dislodge him, to drive him back, to open the way for one’s own troops. The Field artillery of our motorised present, including tanks and self-propelled guns, can have no other basic task. [..]

The history of this second phase of the battle of Kutna Hora is, in this sense, the history of another revolution in the art of war brought about by Zizka, a tactical discovery or invention more permanent than the introduction of the battle wagon.” End quote.

And that is where we will leave it for today, the invention of the mobile field artillery, the tank and all that came with it, the conquest of almost the entire planet by European armies able to use firepower to smash through masses of armed men two, three, even tenfold their number. You know that I am no military man, but once in a while you stand before moments of human ingenuity that force respect, like when a blind man sees a way out of a desperate situation nobody else could.

Next week we will talk more about human ingenuity, dreams of a world without kings and rulers being destroyed by the circumstances and a revolution gradually running out of steam. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime, if you feel so inclined to support the show, go to historyofthegermans.com/support where you can choose to become a Reichsritter, an Imperial Knight, who protects the poor, defends the church and serves the emperor freely and truly. He does not expect anything in return, apart from honor and respect. Nor does an Edelfrau (Dame) debase herself to barter for goods in return for her generosity.

Only an exchange of gifts is suitable for such august personalities, so please graciously receive our Heartfelt Gratitude and accept the invitation to our HotGPod Community site. All that for just 2 pounds a month, less than you pay for your decaf latte.

by on

The Beginnings of Imperial Reform

Sigismund, king of the Romans, king of Hungary and recently crowned king of Bohemia is not doing too well. Despite his long list of glittering titles he is stuck in the town of Kutna Hora, the revolutionaries who had taken Prague, built strongholds, have created a completely new army for a completely new form of warfare and were taking over more and more of his ancestral kingdom.

When one of his most strategic positions, the castle of Vyšehrad comes under siege, he had to take his forces into another battle with the Hussites, which will set off a string of events that will bring what every true supporter of the Holy Roman empire must have been craving – taxes.

Come and find out

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcast

Listen on YouTube

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 179 – Meanwhile in the Empire

Sigismund, king of the Romans, king of Hungary and recently crowned king of Bohemia is not doing too well. Despite his long list of glittering titles he is stuck in the town of Kutna Hora, the revolutionaries who had taken Prague, built strongholds, have created a completely new army for a completely new form of warfare and were taking over more and more of his ancestral kingdom.

When one of his most strategic positions, the castle of Vyšehrad comes under siege, he had to take his forces into another battle with the Hussites, which will set off a string of events that will bring what every true supporter of the Holy Roman empire must have been craving – taxes.

Come and find out

Before we start a little story about the world of podcasting. Every year we get to hear that the number of podcast listeners has gone up. I just saw a report that said that the percentage of Americans listen to podcasts at least once a month has risen to 44%. But then the next news item is that podcast networks left right and center are cutting their workforce, that platforms shut down and long established shows give up. Why is that? One element is the shift from traditional podcast platforms like Apple, Pocket cast and Podbean, to YouTube and Spotify video. The difference is that monetization through advertising on traditional platforms leaves a lot more on the table then at the video platforms. The video platforms control the adverts you see and pass through pittance to creators, whilst in traditional RSS feeds a 100% of the advertiser’s fees go to the creators and their networks. As listeners migrate across to YouTube and Spotify video, podcaster advertising revenues decline. So in order to make ends meet, they put ever more advertising slots in. Many shows I love and listen to have now 3 minutes at the beginning and 4 minutes in the middle. That is 7 minutes per show. I am listening to maybe 2 episodes per day, which makes it 14 minutes or three and a half days per year. Imagine what you could do with all that time – listen to the entire back catalogue of the History of the Germans for instance!

Which is why we should be so thankful to all of you who keep this show advertising free. In particular Finbar G., Gilman L., Casper H., Gerry C., Charles M., David and William. And if you want to join this august group, you can do so on my website at historyofthegermans.com/support.

Support the Show – Become a Patron

And an apology for getting Jan Hus and Jan Zizka mixed up last episode. To clarify Jan Hus is not the kind of person carrying a military flail.

And with that, back to the show

Last week we ended on the battle of Vitkov Hill. This was an encounter between the crusading army of emperor Sigismund and the Hussite defenders of the city of Prague on July 14th, 1420.

The defenders did win and 500 years later work began on the Vitkov Hill memorial that towers above the city  of Prague boasting a 22m high statue of Jan Zizka weighing 16.5 tons. I have not been there yet but will come to Prague this summer and will look for any monument for the 2 women and the one girl that according to Lawrence of Brezova had fought thousands of Saxon and Thuringian Knights with their bare hands. Let’s say, I am not hopeful.

Such a massive memorial suggests it had been a huge battle, but I am afraid it wasn’t. The stated number of casualties of about 500 would not be a huge loss for an army of allegedly 150,000. If we scale this down by the average degree of exaggeration, we are looking at maybe 50 to 100 casualties on the imperial side and far fewer amongst the Hussites. Basically an average Tuesday night in Glasgow.

Still it was a hugely important battle. By defending the Vitkov Hill, Prague was able to keep its supply lines open. With supplies coming in, Sigismund’s plan to starve the city out was doomed.  And he was – as usual – running out of money. So the great crusading army disappeared back home, leaving Sigismund with just his own troops from Hungary and the forces of the catholic barons and cities.

But he did not give up that quickly. The catholic lords of Bohemia told him that they were in touch with moderate and conservative forces amongst the Hussites. Conflict was rife amongst the various factions, they said and soon almost all of Bohemia would recognize him as king, they said and so let’s just elect and crown you, they said. And so the crown of St. Wenceslaus was taken out of the beautiful chapel his father had built and placed on Sigismund’s head, whilst in the city below the Hussites were still celebrating their victory.

After that Sigismund returned to Kutna Hora and patiently waited for the inevitable surrender of his enemies.

The Catholic barons weren’t entirely wrong about the rifts between the various factions inside the movement. The Hussites weren’t by any means a monolithic religion. What they agreed on were the 4 articles of Prague, i.e., the right to receive communion as bread and wine, the freedom to preach the gospel, the poverty of the church and the eradication of sin. But for the moderates these were maximum demands and for the radicals this was the bare minimum.

The Taborite radicals produced a more detailed program, comprising 12 articles. Therin they demanded the destruction of all monasteries, the stripping out of all gold and imagery from the churches, the closing of brothels and expulsion of prostitutes, a ban on fancy clothing and all the other things that would become popular in England in the 1640s. They probably wanted to ban Christmas as well.

And then there were different factions amongst the radicals as well. Some of them went seriously off the reservation claiming that the third age had arrived, after the age of God ruled by the Old testament and the age of Christ dominated by the New testament it was now the Age of the Holy Spirit where there was no testament, just direct communication between the godhead and the leaders of the community. There was no longer any sin and any action that had been regarded as sin in previous ages was therefore no longer sin. Sounds like a great party for some but was absolutely abhorrent to the puritanical mainstream Taborites.

These internal divisions were suppressed when Sigismund’s great army was lying before the gates, but came back out with a vengeance when he withdrew. Jan Zizka was smart enough to take his forces back to Tabor before things got dicey, but the radicals in the New Town went on a rampage. In one famous instance Wenceslaus Koranda, our friend and end of Days preacher from Pilsen took a mob out to the monastery of Aula Regia, the greatest of the many splendid Cistercian monasteries in Bohemia, and place of burial of king Wenceslaus. They pulled the dead kings body out of his grave and destroyed this medieval masterpiece. Its greatest treasure, an image of the Madonna was covered by rubble and only found again, 200 years later. These hooligans celebrated their achievement in a  distinctly unpuritanical way when they went through the sizeable wine cellar of the monastery followed by a drunken attack on the castle of the  Vyšehrad, where at least some came to a sticky end.

Cisterciácký klášter a chrám Nanebevzetí Panny Marie na Zbraslavi – stav k roku 1420  | Historie v modelech

These antics shocked the moderates who now had to protect their churches from the vandalism of their alleged co-religionists.

But despite these internal frictions, the Hussites were unaware that the only solution would be unconditional surrender to the man they held responsible for the death of Jan Hus.

It took a few months for Sigismund to realise that his situation was a lot worse than he had imagined. No letter of surrender, the crusaders gone and the catholic barons promises of imminent victory sounded increasingly hollow. According to Sigismund’s biographer he accused them of having contrived a vicious plan to thwart his ambitions, that they were all closeted Hussites and that there “were no four lords in the whole of Bohemia and Moravia who could be trusted.

But things were getting worse. During the course of the autumn the Prague forces intensified the siege of the Vyšehrad. This strategically important fortress was still occupied by a sizeable and well led royal garrison. They had held out for 3 months but supplies were running low, the inhabitants of the fortress were walking around pale like corpses.

Sigismund had to come to the aid of the Vyšehrad, unless he was prepared to lose both face and a crucial stronghold. His initial plan was to lure the castle’s besiegers away from the fortress by attacking Hussite towns in the surrounding countryside. But the Hussite commander, this time not Jan Zizka but the baron Krusina of Lichtenberg did not fall for it and continued the siege.

On October 28th the commander of the garrison, himself a catholic bohemian baron met his counterpart under a flag of truce. He agreed that if by nightfall on the 31st of October no effective help had arrived, he would surrender the castle with all its heavy weapons at 09:00 the next morning. In exchange he and his soldiers would be allowed to withdraw honorably and with all their small weapons.

In the meantime Sigismund had given up on is clever plan. His army was now camped just across the river in Prague castle. All that was holding him back from going out to relieve the Vyšehrad was the need for more reinforcements. He was waiting for an army of 2,000 Moravians to top up the 16,000 men he already had. The minor snag was that these Moravians did not arrive until the evening of the 31st , exactly the moment the garrison commander became bound by oath to hand over the castle.  But neither Sigismund nor his generals knew anything about this agreement. The only way they could communicate with the castle had been through the burning of nearby villages to announce their arrival. Not subtle enough to convey complex terms of surrender.

What also did not help was that the Hussites captured the messengers Sigismund had tried to send into the Vyšehrad with his battleplan.

When Sigismund mustered his troops on the morning of the 1st of November to attack the Hussite siege positions that surrounded the castle, they found the enemy well entrenched. The leader of the Moravians counselled the king to halt the attack. Sigismund responded that it was “wholly fitting that he would fight these peasants today”. But the Moravians kept warning him that any action would risk the destruction of the army and that they feared the flails of these peasants. At which point Sigismund accused them of cowardice and disloyalty. To prove they were neither the Moravians then agreed to take the most dangerous position on the battlefield where they were fighting uphill on to the enemy positions.

The battleplan was comparatively simple. Sigismund’s forces would attack the Hussite positions from the front and the Vyšehrad garrison would fall into their back, then, squeezed between the two sides the Hussites would be unable to move and had to surrender.

But it failed miserably, for one because the garrison commander of the Vyšehrad stuck by his agreement and blocked the gates so that even those soldiers who wanted to fight could not exit. Secondly, because the Hussite defenders held their positions firing their guns and crossbows at the knights who had to cross an open field. The advance halted and then turned back. That retreat turned into an uncoordinated flight as the besiegers chased after them and the peasants cruelly killed many with their flails. No quarter was given even to those who surrendered and promised to convert. The  Moravians took the biggest losses. Lawrence of Brezova lists dozens of barons and knights whose names I will not recount out respect for the Czech language. These “gentlemanly and rugged warriors, these handsome and curly haired young men” were “butchered like pigs” and “immediately stripped of all their armour as well as their clothing down to their underwear”.

The chronicler of the life of emperor Sigismund blames the sudden retreat on our not friend of the podcast, Nicholas of Jemniste, the butcher of Kutna Hora, who turned his horse around in the height of the battle.

Sigismund himself observed the fighting from the top of a hill in order to coordinate between this attack and a parallel equally disastrous attempt to retake the Charles Bridge for the nth time. When he saw the destruction of his men he “was struck with terror and fled in tears with is retinue”.

The Vyšehrad garrison surrendered the castle as agreed and the common people violently entered [..] and invaded the churches and with great ruckus broke and dashed to pieces pictures, altars, organs, chairs and other decorations”. This begins a process of dismantling the ancient royal residence that lasted centuries and left little of this once great castle.

The rest of Sigismund’s campaign of 1420/21 is short and sad. Following the success at the Vyšehrad the Hussites were riding high. The Taborites under Jan Zizka defeated the baron Rosenberg, the richest and most powerful Bohemian baron and loyal catholic. Rosenberg had to recognize the four articles of Prague and allow Hussite religious practice in all his lands. That brought almost the entirety of Southern Bohemia under Hussite control.

Then Jan Zizka turned against the Pilsener Landfrieden, an alliance of royalist cities in western Bohemia. He took several fortresses and laid siege to the town of Tachov. Tachov was a predominantly German speaking town and lies just 7 miles from the border to Bavaria and Franconia. That rang alarm bells everywhere from Nurnberg to Landshut. What if these fanatic heretics who were putting monasteries to the torch and burned every catholic priest descended from the Boehmerwald and infested the land with their erroneous ideas.

So when the citizens of Tachov sent for help to Sigismund and the duke of Bavaria and the city of Nurnberg, an army of 12,000 gathered quickly to relieve the stricken town. Sigismund brought his remaining forces from Kutna Hora, at which point Jan Zizka raised the siege of Tachov, garrisoned the three towns he had conquered earlier and returned to Tabor to gather fresh forces.

Sigismund’s army then laid siege to one of these fortresses, Kladbury where one of Zizka’s paladins was holed up with about a thousand men. Despite outnumbering the garrison 12 to one, Sigismund made scant progress in taking Kladbury.

Meanwhile Zizka was on his way back with a Taborite force of a few thousand men. Given the size of Sigismund’s army that appeared not enough. So he asked the Praguer for help. And despite the ever deepening religious and political differences between the moderates in Prague and the radicals, they did answer the call. 7,000 men and 320 war wagons joined the Taborites.

Now both forces were roughly equal. The stage is set for the decisive battle. But seeing a Taborite force of roughly equal size approaching, far larger than he had expected, Sigismund lost heart. He sent the Bavarians and Franconians back home, took himself down to Kutna Hora and left Tachov and all the royalist towns in western Bohemia to their destiny. Soon thereafter he left Bohemia altogether and returned to Hungary. Prague castle surrendered to the Hussites in July 1421. The campaign that started with an invasion by the great Christian lords from dozens of countries allegedly 150,000 men strong had been defeated by peasants, townsfolk and some barons from a medium sized kingdom on the eastern edge of the empire.

And what was even worse than the military defeats was the complete loss of political authority in Bohemia. The Moderates who had for various reasons tried again and again to reconcile with the heir to the crown had comprehensively come off the idea that Sigismund could ever be their gracious king. Not only had he pushed back all their attempts to make peace, his armies had run amok across Bohemia on their return journeys. As far as his Bohemian subjects were concerned he was the man who had Jan Hus killed, had gone through with a coronation not sanctioned by the majority of barons and cities and had at every opportunity shown no respect for their sincere desire to follow the Holy Scripture. So at an assembly of the Bohemian estates in the summer of 1421 they decided to offer the Bohemian crown to Wladyslaw Jogaila, victor of Tannenberg and ruler of Poland-Lithuania. The court in Krakov was already sympathetic to the Hussite ideas and an alliance with eastern Eastern Europe’s most powerful ruler would be a counterweight to the crusaders. Jogaila turned the offer down but his nephew Zygmund Korybutowics was game. Seriously, are they having these names just so I can make a fool of myself. Anyway Polish Zygmunt shows up in Bohemia and Sigismund lost another political lever.

These events will obviously have a major impact on Bohemia and we will look into that in an upcoming episode. This show is however is called the History of the Germans and it is high time we look at the impact all these events, the rise of the Ottomans, the Hussite revolution and the Council of Constance had on the German lands.

And these German lands are in a dreadful state. Though they had not seen a major war since the wars of succession between Karl IV and Ludwig the Bavarian way back in 1345-49. In HotGPod time, that was episode 156, 6 months ago. That sounds pretty good given that France was caught up in the hundred years war all throughout this time and in Italy the rivalry between Milan, Florence, Venice and dozens of other cities and their lords resulted in a near permanent state of war. What the German Lands had instead was a never ending sequence of feuds. Feuds between barons but also between cities and the princes, princes and barons, even peasants were feuding.

Feuds are in some way even more destructive than outright war. A feud was rarely fought by breaking each other’s castles or city walls, let alone trying to kill the opponent. The latter would have defeated the purpose of the feud, which was to force him to admit publicly that he was wrong. Feuds focused more on intimidation, arson, looting, cattle rustling and kidnapping with a sideline in burning villages and manors, uprooting vineyards and putting fields to the torch. One famous never ending feud was that between the archbishop of Mainz and the Count Palatinate on the Rhine.  These two electors held territories in close proximity and had important roles in the empire, creating great opportunities to knock each other out. In particular the very fragmented areas of Southern Germany and the Rhineland were prone to ambitious lords and princes seeking a few villages or towns here and there on the grounds that great aunt Elenor was the second cousin of the duke of Anderswo who had once owned them. To get a scale of the devastation, according to the historian Peter H. Wilson 1200 villages in the Rhineland were devastated during the first half of the 15th century, almost as many as were destroyed in Bohemia during the Hussite wars where large armies crisscrossed the country every year.

One of the reason for the collapse of law and order can be laid at the feet of the largely ineffectual rulers of the empire since 1378. After King Wenceslaus’ attempts at pushing through a general peace, a Landfrieden had ceased around 1388 no further serious effort was undertaken to bring things under control. When Wenceslaus reign in the empire came to its ignominious end, Ruprecht of the Empty Pocket made a few half-hearted efforts to assert his position and then retreated to his gorgeous castle above Heidelberg, founded  a university and just generally forgot about the empire. Sigismund who had taken over by 1410 stayed back in Hungary for the first 4 years of his reign, then spent most of his energy and political capital on the Council of Constance and was now pre-occupied with Bohemian affairs. Bottom line, there was even more interregnum during these forty years than there was during the actual Interregnum. As an anonymous writer stated a few years later quote

“We behave like sheep without shepherds. We stray in the pasture without permission.

Obedience is dead,

justice is afflicted,

nothing is in good order. end quote

Though there is surely never a time when organizational near collapse is a good thing, but this time, the early 15th century is a particularly bad time to be bad at the job. As I mentioned at the beginning of this season, for centuries there had not been an existential external threat for the empire. The last one may have been the Mongols, but they never got deep into the heartlands and had disappeard very quickly. Hence this constant feuding and disunity could be sustained. But now some serious challenges are coming up. The Ottomans now stand at the Hungarian border. That is still 800km away, but fifty years ago they were 1,600 km away.  The Hussite ideas were a fundamental challenge to the existing order as anyone could see as Bohemian towns and villages went up in flames. France is still in agony but Henry V of England, the victor of Agincourt died in 1422 leaving his kingdom to a baby, Joan of Arc will seek her audience with the king in 1428 and the inexorable expansion of the French monarchy begins.

Strong leadership and fundamental reform is what is needed.

When Sigismund left Bohemia in the spring of 1421 utterly defeated and utterly broke, the elites of the empire, the electors, the princes and the city councilors knew that their ruler would not be able to spare much time on bringing peace and security to their land. Nor quite frankly did his military record impress much, Nikopol had been a disaster, then Vitkov, Vyšehrad and now running away from the decisive battle. Not a good look.

Talking about looks, the whole affair had left a bit of a sour aftertaste in the mouths of the crusading German princes. They struggled to understand why their king gave up so quickly after the comparatively minor skirmish on Vitkov Hill. Why did he not make another attempt at going up there? And then this whole business with the catholic barons promising him the crown without bloodshed. How was that supposed to work unless Sigismund made concessions to the Hussites. Sure he had turned them down several times before, but still, how was that supposed to work. And now the withdrawal from Tachov. They were all there, ready and good to go and then he simply walked. He was either a coward or he had made some sort of deal with the Hussites. It all smelled a bit fishy.

But it was not just disappointment with Sigismund as an individual. The structure, institutions and processes that had developed throughout the Middle Ages were simply no longer fit for purpose. A fundamental reform of the empire was needed.

The first step in that direction happened at the end of May 1421 when the princes and cities of the empire got together without the emperor’s knowledge or involvement and declared an imperial war against the Hussites. An army of the princes and estates was to meet in Eger on August 23rd and then march into Bohemia. When Sigismund heard about it he had to support the initiative. Though it wasn’t his army, at least it was an army that would go up against the Hussites.

Whilst this is going on, he sets up his own initiative to deal with Hussites. As usual he cannot move that fast due to the lack of cash. The solution was to marry his only child, his daughter Elisabeth to Albrecht, the Habsburg duke of Austria. This made Albrecht in one fell swoop the heir of Hungary, Bohemia and puts him into pole position for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. And Elizabeth came with a decent dowry, the whole of Moravia, a land that Sigismund actually controlled. In exchange Sigismund gets about 400,000 florins, enough to muster an army of 12,000 to go to Bohemia.

But all that marriage contract negotiation took time. The army that had been created outside of his control had already gone off to Bohemia and had begun the siege of one of the Hussite towns. But when Zizka’s soldiers, their war wagons, flails and guns appeared over the hill, the crusaders panicked and ran back home. Within just 2 years the Hussite armies had built up a reputation of efficiency and terrible cruelty, the mere appearance of their flags left these veterans of a hundred feuds tremble in their boots.

Sigismund’s efforts got under way a month later. His army of again 15,000 or so entered Bohemia. This time he could not bottle it again and so when Zizka and his terrifying army caught up with him, he had to take a stand. Well, he shouldn’t have. This was the huge and very decisive defeat we were all expecting. We will take a closer look at this battle and the subsequent ones in one of the next episodes. For now, all we need to know is that the flower of the Hungarian and Bohemian chivalry was lying dead in the ice cold Sazawa river, squashed by Zizka’s war wagons. Sigismund barely escaped with his life and ran back to Hungary.

At this point Sigismund who after all had reunited the church after 40 years of schism had lost all credibility and support. A certain Andreas Of Regensburg says about him around that time quote:

“Domitian and Diocletian were the most cruel men, Dacian and Maximian the most wicked men, Africanus and Julian the Apostate the most desperate men, Herod, Nero, and Hadrian the most corrupt men—yet none of them committed as many and such destructive acts [..], as this man. His name is great not in goodness, but in deceit; he does not spare the saints, he does not fear God, he does not respect men, he does not hesitate to exterminate holy virgins, he is not ashamed to commit sacrilege, to profane sacred places, or to defile the burial sites of his ancestors. He fears offending his idol, which he carries with him, more than he dreads despising God, his Creator.” End quote. Not a good look at all.

The natural next step from here would be for the imperial leadership to get together, depose the incumbent and select a new one. That is what the electors had done with Sigismund’s brother Wenceslaus. And indeed they did get together and they did discuss deposing Sigismund, but they didn’t go through with it.

There was nobody who wanted the job, or more precisely could afford the job. As the author of the Reformation of emperor Sigismund would write a few years after that quote:  “an emperor or a king of the Empire cannot establish or maintain his position when so much has been taken from him by the electors and others that things have become very miserable indeed.” End quote.

What kind of a kingdom, let alone empire is this where nobody wants to sit on the throne?

Even though the electors and princes were the main beneficiaries of this state of affairs, they also realised that this complete absence of a co-ordination mechanism was not, or no longer viable. It was the Hussite revolt and the fear that it could spread intellectually and militarily to the empire that forced them to act. This is the very beginning of a hundred year long process of imperial reform that will reshape the empire into its early modern incarnation as a mixed monarchy.

The first item on the agenda was finance. You have already heard me going on and on about the importance of taxes. But indulge me again. By 1422 the great monarchies of France and England as well as the great Italian states all collected taxes. There was no other way to finance the ever increasing cost of warfare. Armies had become larger and weapons more sophisticated and expensive.  Emperor Henry VII had attempted to regain Italy with 5,000 men. By now armies of 10-15,000 were common and by the end of the century 50,000 men would be the standard size. By the early sixteenth century one year of campaigning on the ottoman front cost between 1.8 and 3.6 million florins and by 1550 this doubled again to 5.4 million Florins. The existing system of financing imperial war out of the emperor’s private purse supplemented with some voluntary contingents from the princes and cities was woefully inadequate to defend the country.

So in July 1422 the imperial diet, one called by the electors rather than by Sigismund, decided on the first imperial tax, the common penny. This tax was calculated as 1% of the wealth of each of the imperial princes and cities. It was a system of taxation that would really catch on. The reasons were simple, firstly the information about how much anyone owned in monetary terms was simply not available but even more importantly, the cities did not want to disclose their wealth. They feared, quite rightly, that if the local princes knew how rich they actually were, the territorial lords would double their efforts to bring the cities under their control. This process of integrating once free cities into princely territories had already been under way for a long time and was only going to accelerate.

To avoid the issue of disclosure of wealth, the common penny was replaced with the matricular system. In this system each of the members of the empire was obliged to provide a fixed number of soldiers, or at a later stage, the cash equivalent. That meant cities did not have to disclose their wealth, just negotiate a suitable level of contribution. Those who provided more soldiers under the matricular system were given more say in where they would be deployed. It became a give and take that mirrored elements of the ancient system of voluntary contribution and the obligatory nature of a  taxation system.

Another tax that was easier to get agreement on was a 3% tax on Jewish property. This came on top of a now long period of oppression of the Jewish population who were banned from many attractive occupations, including high finance and were reduced to menial work and payday lending. There were regular waves of expulsion of Jewish populations, though due to the fragmented nature of the empire, there wasn’t a blanket ban on Jewish life, as had been the case in England from 1290 to 1655. One should therefore not expect much from this tax on the jews, apart from further emigration eastwards where the Polish rulers welcomed them with open arms.

The other great reform complex was the judiciary. Way back in the 13th century, Rudolf of Habsburg had created regional entities, the Kreise. The Kreise were designed to maintain the peace within a certain area, were led by a captain who could use imperial resources to enforce his judgements. This infrastructure had largely been dismantled by subsequent rulers, but Sigismund tried to revive it, admittedly with limited success. However, the Kreise would become a key element of imperial reform.

With his Kreise being stuck, Sigismund tried another tack. He proposed the free and imperial cities form one huge alliance, not just amongst themselves, but also with the imperial knights. This alliance would police themselves, have their own courts and enforcement mechanism. It would mean a lot of feuds between these smaller entities could be dealt with on the regional level. It also meant that the territorial princes would have to think twice before attempting to snatch a few villages from their neighbouring city or lordship, if there was a major alliance protecting said city or lord. This was a big step away from his father’s Golden Bull that prevented the formation of city leagues. But this initiative too got stuck.

Like his father, Sigismund had a knack for generating physical manifestations of political ideas. Crowns tend to be great for that purpose. In 1423 he had the imperial regalia, the crown, the Holy lance, the purse of St. Stephen, socks, coronation mantle and so forth brought over from Karlstein castle to Nurnberg. Up until this moment these regalia had always been kept in the possession of whoever held the imperial title. They were often a pawn in the negotiations over succession and as we know were essential part of any coronation ceremony. Which is why up until now every emperor had kept them in whichever was his best defended castle.

Sigismund put an end to it. He had the regalia taken from his castle in Hungary to the hospital of the Holy Spirit in Nurnberg. The transport was organised by Nurnberg patricians who hid these  priceless treasures in a wagonload of fish for the journey.

Nurnberg was one of the three spiritual capitals of the empire along with Frankfurt where the emperors were elected and Aachen where they were crowned. By keeping the crown and the other regalia in Nurnberg, and displaying them once a year for two weeks, Sigismund separated the institution of the empire from the person of the emperor. The logic behind that was that It was easier for the princes of the empire to rally around the crown than around an emperor who like himself had some reputational issues. It is similar to a soldier swearing allegiance to the flag, though he may not support the government of the day. His father had done the same thing with the Crown of St. Wenceslaus, which was kept in Prague cathedral, not in a royal castle.

Despite all of Sigismund’s and the electors’ efforts, imperial reform still took almost a century to come to fruition. But it did start during the reign of Sigismund and it was a reaction to, amongst other things, the Hussite revolution.

And there is one more way in which Sigismund had a lasting impact on the empire. And that was the final allocation of the electoral roles.

We have already heard that in 1415 he granted the electorate of Brandenburg to Frederick of Hohenzollern, a position his descendants would hold until the end of the empire, amongst other titles acquired alongside.

By marrying his daughter and sole heir to Abrecht of Austria in 1421 the electoral vote of Bohemia would finally end up with the House of Habsburg, though it took a little while.

The other electoral title that was reallocated during his reign was the electorate of Saxony. This title had been held by the Ascanian dukes of Wittenberg, descendants of Albrecht the Baer. In November 1422 the last of this line died without offspring. Sigismund very rapidly decided to award the title and electoral rights to Fredrick the Belligerent, the margrave of Meissen.

Sigismund was deep in debt to Frederick, which may account for his decision to elevate him. The house of Wettin that Frederick belonged to held the electoral title until the end of the empire. They too became a huge force, not just on account of their wealth, but also on account of their support for the Reformation and later as kings of Poland and turning Dresden into the epitome of baroque splendour.

These three join the House of Wittelsbach that had held the electorate as counts palatinate on the Rhine since the beginning and will hold it all the way to the end.

As the secular electors rise in prominence, the ecclesiastical ones, the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier gradually diminish.

And even below the Electors, the main princely power blocks are also settling down.

Of the very old houses, the Welf in Brunswick are still around and will become kings of Hannover and England, the Reginars hold Hesse, and the Zaehringer rule in Baden. Then there are the newer houses. The counts of Wurrtemberg are now well established in the South West, the dukes of Mecklenburg and Pomerania holding their lands in the North, whilst the house of Oldenburg will add the Danish throne in 1448.

And, like on the electoral level, the bishoprics and archbishoprics gradually come under the sway of these princely houses, either directly, because one of the family occupies the seat or through simple exertion of force.

The empire is assembled, the process of imperial reform has kicked off, just our friend Sigismund looks a bit down in the dumps. Next week we will see how he claws his way back by hook and by crook to finally become king of Bohemia, a country barely recognisable from the days of his father Karl IV. I hope you will join us again.

And just a quick thanks to professor Duncan Hardy whose excellent translations of key documents help enormously. Ah, and as always, historyofthegermans.com/support is where you can deposit you imperial common penny with the Podcast and receive the immense gratitude of your fellow members of the empire.

by on

The Hussite Revolution Part 4

“It is we the followers of master Jan Hus, who are obeying the law of God, we who are the true followers of Christ. Thus therefore, who oppose us, oppress us, kill us, are themselves heretics, trying to thwart the will of God. Out of this deep, passionate conviction was born the determination not to yield, not to surrender, but to challenge if need be, all the forces of the religious and political order which had dominated medieval europe for nearly a thousand years, to fight it out against odds the like of which have seldom been seen in history”

So it is written in the “Very Pretty Chronicle of the life of John Zizka” which tells the not so very pretty story of the war against the Hussites that is now heating up. Sigismund musters his crusading army in Silesia whilst the radical Hussites take to the hills and then take a hill.

To listen on Spotify – click here

To listen on Apple Podcast – click here

To listen on YouTube – click here

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 178: No Hill to Die On– From Tabor to Vitkov

Quote: “It is we the followers of master Jan Hus, who are obeying the law of God, we who are the true followers of Christ. Thus therefore, who oppose us, oppress us, kill us, are themselves heretics, trying to thwart the will of God. Out of this deep, passionate conviction was born the determination not to yield, not to surrender, but to challenge if need be, all the forces of the religious and political order which had dominated medieval europe for nearly a thousand years, to fight it out against odds the like of which have seldom been seen in history”

So it is written in the “Very Pretty Chronicle of the life of John Zizka” which tells the not so very pretty story of the war against the Hussites that is now heating up. Sigismund musters his crusading army in Silesia whilst the radical Hussites take to the hills and then take a hill.

And now an announcement forced upon us due to recent events. I have always kept the show out of current politics. This is a history show and everybody is welcome. I am actually taking a lot of pride in the fact that there are many listeners to this show who fundamentally disagree with my political views and still enjoy it. We may come to different conclusions from the same facts, but we share a passion for historical accuracy and willingness to listen to different perspectives.

However, there are moments when limits are breached, and things need to be said. My limit is $86, £86a of the German Penal code which bans the distribution and use of national socialist propaganda. That does include the Hitlergruss, the Hitler Salute. Elon Musk did perform the Hitler Salute on January 20th, 2025. That needs to be said. That is why the History of the Germans Podcast had comment on social media. Further the History of the Germans  will no longer post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Support the Show – Become a Patron

And with that, back to the show.

Last week we left the Hussite radicals under the military leadership of Jan Zizka at the gates of Tabor. They had left the city of Pilsen that had been put under siege by a royalist army in late March 1420. Though they had been promised free passage to join their brethren in southern Bohemia, the small army of about 400 found itself under attack from a much larger and much better equipped force of catholic royalists.

Thanks to Zizka’s quick thinking and the sun setting, the Hussites did win that encounter. And a few days later they arrived at the place that would become the centre of radical Hussitism for the remainder of the conflict.

But at this very moment there was not a lot there. It was just an open space on top of a hill. The ancient settlement that had once occupied it had perished in the 13th century. When Zizka and his small warband arrived, they found friends and fellow Hussites from Southern Bohemia who like him had left Prague in November 1419.

This group had gone to the town of Pisek. When Pisek was besieged by a royal army in February 1420 they left and headed for the city of Usti. They hid in the woods until Ash Wednesday, when they knew the predominantly catholic inhabitants would be nursing an almighty post-carnival hangover. They captured the city with ease. But Usti prove difficult to defend, so they put the whole city to the torch and chose this abandoned hillfort as their new base.

They renamed it Tabor after the mountain in Galilee where the miracle of Jesus transfiguration is believed to have taken place, That was the moment when he appeared radiant and in the company of Moses and Isaiah revealing himself to be the bridge between the divine and the temporal.

This was not the first hill the radical Hussites had named after Mount Tabor. At least one of the mountains where they had gathered before to pray, to take communion as bread and wine and to experience their communal meals had also been named Mount Tabor. Mount Tabor was not meant to be a physical location as more of a spiritual place.

But this Mount Tabor would be a very physical a permanent space, no longer a sort of religious Woodstock. This was to be where the elect, the true members of the church can be together. It is here that they would build their own society, uncontaminated by any outsiders. And a very different society it was to be. Here is how one Taborite writer described it; quote “at Tabor there is nothing mine and nothing yours., but everything in the community is possessed equally, so everything should be in common for all and no one may have anything privately. And if he does, he sins mortally” end quote. All social hierarchy was dissolved, the baron and the labourer were equals who called each other brother and sister. The priests were their spiritual leaders but they would wear the same peasant shifts as their congregation nor would they stay in better tents or houses. The host was not passed in its round form, but as a torn piece of unleavened bread, the wine served not from a golden chalice but from any cup or tin or any common receptacle available. The writings of the great doctors of the church were not to be accepted, university education was seen as vain and heathen, the rites were abolished as traditions of antichrist. No chrism, no holy water, no canonical hours, chasubles or church chant. Just the prayer and the eucharist.

There was however one problem. Like Wenceslaus Koranda who had led the radicals in Pilsen, the Taborite priests had called the end of days for February 14th, and like in Pilsen, not much happened on that day. Babylon did not fall.

There are two well-trodden ways for any prophet of the apocalypse to deal with this, so far inevitable occurence. One part of the Taborites just pretended they had never made any such claim and simply soldered on, building their community of the faithful on the hill. Nothing to see here.

The remainder went the other way and dialled it up to eleven. I never thought I would find myself reading the book of revelation, but now that we are deep in the weeds of the debate of what happens at the end of the world, I had to. And to say it with the inimitable words of George Walker Bush: That’s some weird shit. Open to literally any kind of interpretation. There is this whole debate about the millennium before or after antichrist or Jesus arrival, which may be bliss or horror, or does not happen at all, take your pick.

The interpretation the Taborite millenarians went as follows. The day of wrath had actually come. But instead of wiping out all the bad people, it brought on the thousand years of righteous rule. So from now on, those who had left for the five cities and had now all come together on Mount Tabor would be ruling the world. That they would no longer have to pay rent to their lords, take over all the villages, fish ponds, meadows and forests, in fact they would be drowning in an abundance of silver and gold. The only bit that was required to get there was the extermination of the sinners, which god had now assigned to them. As one chronicler said, quote “the seducers, wanting to bring the people to that freedom and somehow to substantiate their lies, began to preach enormous cruelty, unheard-of violence and injustice to men” end quote.

This is a revolution and like every revolution it has to stay in motion. At every junction a new chapter is opened and the rhetoric is ratcheted up. Once the movement stalls, the forces of the counterrevolution brings the process to a halt. And the Hussite Revolution still had a lot of motion.

Back in the physical world we should note that this new Jerusalem found itself in a geographically advantageous position, on a rock, surrounded on two sides by rivers. But that was it. The defensive walls of the previous settlement if they had ever been material, were gone, as were the houses. With Sigismund’s crusade being called and royalist armies swarming the land, for this community to survive it needed walls and towers and most importantly soldiers.

And to deliver those, even an egalitarian community requires someone who organises things. Which is why on April 6, days after the faithful from Pilsen had arrived, they elected four leaders, captains as they called them. One of them was Jan Zizka who would soon take charge of all military matters.

And they got going on building defences. Day and night the Taborites, the older men, the boys and the women carried stones and mortar, creating a hexagonal fortress surrounded by a double wall, a moat and strengthened by six bastions, one at each projecting corner. Originally there was but one gate into the city leading to the bridge over one of the rivers. This was a remarkably modern, impregnable fortress that would mightily impress Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini, the future pope Pius II.

And here is the truly astonishing thing, it was built in less than 2 months, between March 27th and May 18th. The people who built it lived in tents inside the walls. There was no time to build houses or churches yet.

Even the mightiest walls and towers are of no use if there aren’t soldiers able to defend them. And that is where Jan Zizka’s true genius played out. At the same speed as the walls rose up around Tabor did he create an army such like had never be seen before.

Medieval military doctrine stated that no infantry force could withstand a charge by  armoured riders. This doctrine had already been challenged hard at Muhldorf, Morgarten, Poitiers, Agincourt and Nicopol where the flowers of chivalry had been decimated by people they regarded as beneath them.

There is a difference though. The Janissaries at Nicopol and the English Longbowmen at Poitiers and Agincourt had trained for years before they got deployed in battle. The Swiss and Bavarian infantry too had training and benefitted from knowledge of their very specific geography.

What Zizka did was to turn a ragtag bunch of peasants, a few artisans and even fewer experienced soldiers within less than two months into an army that would never be defeated by an army of knights, never. How he did it, well even though there are many accounts, in the end, it is hard to explain and even more difficult  to replicate.

On March 27th he had brought 400 men from Pilsen who may have had received some military training during the fighting there, but Zizka will leave Tabor at the head of an army of allegedly 9,000 on May 18th.

The early 15th century was a time of such brutality, that everyone had a weapon and knew how to use it. That means townsfolk, even artisans would likely have a swords or a crossbow and some experience in handling these. But the majority of Zizka’s new army were peasants who had their agricultural tools, their pitchforks and flails as their means of defence.

Just in case like me you do not know exactly what a flail is, here is what I found out. It is a tool that consists of a striking head that is attached to a handle by a metal chain or rope. It is what was used for threshing, i.e., for separating grains from their husks. The flail has some advantages. An agricultural flail has a fairly long handle and because the striking head is on a chain, it is hard to parry. It can go around a shield or hit over a wall. By adding spikes or studs to the striking head, it can be become deadly. These agricultural flails are not to be confused with the military flails you see for instance in many depictions of Jan Hus. These have shorter handles and small metal spiked balls at the end. Germans call them Morning stars. These were expensive weapons yielded by the nobility. What we are talking about here are peasant tools, repurposed for warfare.

And that means they were available, and other weapons weren’t. One of the most famous contemporaneous depictions of a Hussite army shows the men carrying very long flails, maybe two metres tall.

The men carrying flails were one of three major infantry formations. An other one were the pikemen or lancers. They carried long lances meant to unseat riders. And the third formation were archers and crossbowmen who provided long distance firepower.

Mustering the men and optimising their weapons was one thing, but the most crucial component of infantry going up against a cavalry charge was discipline. I think I said that many times before, but there are very few things more terrifying than a thousand riders on heavy hoses bearing down on men on foot. They may know that they will almost certainly die if they run, but for centuries after the fall of the Roman empire, running was what infantry in europe did.

Discipline did not just come from the imposition of authority, though that surely existed given the religious fervour and respect for the scarce military experience, but from the structure of warfare Zizka had invented.

That is where his first major innovation came in, the war wagon. The wagons Zizka had used at the previous two encounters had been just ordinary carts of the kind used to transport foodstuff to market or on campaign.

The war wagons that Zizka used later and presumably developed further as he went along, were of a different kind. These were designed as moveable fortresses. They were heavy and robust carriages. The sides could be reinforced with movable boards for his soldiers to take shelter behind. Other boards could be deployed to protect the wheels and to stabilise the wagon. The gap between two wagons was protected by a heavy mobile shield. That meant the Hussite army could create a mobile fort simply by pulling their war wagons into a circular formation and deploying the shields into the gaps. If they had enough time to set it up on top of a hill and dig a moat around it, these fortifications were almost impregnable. And as we will see, he also found a way to turn the war wagon from defensive tools to offensive weapons.

But beyond the mechanical change this brought, it also forced a complete rethinking of European military tactics. A medieval battle was effectively a giant melee where the great lords decided more of less freely when to attack, where and who. They were all doing more or less the same thing and since the only honourable formation was to go straight at them, no flanking or other cowardly moves, there was less need to coordinate across different divisions.

That lack of discipline and coordination is what led to the catastrophic French defeats in Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt, the loss of the battle of Nicopol and scores of other, less famous encounters. None of the field commanders were able to bring in the kind of discipline that allowed generals to deploy their forces according to some battle plan.

An army that fights out of a formation of wagons was forced into coordination for the simple reason that the movable fortress only worked as well as its weakest link. Every wagon team had to get to the right place at the right time. Otherwise there would be a giant opening in the wall. Operating war wagons required specialisations, some soldiers were manning the wooden walls, other the shields between the wagons, there were the wagon drivers and those who handled the artillery. Every member of the team needed to know what to do and their comrades had to rely on him, or in fact her, doing their job.

The last component that made the Hussite armies so special was the use of field artillery. Artillery had been around for at least fifty years by then. The oldest surviving European firearm, the Tannenberg handgunne dates back to 1399 but they had been mentioned far earlier. These guns were predominantly used in static warfare, i.e, as a way to break walls during sieges. There were guns deployed at the battle of Tannenberg in 1410, but it is in the Hussite wars that they start to make a material difference. Shooting balls from behind the walls of their mobile fortress not only terrified riders and their horses, but as aim and speed increased it became a way to overcome the advantages of steel armour.

We do not know when Zizka exactly developed this form of warfare. It might have already gone around in his head when he fought in the wars against the Teutonic Knights. We have heard that he first deployed some of his tactics during the siege of Pilsen and then on the trip over to Tabor. But it is during this time in April 1420 that he was able to scale it up.

It was almost certainly an iterative, learning by doing process. During these two months he kept his new army in the field, running a number of attacks across the neighbourhood of Tabor. They raided the castles of the lords who had broken the promise of safe conduct. They attacked the small army of Nicholas of Jemniste, the man in charge of the massacres in Kutna Hora. They inflicted damage on his forces and forced him to release his prisoners. Once the truce between the royalists and Hussites ended on April 23rd, he felt free to attack any of the local lords who had sided with the king. In the process he took a lot of booty which included arms as well as horses, which allowed him to add a small troop of cavalry to his force.

As the Hussites became more powerful they also became more cruel. At one point they told six prisoners that they would release whoever was prepared to decapitate all his five comrades. Zizka himself ordered seven monks to be burned at the stake.

But the next great battle was however not fought over Tabor as the leaders of the community had feared, but in Prague.

Prague as we know had signed a truce with the royalists in November 1419 and had cowed before Sigismund in December. The leaders of the city and the moderate Hussite barons had believed that there was space for reconciliation, in particular that Sigismund could be made to tolerate the chalice, the communion of bread and wine as well as three more demands. But as we explained last week, Sigismund as emperor elect and king of Hungary could not compromise, even if he had wanted to.

The pointlessness of their attempt at compromise became abundantly clear when Sigismund sanctioned the burning of a Prague merchant who was reluctant to give up his Hussite beliefs. Then he issued an order that anyone who was found practicing Hussite beliefs by the time he arrived in Bohemia would be punished by death and loss of all possessions.

At that point the leader of the moderate Hussite barons, Cenek of Wartenberg, who had been appointed Sigismund’s regent in Bohemia and who held the Royal castle above the city, turned publicly against the king. In a symbolic act he sent back his precious insignia as a knight of the dragon. And then convinced his fellow magnates to side against the enemies of their faith. And even the most conservative Hussites amongst the city councillors and nobles concluded that they had to fight.

On April 3rd, 1420, the city of Prague formulated what would become known as the four articles, a summary of the key demands of the Bohemians to their king. It was a manifesto all the now various factions of Hussites could agree upon.

And this is what they said, quote:

  1. We stand for the ministering of the body and blood of the Lord to the laity in both kinds, for … this was Christ’s institution and …that of the first apostles.
  2. We stand for the proper and free preaching of the word of God and of his every truth
  3. All priests, from the pope down, should give up their pomp, avarice, and improper lordship [..] over temporal goods and they should live as models for us.
  4. We stand for the purge and cessation from all public mortal sins, by each in his own person; and for the cleansing of the Bohemian realm and nation from false and evil slander; and in this connection, for the common good of our land.” End quote

From now on, whenever Bohemia is threatened from outside, the various Hussite forces will coalesce around these four demands, and every time they are left alone, they will fall out over what exactly they mean.  

For now they were under attack and hence they were united. The city of Prague was readying its defences. They expelled the remaining Catholics, most of them German speaking. The Vhysherad they had so foolishly  handed over to the royalists in 1419, was put under siege.

Meanwhile Sigismund’s army marched from Silesia towards Prague. The numbers for the size of Sigismund’s army are all over the place. Our chronicler Lawrence of Brezova talks about 150,000 men, including bishops, archbishops, dukes and secular princes, approximately 40 in all, not counting margraves, counts, barons and nobles. These were Bohemians, Moravians, Hungarians, Croats, Dalmatians, Bulgarians, Wallachians, Huns, Tassyans, Ruthenians, Russians, Slavonians, Prussians, Serbs, Thuringians, Styrians, Misnians, Bavarians, Saxons, Austrians, Franconians, Frenchmen, Engishmen, and so forth and so forth. Sigismund’s chronicler talks about 80,000. Neither of these numbers are believable. The French and English side at Agincourt in 1415 counted each about 15,000, at Tannenberg/Grunwald, high estimates talk about 30,000 men. And these were battles involving some of the richest and most powerful monarchies of the middle ages, not an impecunious claimant for the crown of a medium-sized kingdom.

But it was still a huge army, quite likely one of the largest forces assembled in that century to date. Seeing all this, some moderate Hussites were either getting cold feet or became disconcerted about the increasing brutality of the Taborites, or both.  Amongst them was the grand magnate and leader of the moderate Hussite barons, Cenek of Wartenberg. He opened discussions with Sigismund and in exchange for the promise that he and his family could continue receiving the chalice, handed over Prague castle.

That was a massive blow for the defenders. The city of Prague was now wedged in between Prague Castle and the Vysherad. They tried to take either of them and failed. With the main forces of the enemy approaching at pace, despair spread through the city. Again they were considering a truce and sent delegates to discuss with Sigismund in Kutna Hora.

And again Sigismund turned them down. He demanded unconditional surrender, no ifs no buts. Return to old school Catholicism, no chalice, the return of the monks and the Germans, and restitution of church property. And there was no way the Hussites could accept it, certainly not the radicals, but neither could the moderates. The delegation returned to Prague and the city prepared to fight to the end. One of the astonishing things about this conflict is how often the moderates try to reconcile with the king and how they do not understand that he would not and could not budge.

 So, rather than dissolving their militia and removing their barricades as they had been ordered, wherever there had been one chain to barricade the street, they put two, and locked themselves up against the king.”

And the city now called for help. Hussites from all across the country mustered their forces and journeyed to Prague. On May 18th, an army, 9,000 strong, armed with flails, swords, crossbows, lances and pikes, accompanied by war wagons and led by Jan Zizka set off from Tabor on the 50 mile journey to Prague. Medieval armies tended to be slow and it would have usually taken a week to cover this distance. Zizka made it in three days, which included a successful skirmish with Royalist troops halfway through.

Whilst the city was filling up with determined fighters, the strategic position remained extremely challenging. The Hussite positions were the Old Town and the New Town which are lying on a plain on the right bank of the Vltava. The Lesser Town on the opposite side of the river was a smouldering ruin. The royalists held Prague Castle, one of the largest medieval castles in the world that sits 150 meters above the town. And they hold the Vhsherad, a somewhat less imposing hill, but still a mighty fortress to the  the south.

Both sides assumed that once Sigismund arrived, he would try to put the city under siege, cutting off food supply and slowly starve them out. To do that he needed to close down all access roads into the city.

There are four main routes into Prague, along or on yhe river, either from the north or the south, and by road from either the South-east or the North-east. Three of those routes were blocked by Prague Castle and the Vysherad. There is always a reason why the castles are built where they have been built.

The only road the royalists did not control was the North-eastern access route. That road came in on the right bank of the Vltava, i.e., the side where the Old and New Towns are and crossed a fairly wide plain called Hospital Field. Hospital field was  bordered on one side by the river and on the other by a 70m high, long ridge called the Vitkov Hill.

The destiny of Prague and now that all Hussite forces were gathered inside its walls, the movement itself was to be decided on Hospital Field and on Vitkov Hill.

Sigismund and his army arrived in early summer and made camp by Prague Castle. And that is where they stayed for the next couple of weeks, growing in number as more and more crusaders arrived. Prague was after all one of the largest cities in the empire. Surrounding it from all sides will take a huge army. Hence they were waiting for the moment that their forces would be sufficient to fully invest the city.

Meanwhile the defenders dug moats and strengthened walls. And they prepared the key strategic point, Vitkov Hill. On one end of the ridge stood an old watchtower, once built to protect the royal vineyard on the southern slope of the hill. Zizka then had two more wooden bulwarks built at the other end. These were fairly small, each holding maybe 30 defenders. Around these bulwarks all trees had been felled and houses that could impede access or visibility had been taken down. And then they waited.

The action began on July 14th, 1420. Sigismund planned an all-out assault. One contingent of a few thousand cavalry, mostly troops from Meissen and Thuringia were to take Vitkov Hill. Once that was accomplished a force of 16,000 was to come down from the royal castle and fight their way across the bridge, whilst another large army was to attack the new Town from the Vysherad. Overall a sound plan. Either the defenders would give up as soon as Vitkov Hill had fallen, or if they continued to resist, they could be starved to death.

Here I leave the storytelling to Lawrence of Brezova: quote “Those from Meissen climbed the mountain with their own troops and the 7,000 to 8,000 cavalry allied to them, in force and with trumpets blowing, and launched an assault on the aforementioned wooden battlements., successfully crossing the moat and taking the watchtower in the vineyard.  When they wanted to scale the walls made from mud and stone, two women, with one girl and 26 men who had remained temporarily in the bulwark offered brave resistance with stones and spears and were repulsing the attackers, having neither shells nor gunpowder. One of these women, even though she was unarmed , surpassed even the courage of the men, refusing to yield a single step, saying it was wrong for a faithful Christian to yield to an Antichrist. Fighting with great zeal, she was killed and breathed her last. Then Zizka came to their defence and he himself would have been killed had his own men not come with flails and rescued him from the hands of his enemies. Just as practically the whole city was terrified at the prospect of its doom, and the citizens were pouring out tears and prayers with their small children, counting on heaven alone to aid them, a priest approached with the sacrament of the body of Christ. Behind him were about 50 archers and a number of peasants unarmed except for flails. When the enemy saw the sacrament and heard the little bell, together with the loud cries of the people, laid low by powerful fear, they turned their backs, fleeing in haste, everyone trying to get in front of those before them. Many were unable to keep their balance against the onslaught and fell from the high rocks and broke their necks, and many more were killed by their pursuers. Within an hour more than 300 of them were slain while others were mortally wounded or captured” end quote.

I understand that this story as told here is one of the foundation stories of Czech national identity, so I will not dig too deep into the embellishments our chronicler might have added to the story. Let’s just say that Jan Zizka would not be much of a military genius if he had left the garrison at this crucial point without weapons and in particular without guns. It is also somewhat doubtful that a thousand battle hardened mercenaries would be turned into panicked wrecks by the sight of a priest with the Holy sacrament and 50 archers.

Despite this spot of myth making, the fact remains that Sigismund’s army was unable to take Vitkov Hill on that day and the following days the citizens of Prague dug deeper moats and build larger forts on Vitkov Hill so that the supply lines into Prague remained open.

And as it had happened twice before, the victory of the rebels was followed by negotiations. Again the Leaders of the city of Prague and the moderates sought reconciliation with their king and with the catholic church.

Sigismund, realising he could no longer take the city by force began to lend his ear to the catholic barons who promised him Prague without bloodshed. At which point the German princes who had been promised the land of the Hussite barons as well as booty from the sack of Prague turned first on the Bohemian barons and ultimately on their own king. One by one the imperial princes left the camp and went home, burning and plundering as they went. Sigismund was crowned king of Bohemia in St. Vitus cathedral but immediately afterwards retreated to Kutna Hora the centre of catholic power in Bohemia to await the peaceful resolution of the conflict.

We will see next week whether Jan Zizka and emperor Sigismund will hold hands and ride off into the sunset. But even more importantly, we will find out what repercussions these events have in the German lands, how they change the institutions of the empire and the position of its ruler. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime, if you feel inclined to support the show, you can do so at historyofthegermans.com/support.

by on

The Hussite Revolution Part 3

“To our great shame and sorrow, we must acknowledge how our brethren have been cleverly seduced by Satan, and how they have departed from Holy Scriptures in strange and unheard-of ideas and acts. When Satan first came to them it was not with an open face, as the devil, but in the shining garb of voluntary poverty, [..], and in the zealous work of preaching to and serving the people and in giving them the Body and Holy Blood of God. And [..] a great many people flocked to them.

Then the devil came to them clothed in other garb, in the prophets and the Old Testament, and from these they sought to confect the imminent Day of Judgement, saying that they were angels who had to eliminate the scandals of Christ’s kingdom, and that they were to judge the world. And so they committed many killings and impoverished many people; but they did not judge the world according to their words, for the predicted time has elapsed with which they terrified the people, telling them strange things.” End quote.

Strange things indeed were happening in Bohemia. Peter Chelcicky whose words you just heard reported how the radical Hussites had called the End of Days for February 14th, 1420. But when that day came, and instead of all the enemies of the faith lying dead with their noses pointing skywards, royalist forces surrounded the radical Hussites in the city of Pilzen. Now the end really seemed nigh, but cometh the time, cometh the man, even if the man is a one-eyed, gruff ex-Highwayman.

To listen on Spotify – click here

To listen on Apple Podcast – click here

To listen on YouTube – click here

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 177 – The Day after the End of Days, which is also episode 14 of Season 9 The Reformation before the Reformation.

“To our great shame and sorrow, we must acknowledge how our brethren have been cleverly seduced by Satan, and how they have departed from Holy Scriptures in strange and unheard-of ideas and acts. When Satan first came to them it was not with an open face, as the devil, but in the shining garb of voluntary poverty, [..], and in the zealous work of preaching to and serving the people and in giving them the Body and Holy Blood of God. And [..] a great many people flocked to them.

Then the devil came to them clothed in other garb, in the prophets and the Old Testament, and from these they sought to confect the imminent Day of Judgement, saying that they were angels who had to eliminate the scandals of Christ’s kingdom, and that they were to judge the world. And so they committed many killings and impoverished many people; but they did not judge the world according to their words, for the predicted time has elapsed with which they terrified the people, telling them strange things.” End quote.

Strange things indeed were happening in Bohemia. Peter Chelcicky whose words you just heard reported how the radical Hussites had called the End of Days for February 14th, 1420. But when that day came, and instead of all the enemies of the faith lying dead with their noses pointing skywards, royalist forces surrounded the radical Hussites in the city of Pilzen. Now the end really seemed nigh, but cometh the time, cometh the man, even if the man is a one-eyed, gruff ex-Highwayman.

Before we get to the delights only a full blown apocalypse can offer, let me offer you nothing, nothing to buy, nothing to sign up for, nothing but the gratitude of your fellow listeners and your humble podcaster. Protecting us against an ever rising wave of advertising is a noble pursuit you can indulge in at historyofthegermans.com/support. Hence we thank all the lords and ladies who have so graciously lent a hand, namely Phil Grass, Hendrik N., Brian K., Chris C., John F., Martin W. and special thanks also to Historygirl Susan E. whose generosity and support all across social media is much appreciated.

Support the Show – Become a Patron

And with that, back to the show.

Last week we left the Hussites at a low point. Though they had won the battle of the Lesser Town of Prague, their subsequent truce and kowtow before emperor  Sigismund had wiped out all of this success. A massive Catholic backlash against the religious reformers was under way. Sigismund had ordered the magistrates of Prague to lift the siege of the Royal Castle and to dismantle their fortifications, an order they were too weak to resist. The monks and nuns returned to their ransacked monasteries and the German merchant elite re-occupied their houses in Prague. The mining town of Kutna Hora became a centre of the repression of the Hussites who were thrown down mine shafts, some dead but also some still alive.

Sigismund, rather than entering Prague for a coronation went on to Breslau for an imperial diet. At that diet the Electors and princes signed up for a crusade against the Hussites. That crusade was initially intended to defend Hungary against the Ottomans, but pope Martin V had allowed for it to be diverted to eradicate the heretics of  Bohemia. And to make it abundantly clear that there was no room for reconciliation between even moderate Hussite demands and the imperial will, the diet convicted another Hussite priest, dragged him behind a horse over the cobblestones and when he still refused to die, burned him next to the abattoir.

What made all this even more disconcerting for the people was that most of that calamity had been self-inflicted. On November 5th, 1419 the Hussites were a cohesive movement. The citizens of Prague, both the more radical artisans and labourers in the New Town and the more affluent patricians of the Old Town, the provincial  communitarians who had come from their mountains to support their brethren and many of the Bohemian barons had all been united in their opposition to the royalists up in the castle. They had fought together, they had died together and they had won together.

But just 8 days later, the moderate factions in Prague had agreed a truce with the Royalists which allowed the Catholics to retaliate. The Radicals were opposed to the truce and the movement splintered into factions.

For these radical Hussites who had come from the provinces, this turn of events was almost impossible to understand. How could they get through the canon fire on the Charles Bridge and put experienced and well-armed mercenaries to flight, only to see the enemies of the faith triumph.

And this was not the first time they had experienced hardship. This is the early 15th century and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse are riding high.

The rider on the white horse had brought the plague, the plague that had begun in 1348 but had come back again, and again and again taking its grim toll.

The rider of the red horse had come to take peace from the earth and to make men slay other men. He had brought war, incessant war between the kings of France and England, between the princes of the empire over this, that or the other parcel of land, and the war between Wenceslaus, his barons, his cousins and at times his brother that devastated Bohemia the once richest and most august of the principalities of the empire.

The rider of the black horse came with a pair of scales weighing what little bread was allowed in times of famine. And now that the climate was turning colder and colder, even a good harvest in 1410 was no better than a poor harvest 150 years earlier. Those who have stayed on their land and failed to negotiate better wages found themselves re-enslaved following the plague whilst many who had left for the bright lights of the cities found themselves as menial labourers or domestic servants.

And the fourth rider on his pale horse of death was ever present, the catch all for those who had not succumbed to disease, war or famine.

It was a brutally tough time to be alive, very much the opposite of the beautifully illuminated images that the early renaissance masters, the Giottos, Lorenzettis, Martinis and Masaccios produced during that time.

And for the men and women who had left their homesteads in the autumn of 1419 to come to the aid of Prague, all this felt even more dystopian. Not only had they suffered the agony of disease, war, famine and death, they thought they had found the reason for their suffering. And that reason had been the corruption of the church, the church that turned its back on the example of the apostles, that had them denied the sacrament of bread and wine, without which there was no salvation. And they had not only found the reason for their suffering, they had begun remedying these ills. They had gathered on the mountains and had taken the bread and wine, they had shared their worldly goods as the apostle had done and they had listened to and tried to live by the scripture.

If they had done all that was required, how could it be that they found themselves leaving the city of Prague in fear of persecution and with nowhere to go?

Their priests were as confused as they were themselves and sought the answers in the one place they knew had all the answers, the holy scripture. Here is what our chronicler, Lawrence of Brezova reports they did next quote: “during this time some Taborite priests were preaching to the people Christ’s Second Coming, during which time all evil ones and adversaries of the truth deserved to perish and be annihilated, and all the righteous ones would be saved in five towns. [they were] warning that everyone who wished to escape the wrath of almighty God, which was supposed to be sent into the entire world, should move from their towns, castles and villages like Lot from Sodom to the five cities of refuge. These were the names of the cities: Pilsen, which they called the city of the sun, Zatec, Louny, Klatovy and Slany. This was on account of the fact that almighty God wanted to annihilate the entire world, with only those who fled to the aforementioned towns being spared” end quote.

Medieval history is full of predictions of the end of the world, from the millennial fears that gripped the contemporaries of Otto III and Henry II to the predictions of Joachim of Fiore that called upon Frederick Barbarossa to go to Jerusalem to bring about the 1000 years of bliss that preceded the coming of antichrist.

Seeing the defeat of their side and hearing that Sigismund was about to arrive in Bohemia to strike the final blow, the Taborite priests wrote quote: “The lion has gone forth from his lair and the heathen pillage has arisen..[..] the King of Hungary has gone forth to lay waste your land. Your cities will be wiped out..[..] therefore, knowing these things give diligent heed to the lord God himself and do not be tardy; He is at the gates.” end quote

And they gave a date for when he, Christ, not Sigismund, was to arrive – they said soon, very soon, in fact in just three months, in mid-February 1420.

And with that date being so close, the persecution of heretics in full swing across the country and a crusade against them being called, thousands of ordinary people left their homes, sold their belongings and took their husbands or wives, their children and their livestock to seek safety in one of these five cities. At this stage the biggest concentration was in the city of Pilsen, today more famous for Pilsener beer, the original Lager. Pilsen was turned into a fortress, many of its citizens who did not adhere to the Taborite beliefs left or, according to some accounts, were thrown out or even killed. The monasteries were ransacked as were the churches and the homes of the rich. In line with the tradition they been had established in their gatherings on the mountains before, they pooled their possessions, or as the our rather biased chronicler said, threw their money at the feet of their priests.

Conditions within these five cities must have been very difficult. Pilsen may have been a city of a few thousand people if that and the influx of thousands of pilgrims from the countryside must have led to massive overcrowding. Moreover, these people had no business in these towns, no work or income. And since they were there only to wait out the coming apocalypse, there was no incentive for them to set up shops or create much of a society. Feeding these masses was a challenge even before the cities were put under siege. And then there was the question on how to defend the city with nothing but pilgrims, most of them peasants and artisans and very few soldiers

The answer to that last question had already arrived in November 1419, a grizzled old soldier with only one eye who had fought for decades but had never held command of a major force.

I have promised to talk about Jan Zizka for three episodes now, and finally we are getting there. And at this point a big thank you to Czech listener Jiri D. who kindly summarised some of the recent Czech historical research for us.

There is precious little information about the first fifty years of the great Czech hero, the man who broke the dominance of the armoured knights and whose bronze equestrian statue overlooking Prague is the third largest in the world.  But recently a major works has been published by professor Petr Čornej that sheds more light on his life before the Hussite Revolt. And from that we can conclude that Jan Žižka had already lived and survived more lives than the proverbial stray cat before he came into historical focus.

Jan Žižka was born between 1360-1363 most likely in Trocnov, 16km southeast of Budvar, yes, another town that makes great beer and also gave its name to something called Budweiser. The family background was petty landed gentry which provided him with a coat of arms of a red crayfish on a silver field, but not an awful lot more.
His parents and relatives owned two farms, covering together not more than 40-50 hectares of very poor soil. The place was later deserted and converted into pastures, so  not enough to maintain the standards of even just the lowest level of gentry.

The name Žižka by which he is known, was actually a nickname. It means “one eyed” as Jan lost an eye quite early, probably due to an accident roughhousing with a childhood friend.
His early years, upbringing or education left no trace. He first appears in public records in four documents dated between 1378 – 1384, presenting him as a poor manager and householder, constantly in debt and incapable of taking care of his farm. He gradually sold off all of his land and assets and disappeared from the local land register. In the meantime, Jan had two short-lived marriages. Both wives died very early, probably in childbirth, leaving him with only one surviving child, his daughter Catherine.

Jan Žižka initially served Heinrich von Rosenberg, the all-powerful lord of Southern Bohemia, but must have fallen out with him fairly early on. Jan Žižka and his brothers, once their money had run out, joined a gang of Highwaymen under a certain “Matthew the Leader”, which operated between the years 1404-1409 in the border region between Bohemia, Moravia and Austria. They were a particular menace to the lands of his former master, the Rosenbergs and the citizens of Budvar. Jan Žižka did what a highwayman does, he took a load of herrings from the Rosenbergs, killing one of the lord’s men, shook down two brothers for cash and fleeced the merchants travelling between Vienna and Prague.
On occasion and at the behest of clients his gang would have a go at larger prey too. They tried to capture the royal castle of Hus and another time they planned to seize Nové Hrady, scaling the walls with rope ladders.

That brought the authorities on to the scene who systematically wiped out their local network and cornered, caught and hanged the gang members. Jan Žižka remained in hiding until he was saved by a royal pardon.

That royal pardon is seen as the great mysteries of his earlier life. Why would a king of Bohemia suddenly pardon a robber down in the south of the country who he may have never met before? Wenceslaus IV  wrote to all concerned on  July 27,1409 that “…he has accepted Jan the said Žižka, his beloved faithful, on his mercy, forgiving him graciously all the offences committed against Him and against the Crown of the Kingdom of Bohemia.”
Hmm, a state prosecutor pardons a gang member whose affiliates have all been hanged? Honi soit qui mal y pense as they said in the 14th century..
 
There is also a completely different story going round. Records of the court of Burgundy mentions a certain Jehan Susque de Behaigne which sound like Jan Zizka from Bohemia who acted as a go-between for King Wenceslaus and duke John the Fearless. This Jehan passed messages between the two princes, brought expensive horses to Dijon and accompanied the Burgundian chancellor on various diplomatic missions to eastern europe. The problem is  that the timing of these two stories overlaps, and whilst one can move from convicted felon to ambassador, nobody can be a diplomat and a highwayman at the same time. So either Zizka was a highwayman and this Jehan person was someone else, or Zizka was indeed a diplomat and the pardon was granted to him for a crime committed on occasion of one of his missions.

By 1410 we are on firmer ground. We find him fighting as a mercenary for Jogaila of Poland and Lithuania in the war against the Teutonic Knights. He may or may not have participated in the battle of Tannenberg/Grunwald in 1410 but he was definitely involved in the campaign and the defence of the castle of Rheden/Radzyn. This must have given him a good idea of how detachments of knights operated on the battlefield and how royal armies conducted large scale sieges. And he also could see the use of fire weapons at scale, weapons that had only recently become deployed more broadly.

Sometimes between 1411-1414 Jan Žižka joined the household of King Wenceslaus as a “palace gatekeeper”, someone close to the king, acting as a bodyguard. Wenceslaus was famously unstable and erratic. As a member of his immediate entourage Zizka must have been good at gaging his master’s moods, information that was exceedingly valuable to anyone with business at court. That may explain why his financial situation finally improved. In 1414 Žižka bought a representative house close to Wenceslaus favourite palace, though he did not keep it for long. He sold it to fund his daughter’s dowry two years later. As a member of the royal court Žižka made friends with prominent political, religious and military figures. It also brought him in contact with the Bohemian reformers who had many powerful supporters at court. There is a story that Zizka regularly accompanied queen Sophia when she attended Jan Hus’ Sermons at the Bethlehem chapel.

In 1419 when the Hussite revolt kicks off, Jan Zizka is already in his mid to late Fifties. Very little makes him out to become one of the greatest military figures in European history. Not only is he a relatively old man, he is visually impaired, had never held command of significant military forces before and his backstory is, as we have seen, a little too checkered to lead a religious movement. But then he did all that. Cometh the day, cometh the man!

And that day when Jan Zizka first steps into the limelight of history was the 30th of July 1419, the day of the first Defenestration of Prague. Our chronicler Lawrence of Brezova tells us that the royal councillors were quote “outrageously slaughtered by the common people and Jan Zizka, courtier of the Czech king” end quote. Many biographers ascribe Zizka a significant role in this event, though there is no further evidence of him even being there. I personally think that it is unlikely that he was one of the ringleaders at this event, simply because if he had been, the chroniclers would have made a big song and dance about it. But they didn’t. Hence my guess is that at this point he was still only another man in the crowd.

More interesting is the question why he was there. He was after all a royal servant, a “familiaris” of the king who had risen to wealth and prestige at court. Taking part in the insurrection, even in a minor role, was an act of treason. So why did he do it.

In a chronicle written about his life in 1436 it says simply, that he “took the field to fight against who did not take the Body and Blood of Christ in both kinds. Those he took for his enemies” end quote.

It was likely as simple as that. Jan Zizka, like almost everyone in Bohemia at that time had to make a decision, to stand either with the Hussites or with the Catholics. There was no middle ground. Zizka was close to the reformers at court who had just been dismissed. And he may simply have agreed with their view of scripture and decided to stand with the Hussites. And that was that.

From here on we find Zizka at the forefront of events. He led the attack on the monasteries following the death of Wenceslaus and then, as captain of the forces of the New Town, led the attack on Vysherad castle that kicked off the actual revolution.

During the battle for the Lesser Town some chroniclers ascribe Zizka a major role alongside the overall commander Nicolaus of Hus. And he seemed to have displayed a lot of personal courage during the fighting on the Charles Bridge.

Which is likely why he took the signing of the truce between the city of Prague and the Royal Castle so hard, in particular the decision to return the Vysherad to the Royalists. He had taken that castle, he understood its strategic importance and he knew what a foolish decision the truce had been. And like so many other disaffected radical Hussites, he left the city.

Passing through the gates of Prague he had once defended and where he once had a handsome house and position at court, he headed to one of the five cities the radical Hussites had declared the safe haven in times of the apocalypse. He went to Pilsen, the city of the sun where he arrived in the middle of November.

He had been invited to Pilsen by Wenceslas Koranda, a Hussite preacher who had already established himself as one of the leaders of the more extreme branch of the Hussites. Koranda was one of the most vocal Adventists who had predicted the second coming of Christ for mid-February 1420 and had urged the faithful to take refuge in one of the five cities.

After Koranda and Zizka had arrived, Pilsen began to fill up with those seeking safety from the Day of Wrath and/or protection from the brutal persecution by the Catholics that was kicking off.

As these people arrived, the demographics of Pilsen changed. Initially a city dominated by Hussite moderates, the radicals took up more and more space. That gave Wenceslaus Koranda the room to imprint more and more of his ideas on to the cityscape. He started with stripping the churches of their idolatry images before moving on to the destruction of the monasteries. The monks and the inhabitants unwilling to fall in line were expelled. And from there he whipped up the crowd with fear of the imminent Second Coming, which got ever more aggressive as news of the massacres at Kutna Hora spread.

I have by the way found another source for these events we discussed last week. A letter written by the magistrates of Prague to the city of Venice in July 1420 highlights both the incredible cruelty and the involvement of the largely German population. The leader of the atrocities was a certain Nicholas of Jemniste. Jemniste had initially been sympathetic and had warned Jan Hus against going to Constance, but he ended up a fanatic anti-Hussite. He is supposed to have devised the murder by mineshaft we discussed last week, earning him the nickname “the fierce”.

Naturally, Pilsen refused to sign up to the truce with the royalists. The government in Prague sent troops to bring Pilsen to heel. Initially this was a small army recruited mainly from the local nobility. They were unable to surround the city completely. Instead, they ran a campaign of destruction of neighbouring fields and villages, thereby reducing the availability of foodstuff in the overcrowded city.

Up until now the Taborites had been a peaceful lot, except for the destruction of churches and monasteries. Their whole ethos was to replicate the lives of the apostles who had spent their time preaching and living a communal life. But now that the armies of the enemy had gathered, the question is whether they were allowed to defend themselves. Zizka and his fellow commanders had already used military force in Prague, but the question was whether the faithful and even the priests could join them in this fight. After all the apostles had accepted martyrdom without resisting and does that not mean they should too? Zizka and his fellow commanders put this question to the masters of the university in Prague. And the masters concluded that it was appropriate for the laity to use violence in defence of their faith but reiterated the prohibition for priests to carry swords. That is often seen as the moment when Koronda and Zizka began to fall out, something that will be relevant later.

For now, the defence of the city was priority number 1. The small contingents of royalists roaming the countryside were clearly just the advance guard of a much larger army that would be sent against Pilsen. Zizka as captain of the city was in charge of defence. We know little of the early skirmishes in that period except for one significant event.

Sometime in December Zizka had made a sortie to take a small royalist fort at Nekmer, a few miles from the city. What he did not know was that this had been a trap, set up by the royalist commander. As Zizka arrived, he suddenly faced up against the entirety of the enemy.  forces, made up of dozens maybe a hundreds of knights, all in shining armour confident in the knowledge that nothing could resist their charge.

Zizka, it is said, had just a small force of men, not all of them trained soldiers, a few guns and seven wagons. As far as we know this was the moment when he first deployed the technique that would later make him the greatest military tactician of his day.

He ordered the wagons to form a circle on top of a hill and placed the canons in the middle. As the knights attacked they were met with canon fire that could penetrate their armour. And even if they were willing to dodge the shrapnel, they found their progress barred by the heavy wagons. The defenders meanwhile stayed behind in the safety of their mobile castle, taking shots at the enemy out in the open, or hitting them with their flails. This kind of warfare did not require years of training the knights went through. All you had to do was to be mad enough to handle one of these early guns that were almost as likely to explode in your hands than to send a projectile and to hold still whilst the stampede of armoured riders was coming at you. And if you believe that the End of Days was coming anyway, that was not quite as difficult as it sounds.

This tactic prove extremely effective against medieval knights in this and many later encounters. The royalists fled the field of battle and a new form of warfare was born.

But before this new model could be deployed successfully and at scale, Zizka and his men had to deal with a much, much larger royalist army that now invested the city of Pilsen. If that was pretty bad, what had made their position inside the city even more untenable was that February 14th had passed as just another uneventful Saturday. Instead of finding quote “all the others dead, with their noses sticking up in the air”. Instead the royalists were putting up their noses at those who quote “had been deceived in such an ugly way”.

The garrison of Pilsen was quickly running out of food, the population grew hostile and the royalist army outside the gates was growing by the day. It was time to go.

There was one silver lining. The commander of the royalist army was Wenceslaus of Duba, the Bohemian nobleman who had accompanied Jan Hus to Constance and had stood by his side until the end. Duba may not have been a full blow Hussite, but he was definitely no catholic fanatic. He offered Zizka and his fellow commanders an honourable surrender. If they gave up, they could leave the city with their camp followers and their weapons. Utraquist communion would be allowed for those citizens of Pilsen who desired it without punishment or molestation.

Jan Zizka took the deal and on March 22nd , 1420 a small troop of probably 400 armed men accompanied by women and children and now 12 wagons left the city of Pilsen. Though they had been promised safe passage, they soon found themselves under attack from a much larger force of 2,000, most of them armoured riders, commanded by some of the grandest barons of the realm. One had been in charge at the previous encounter and another was Nicholas of Jemniste, the cruel master of Kutna Hora. And again the wagons proved to be their salvation. This time the terrain was much less advantageous. The enemy attacked when his group was crossing a river. There was no chance for them to set up a defensible position on a hill. But Zizka spotted a number of fishponds nearby. That is where he guided the wagons, forming a circle which incorporated the ponds. This time the royalists were not so easily surprised by Zizka’s tactics. Instead of mounting rolling charges one after the other, the knights dismounted and fought their way hand to hand towards the Wagenburg. At one time they nearly succeeded in breaching the line of wagons, destroying two or three of them. But by then the battle had lasted for several hours and night fell. The royalists lines became muddled and ultimately so confounded that they could no longer distinguish friend from foe. Having beaten each other over the head a couple of time, they realised that this was not going to work out and retreated. Jan Zizka and his ragtag band of a few professional soldiers but mostly badly armed peasants had again defeated a much superior and much better equipped force.

On March 25th, 1420 they reached their destination, a place that was once called Hradiste and where their religious brethren were building a whole new city, a city they called Mt. Tabor and that would become the epicentre of radical Hussitism, giving it its name, the Taborites.

I would love to go on now and talk for another 45 minutes about Mount Tabor, the people who congregated there, what they believed and how they became the most powerful political and military machine of Bohemia, but we have already been going for more than 35 minutes. And that is enough for all of us. So Mount Tabor will have to wait until Next week. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime, just a quick hint, if you want to support the show go to historyofthegermans.com/support and become an imperial knight, a peer of the realm or even a Prince Elector for the equivalent of one, two or four cappuccinos a month. Who else can offer such elevated status?

by on

The Hussite Revolution Part 2

Revolutions are exceedingly rare in world history. And they are so rare because they require a whole host of things going wrong and going wrong all at the same time. In 1419/1420 a whole host of things are going wrong in the kingdom of Bohemia. We did already hear about the defenestration, the first in Czech history. As dramatic an event that was, there was no reason to believe that death and destruction was inevitable at that point. After all there had been dozens, if not hundreds of bloody revolts that did not end up with a revolution.

Amongst Mike Duncan’s very many achievements, the concept of the great idiot theory of history is my absolute favorite. A great idiot of history is someone who out of incompetence, stubbornness, narcissism or other impediments created a situation where historical time accelerates and change occurs. It is the counterpart to the great man theory of history that is presumably a bit better known.

Which gets us to what we will discuss in this episode. Looking at my gradually swelling library of books about the Hussite revolt, it appears as if Sigismund, the king of the Romans and heir to the Bohemian crown was one of these great idiots of history. Many an author, not only Czechs, has blamed him for turning a simple revolt into a revolution out of bigotry, incompetence or even malice. But is that fair? That is what we will investigate in this episode, along a spot of street fighting on Europe’s top 3 backpacker destination.

To listen on Spotify – click here

To listen on Apple Podcast – click here

To listen on YouTube – click here

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 176 – A Great Idiot of History?  also Episode 13 of season 8 The Reformation before the Reformation.

Revolutions are exceedingly rare in world history. And they are so rare because they require a whole host of things going wrong and going wrong all at the same time. In 1419/1420 a whole host of things are going wrong in the kingdom of Bohemia. We did already hear about the defenestration, the first in Czech history. As dramatic an event that was, there was no reason to believe that death and destruction was inevitable at that point. After all there had been dozens, if not hundreds of bloody revolts that did not end up with a revolution.

Amongst Mike Duncan’s very many achievements, the concept of the great idiot theory of history is my absolute favorite. A great idiot of history is someone who out of incompetence, stubbornness, narcissism or other impediments created a situation where historical time accelerates and change occurs. It is the counterpart to the great man theory of history that is presumably a bit better known.

Which gets us to what we will discuss in this episode. Looking at my gradually swelling library of books about the Hussite revolt, it appears as if Sigismund, the king of the Romans and heir to the Bohemian crown was one of these great idiots of history. Many an author, not only Czechs, has blamed him for turning a simple revolt into a revolution out of bigotry, incompetence or even malice. But is that fair? That is what we will investigate in this episode, along a spot of street fighting on Europe’s top 3 backpacker destination.

Before we get down to the soon blood soaked streets of Prague just another irritating but inevitable reminder that the History of the Germans is advertising free thanks to the support from so many of you. If you want to join the ranks of these most generous patrons, you can do so on my recently redesigned membership page at historyofthegermans.com/support. There you can become a member or make a one-time contribution very much as you could on patreon.com  before. If you are already on Patreon, there is no particular need to change, though you are obviously most welcome to do so. On the new membership site you find the bonus episodes as before and a chat room where members can exchange views and ideas about the show. Unfortunately I have not yet found a way to invite Patreon members to this chatroom, but I am working on something. In any event we should thank Dave E., Margus S., Jesper Glargaard – which I hope I got right!, Lidija F., Nick S. and Cat C. who have already joined this illustrious set.

Support the Show – Become a Patron

And with that back to the show

Last week we ended on the first defenestration of Prague in 1419, the one that was much deadlier than the more famous second one in 1618. A protest march of Hussites demanding the release of prisoners had gathered outside the Town Hall of Prague’s New Town. Things got out of hand or went according to plan – depending on who you listen to.  In the end 13 royal councilors lay dead on the pavement  having taken involuntarily flying lessons. The Hussite revolt had its own storm of the Bastille.

Louis XVI diary entry for the 14th of July 1789 was famously “rien” = nothing. The king of Bohemia Wenceslaus IV did not display the same sang-froid. Our chronicler Lawrence of Brezova reports that King Wenceslaus was “angered, vexed, and aggrieved [..] and decided to eradicate all Wycliffites and Hussites, especially their priests”.  This decision, like all his other great pronouncements came to nought. Instead, a month later having vexed, angered and aggrieved a bit more, he suffered a long overdue stroke and died with “a great shouting and roaring like a lion”.  

The city of Prague was in such a state of unrest that the king could not even be given a proper burial. His body was moved under cover of darkness from the Royal castle on the hill to the castle of Vysherad on the opposite bank of the river and from there again in the  night to the monastery of Aula Regia where he was finally put to rest. Only a few monks, fishermen and bakers were in attendance at the funeral of a man who had once been king of the Romans, king of Bohemia, duke of Luxemburg and Margrave of Brandenburg. His father, the great emperor Karl IV was lucky not to have seen what had become of the boy he had placed so much hope in, whose election had cost him the humungous sum of 500,000 mark of silver and the support of the once loyal imperial cities.

When news of the king’s demise spread, Prague erupted in an even greater frenzy of destruction. The mob broke into the remaining catholic churches and tore down the images and decorations, the priests and monks fled or hid. By the evening the crowd looted the Carthusian monastery and took away everything that wasn’t nailed down, got drunk from the liquor the monks produced and spilled what they could not pour down their throats. They seized the friars and dragged them through the streets of Prague in a riotous procession, because, as the chronicler said “they had consented to the death of master Jan Hus and resisted utraquist communion”. The next day the monastery was consumed by fire. Over the coming days even more churches and monasteries were ransacked and put to the torch.

The mob controlled almost the entire city with the exception of the Royal Castle. The nobles and rich merchants either left town or hunkered down in their fortified houses. Meanwhile out in the countryside the faithful of Mount Tabor were replicating the events of Prague in dozens of towns and cities.

The death of the king not only triggered street violence, it also caused a massive political problem for the more moderate Hussites, the barons, patricians and university doctors. Until now their strategy, assuming there was one, had been to put pressure on the weak king Wenceslaus to recognize the Hussite program. The masters of the university and the barons knew their king extremely well. They knew that his wife and maybe he too had Hussite sympathies and that the only reason Wenceslaus had sanctioned the conservative backlash of 1419 had been external pressure from his brother Sigismund and from the pope. Hence a carefully administered spot of mob violence was needed to tilt the balance in the favor of reform.

But now Wenceslaus was dead and the waving of flags and shouting had turned into full blown riots – not what the moderate Hussites had been aiming for.

Moreover, Wenceslaus’ heir was none other than Sigismund, the man many of the Hussites held responsible for the burning of Jan Hus. The man who had urged Wenceslaus to clamp down on the spread of utraquist communion across the country, in short the man who was at least one of the forces behind the catholic retaliation.

That left the moderate Hussite, basically the intellectual and political elite of Bohemia between a rock and a hard stone. On the one hand they really, really did not like Sigismund, but on the other hand the university professors and barons could not imagine a world without a legitimate feudal ruler, this is the 15th century after all. And for the barons in particular, their legitimacy was also tied closely to that self-same feudal system and hence the king.

As we have heard in the episodes about Karl IV and Wenceslaus, Bohemia had a rather unusual constitution. Unlike the other prince Electors, the king of Bohemia ruled with the consent of his barons. The barons were able to and had in the past deposed kings and invited new contenders to take the throne. This is how the Luxembourgs had become kings of Bohemia in the first place. And new kings could be made to sign settlements with the barons laying out their respective rights. Karl IV had done that and so did Wenceslaus.

For many moderate Hussite barons such a capitualation seemed to be the most sensible solution. Therefore, at the same time as monasteries were going up in flames all across the country and the radical reformers were dancing on the tables, the Hussite Barons and the university masters opened up negotiations with the royal party holed up in the Hradčany above the city. They put together a list of demands that if granted would allow them to recognize Sigismund as their overlord. These demands contained four main points, that priests could preach freely, only subject to the jurisdiction of the Prague archbishop, that the eucharist could be offered in both forms, as bread and wine, that the church was to give up all its property and that no Bohemian could be forced to stand trial outside Bohemia, in particular not in Rome. To soften the blow they promised to leave the Catholics unmolested and would return some of their churches.

That was the offer, the crown of Bohemia in exchange for the recognition of some key Hussite demands.

Before Sigismund could even respond to the offer, events moved on.

On September 28th there was a large gathering of the rural Hussites in a place called the Crosses. After their usual extended sermons and religious rites followed by communal dinners, they decided to march on Prague. The citizens of Prague welcomed them, led them through town in a torch-lit procession, fed them and housed them in one of the monasteries that were still standing. What further happened during this stay is shrouded in mystery. But most likely the two radical factions, those from the new Town of Prague and the rural activists who we will call the Taborites after the name they gave the hill they had gathered on, agreed to a joint position, a position that is unlikely to involve the kingship of Sigismund or toleration of Catholics.

Seeing the thousands of militant peasants all over Prague who were talking about sharing the wealth and forcing babies to take wine at communion was the final straw for the moderates. They joined the beleaguered royalist party up in the Royal Castle, conditions agreed upon or not.

This newly formed royalist party made up of Wenceslaus’ widow Sophia, the catholic barons and the moderate Hussites mustered their forces and recruited German mercenaries. Meanwhile the radicals down in the city were forming militias. We are moving to the stage in the revolt where a military confrontation becomes inevitable.

Which begs the question, where was Sigismund, the heir to the Bohemian crown, whilst his kingdom was tumbling towards civil war? In one of these twists of fate, the one man who could have deescalated the situation was unable to come to Bohemia.

After his long stay in Constance the situation in his kingdom of Hungary had become even more challenging than normal. The Ottomans had recovered from the catastrophic defeat at the battle of Ankara in 1402. Sultans Mehmed I (1413 to 1421) and Murad II consolidated the divided empire and resumed their expansion policy across the Balkans. Hungary was now Europe’s forward defence against the Turks, not counting the Byzantine empire that had shrunk to not much more than the city of Costantinople.

Moreover, Venice had begun its territorial expansion first along the Dalmatian coast and then into the Terra Ferma, its northern Italian hinterland. This impacted two of Sigismund’s realms, the kingdom of Hungary that used to comprise Croatia and Bosnia and the Empire which included the patriarchy of Aquilea and the Friaul. Venice not only dominated the Adriatic but was also completely ruthless. In 1418 the Great Council had passed a formal decision to have Sigismund assassinated – nothing personal, just business – it was cheaper than raising an army. Spoiler alert, they did not succeed and still had to raise the armies

That I think were good enough reasons for Sigismund to stay away from Bohemia, but they weren’t good enough reasons to mess things up in Bohemia. He played for time. In his letters he said things like, do not worry, I will confirm all the rights and privileges of the estates and we will surely find a solution for the religious differences once I come down. Just for the time being could you please all refrain from any more violence against the Catholics, restore the monasteries to the monks and nuns and allow the expelled German citizens to return to Prague. Being the future king and emperor he did not say please, please. Instead he ended his statement with “if you do not do what I command…we will make you do it”.

After decades of drunken Wenceslaus’ rule his new subjects were not accustomed to imperial commands. They did not refrain from violence against Catholics, did not return the monasteries to the monks and nuns and did not allow the expelled German citizens to return to Prague. At which point Queen Sophia who is now Sigismund’s regent put the second part of his statement into action. The mercenaries and baronial troops took over several of the monasteries and garrisoned key strategic points in the city. They rounded up some of the radical preachers and then they waited.

Jan Želivský , the leader of the New Town radicals called on the Taborites in the provinces to come to Prague and defend their religion as they had promised in the meeting a few weeks earlier.

The civil war began on October 25th 1419 with the radicals capturing Vyšehrad castle.

It may be useful at this point for you get an idea of the topography of the city of Prague. The city spans two sides of the Vltava river, which the Germans call the Moldau. The left bank is dominated by the Royal castle, the Hradčany with its huge cathedral and enormous palace. Below the castle is the so-called Lesser Town. The Lesser Town is connected to the Old Town on the right bank of the river via the Charles Bridge. The Charles Bridge itself is protected by two towers, one at each end. The Old Town is, as the name suggests, the oldest and still richest community of the city. That is where you find the famous Teyn square and the Jewish ghetto. The Old Town is surrounded on three sides by the New Town, the massive extension emperor Karl IV began. That is where the artisans and the labourers lived. It is also where the enormous squares, St. Wenceslaus Square and Charles Square are found, as well as the Bethlehem chapel. At the southern end of the New Town also on the right bank is Vyšehrad castle, the original residence of the Bohemian kings.

In October 1419 the Royal castle and the lesser town were held by the royalists. The new Town was held by the radicals. The old Town was caught between both sides, trying to steer a course between them. When the Vyšehrad fell to the radicals on October 25th, the royalists were limited to their bank of the river, the Hradčany and the lesser Town, unable to relieve the Old Town against attacks by the radicals. So the radicals moved into the Old Town.

The two sides were now heading for a showdown. The radicals in the new Town were waiting for more of the rural radicals to join them whilst the moderates and royalists tried to prevent these supporters from getting to the city. Several groups were intercepted and forced to return. The largest contingent, the one that had gathered on Mount Tabor, was held up by a contingent of royalist soldiers. This was the very first battle of the Hussite war and one where the Taborites sustained severe losses and were forced to return.

On November 4th, 1419, the war got under way properly. Led by Nikolas of Hus militiamen from the New Town, the Old Town and rural insurgents crossed the Charles Bridge under canon fire and broke into the Lesser Town. The drawn-out street fighting lasted until nightfall and ended with a victory for the radicals. Before they could be wiped out completely, the royalists rushed back up the hill into the safety of the Royal castle.

It is hard to understand why, but that same night the radical militia returned across the bridge to the old Town. So, the next morning the royalists reoccupied the Lesser Town. The same process repeated itself, the militia crossed the bridge followed by street fighting, only that this time several of the main buildings on the left bank, including the archiepiscopal palace, the monastery of St. Thomas and the house of the dukes of Saxony caught fire and burned down to the ground.

Looking down on her burning capital, queen Sophia and her ally and largest landowner in Bohemia, the Baron Rosenberg, fled. The remaining garrison in the Royal Castle was put under siege. Out in the countryside a royalist army was defeated by the rural radicals and their mercenaries were turning tail.

Hurrah, the Revolution had won. The Queen and her mercenaries were gone from Prague, the barons were defeated. Surely now a Hussite paradise of free worship, primacy of scripture and utraquist communion was at hand.

Not so fast. There is also another way of looking at this. The city that was burning was not just the city of the queen and the barons. It was a city where people lived. People who had followed Jan Hus’ sermons whose most famous quote was “Love the truth. Let others have their truth, and the truth will prevail.” The Hussite movement had not been about overthrowing the catholic church and the existing political order, it had sought to bring the catholic church back to its roots in the church of the apostles, a church built on faith, the teachings of Christ, forgiveness and community.

And now, instead of sharing food and listening to the word of God together, dead bodies were strewn across Charles Bridge, not just foreign soldiers, but Bohemian men and women too. The night sky was illuminated by the embers of the burning houses and monasteries.

Did anyone really want that?

Once the frenzy of the fighting was over and calmer minds surveyed the wreckage, there were two options laid out before the Hussite leadership.

One route was to push on, to cleanse the country of the catholic clergy, establish utraquist communion everywhere, set up a new political system with another king or even no king and brace for the inevitable backlash from the catholic forces of Europe. The alternative was again to seek reconciliation with king Sigismund, with pope Martin V and the catholic forces of Europe. A reconciliation that would seek toleration of the Hussite beliefs, freedoms and practices but would allow Bohemia to remain within the catholic church.

It was the same question that had been posed right after the defenestration and that would be the question that will run through the entirety of the coming decades of Bohemian history. The pendulum will swing back and forth between these two extremes.

And just now the pendulum had swung far out towards the radical side which could only mean it would swing back to the moderate position. What is astonishing is the speed with which this happened.

The battle over the Lesser City of Prague had taken place on November 4th and 5th. On November 13th the magistrates of Prague signed a truce with the royalists in the castle. This truce was scheduled to run until April 1420. Under the agreement the royalist could not only keep the royal castle but also got the Vyserad back and with it some control over the Old Town. In return the queen promised to not just tolerate but to defend the utraquist communion and what the chronicler calls “the law of god”, i.e., the freedom to preach from scripture.

At the end of December Sigismund called for a diet of the Bohemian crown in Brno in Moravia. All the barons, Catholics and Hussites, the magistrates of Prague and the major cities and church leaders gathered there. This was the big moment, the great reveal. Sigismund will now finally disclose where he stood on the deal the Moderates had been proposing for a while – toleration of the Hussite beliefs and rites in exchange for the Bohemian crown. This was the opportunity to reinvigorate the royalist coalition of Catholics and moderate Hussites, suppress the more extreme elements in the New town and on Mount Tabor and bring an end to the unrest.

If that is what the delegates from Prague were hoping for, they were in for a very cold shower. Sigismund was in no mood for reconciliation. He let the delegation from Prague wait for three days before receiving them. Once admitted to his presence they knelt before Sigismund and recognised him as their hereditary king and master. Then he quote spoke to them quite harshly, and sent them to Prague with the order to remove all chains and posts from the streets of the town and to pull down all fortified buildings in front of the castle [..]. This was to be indicative of their submission to his power and reign. [..] at the same time he deposed all of the officials of king Wenceslaus as well as the burgraves of castles who were supporters of Utraquist communion [..], and installed in their posts adversaries of the truth and blasphemers.” End quote. In other words, Sigismund ordered the power structure of the Hussites to be dismantled.

That was a very hardline position. The conditions posed by the Moderates weren’t really that demanding. Allowing Utraquist communion wasn’t that much of a theological issue, after all that is what had been practice in the catholic church until the 12th century. Freedom from courts outside Bohemia was at least on temporal matters something that had been part of the various special privileges of Bohemia for centuries. Whilst on the other hand forcing the Bohemians to accept him as king unconditionally will prove extremely expensive if at all possible.

So why did he not take the offer?

Some see him simply as evil and debauched. After all he sported a forked beard and w sin the habit of dancing wildly and dropping his pants at the end of dinner parties. From there it is only a small step to being the devil’s apprentice.

Most writers point to his catholic faith as the reason why Sigismund turned this option down. But that is confusing to me. At no point so far had Sigismund displayed any of the deep personal piety of his father. Sure, he was a believer like everybody else in the Middle Ages. But a malicious bigot who was hell bent on destroying heresy, that simply does not gel.

Others claim he wasn’t a great politician and diplomat. But that does hold even less water. This was a man who had acquired the kingdom of Hungary despite not having a valid claim to the throne and against the opposition of the dowager queen, the heiress of the kingdom herself and two-thirds of the magnates. And then he had engineered the end of the schism, something that had eluded the brightest political minds of Europe for 40 years.

If Sigismund did take a hardline position and it wasn’t for bigotry or stupidity, then it must be based on a sober political calculation. And that calculation might have gone as follows. Sigismund was not just the hereditary king of Bohemia. He was also king of Hungary and king of the Romans. Hungary, as we have just heard was in a fragile state, under pressure from both Venice and the Ottomans. And Sigismund’s position as king of Hungary was still subject to potential challenges from his nobles and the Angevins in Naples. Just relisten to episode 169 to remind yourself of the cut and thrust and occasional decapitation of Hungarian politics.

His position as king of the Romans was even more wobbly. In 1420 this king of the Romans had no landholdings in the empire – nada, zilch. He had granted his margraviate of Brandenburg to Friedrich von Hohenzollern. He had lost the ancient family lands in Luxemburg to his niece when he was unable to repay a loan. And as for the most valuable part of the Luxemburg inheritance, the crown of Bohemia, well, see above.

That meant his position as king of the romans and his eventual imperial coronation in Rome was down to nothing but his personal standing, his imperial prestige. And he had been working very hard on that. His involvement in the council of Constance had less to do with his personal spiritual unease about the schism but had been an amazing platform to establish himself as the first lord in all of Christendom. But all this was a walk on a tightrope. One false move and it would become apparent that this emperor could not afford even his clothes.

Embracing Hussite positions, even just tolerating them would have been such a misstep that tarnished his reputation. The Bohemian reform ideas had percolated into Saxony and Poland but not much beyond. For the Prince electors, the senior imperial princes and the magnates of Hungary, the Hussites were heretics whose leaders had been convicted by a legitimate church council and had been burned at the stake. Leaving them be was not only negligence on the part of the ruler of Bohemia, it jeopardised the unity of the holy mother church and thereby endangered everyone’s smooth transition to the afterlife.

As far as Sigismund was concerned the offer from the Hussite moderates amounted to no more than to resume the position of his brother Wenceslaus in Bohemia whilst losing the crowns of both Hungary and the empire. And sitting on the Hradčany and get bullied by barons, university masters, archbishops and radical preachers wasn’t really such an appealing prospect.

From Sigismund’s perspective the only viable political position to take was to turn back time, if necessary, by brute force. That does not make it a good decision, but a rational one. So he was not one of the great idiots of history, but certainly not one of its great men either. Just a man standing before a kingdom and asking it to kneel before him.

Next thing is now sent the magistrates back to Prague, where they did as they had been ordered, they removed the fortifications and readmitted the catholic clergy and rich merchants who had fled the city during the uprising. The garrison of the castle, seeing the enemy ramparts being torn down laughed and called down quote “Now the Heretics and Wyclifites will perish and will be finished” end quote.

Why did the moderate Hussites comply with Sigismund’s orders? Simple. Once their deal was rejected by Sigismund they had neither the backing of the committed royalists nor could they call on the radical forces to support them. Their power has simply been stripped from them. For now, all they could do was obey the king. 

The most eminent American scholar of the period, Howard Kaminsky, believed that had Sigismund gone directly to Prague after the knee fall of the magistrates at Brno, he could have successfully suppressed the Hussites for good.

This I very much doubt. By 1420 Hussitism had taken deep roots in the country, both in Prague and the provinces, amongst peasants and labourers as well as barons and patricians, it would have required and did require a massive military and political presence to keep them down.

And this is what was now deployed, both from within Bohemia and from without.

The backlash against the Hussites moderates and radicals alike inside Bohemia had already begun in November. The chronicler Lawrence of Březová reports that quote “enemies of the truth inflicted on the [Hussite] Czechs the theft of property, cruel manners of captivity, hunger, thirst, and bodily slaughter. [..] They turned them over to the miners of Kutna Hora, and some were indeed sold to them. These people of Kutna Hora, being Germans, cruel persecutors of the Czechs, [..] inflicted various blasphemies and different manners of torture on them, inhumanely threw them down into very deep pits, or mine shafts, primarily at night. Some were still alive when they were thrown down, others were beheaded first. This was done primarily at a place the mountain men called Tabor.” End quote. The chronicler goes on to say that a total of 1,600 Hussites were killed in that way “in a short period of time”.

I will leave this standing here as the chronicler reported it. I have tried to find corroborating evidence about the scale of these atrocities and the role of the German citizens of Kutna Hora but have not been able to find anything in English or German. If any of you Czech listeners have more information, I would be very interested.

What is fact though is that the miners of Kutna Hora were largely German speaking. Germans had developed mining expertise when the first European silver mines opened in Goslar in the 10th century and German miners were active from the enormous copper pit of Falun in Sweden to the great mines of Hungary. As we discussed in episode 153 Nürnberg had become the European centre for mining and in particular smelting technology. Hence it is very likely, if not certain that the miners of Kutna Hora had been German speaking.  

And it is also true that Sigismund had issued orders to all his recently installed chamberlains, burggraves, burgomasters and city councillors that they should by any means possible arrest, persecute and to the extent possible wipe out the Wyclifites and Hussites, and those practicing communion with the lay chalice. This order was however issued after the date the chronicler gives for the massacres at Kutna Hora.

As for the exertion of military might from abroad this came to fruition three months later. Sigismund had called an imperial diet in Breslau, Wroclaw in Silesia for early January. Two items had originally been proposed for this diet, the first was the resolution of the conflict between the Teutonic Knights and the kingdom of Poland and the second one the organisation of another crusade against the Ottomans.

We will leave the Teutonic Knights to one side, if you want to refresh your memory on this less successful intervention, check out episode 135.

As for the crusade against the Ottomans, Sigismund convinced pope Marti V to give him a sort of carte blanche to repurpose it as a crusade against the Hussite heresy if needed.

The crusade was first to go to Bohemia and should the Bohemians give up their Utraquism and exceptionalism the crusaders would then march on the Ottoman. But if the Bohemians persisted in their beliefs, then the forces of the lord would be unleashed against them.

These three events, the sudden collapse of the Hussite front after the victory in Prague, the brutal catholic repression and the call for a crusade against them left the Bohemians not just distressed but also wondering what could have brought all of these calamities about. And many looked for answers in the New Testament and in particular the Book of Revelation.  Quote: “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?”

And what do you do when antichrist is about to take the throne? Where do you go? Shall you arm yourself and defend the faithful or shall you “hide in the dens and rocks of the mountains” as the “kings of the earth and the great men, the rich men, the wise men and every free man” will do when the seventh seal of the Apocalypse is opened.

That is what we will talk about next time…and I hope you will join us again. And in the meantime, as we are talking about a revolution you may want to look again at our first revolution. The one that kicked off with a letter sent to pope Gregory VII calling him Hildebrand, not pope but false monk” Episodes 32 to 42. And do not forget that if you want to support the show, you can do so at historyofthegermans.com/support