Jan Hus

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Jan Hus and the Seeds of Reformation: A Tale of Faith and Revolt

Jan Hus emerges as a pivotal figure in the early Reformation, representing the clash between the burgeoning calls for reform and the entrenched power of the Catholic Church. Born around 1372 in what is now the Czech Republic, Hus began his journey as a humble student at the University of Prague, eventually becoming a prominent preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel. His growing influence was fueled by his criticisms of clerical corruption, particularly the practice of simony and the Church’s exploitation through indulgences. As tensions escalated between the Czech reformers and the German-speaking clergy, Hus found himself increasingly at odds with both the Church and the monarchy, leading to his eventual excommunication. The episode delves into how Hus’s teachings and the socio-political climate of Bohemia set the stage for a rebellion that would reverberate through the subsequent centuries, culminating in his fateful summons to the Council of Constance.

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TRANSCRIPT

Quote “Master Jan Hus, preacher of the Holy Scriptures from the chapel of Bethlehem, was also present at this council, who in his preaching continuously criticized and exposed the hypocrisy, pride, miserliness, fornication, simony, and other sins of the clergy, in order to bring the priesthood back to the apostolic life. He was immensely hated by these pestiferous clerics.”

This is how Laurence of Brezova introduced the great reformer and Czech national hero Jan Hus in his 15th century chronicle of the Hussite uprising.

Why should we care about the trials and tribulations of another holy man railing against corrupt prelates and the subsequent “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing”.

Well, that quote itself should be reason enough. It is from Neville Chamberlain speech of September 27, 1938 weighing the importance of protecting Czechoslovakia against an expansionist Nazi Germany.

But Jan Hus is interesting beyond his status as a towering figure in Czech history. When he came to Prague in 1390 he was just another ambitious young man from a modest background who wanted to rise up in the world on the back of intelligence and hard work. But by the time he leaves for his fate at the Council of Constance in 1414 he has been excommunicated, exiled and unwillingly or willingly become he face of a brewing revolt against king and clergy. This is a story about collapsing certainties and emerging truths, about individual beliefs and institutional order. About what the community of the faithful is supposed to be and who is in and who is out.  And its tentacles reach deep into the next centuries…

Before you can meet master Jan Hus and his fellow Bohemian reformers I will now subject you to a brief treatise on history podcasting. There are now 3.5 million podcasts, though only 380,000 are classed as active. That means if you were inclined to give every one of these active shows a 5 minute listen you would be listening all day all night for 3 years and 7 months, 11 days and 8 hours and 42 minutes. And that is why so many great shows give up, they simply cannot find anyone willing to invest five minutes to find out whether it is any good. So how do people find podcasts? Simple, 30% of podcast listeners come to a show on a personal recommendation from friends and family. So, if you know anyone in your wider circle who may enjoy the History of the Germans, tell them about the show. It makes a huge difference. As does the generous support of our patrons who have signed up on historyofthegermans.com/support. This week we thank Ryan B., Mick, fan of my singing voice, Mark G., Tim T of knightly crusader stock, Tiia Reinvald and CS.

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And then we have a few corrections. Last episode I said that Wenceslaus IV was Sigismunds stepbrother. That was obviously wrong, they were half brothers. An even more significant error was picked up by listener Raluca and some others. Vlad the impaler, aka Dracula was Mircea the elder’s illegitimate grandson, not his son as I stupidly claimed. And it was also not Mircea’s honor but Vlad’s father’s membership of the order of the dragon that brought about the nickname “little dragon”. I should just stop trying to pointlessly spice things up with random facts I picked up from secondary literature. Again I promise to do better next time and will fail again.

And with that – back to the show

Jan Hus was born probably around the year 1372. His father was called Michael, but we do not know what he did as an occupation. Of his mother we do not even know her name. Even his own name is an invention, he called himself after his home village of Husice, Goosetown which is why his surname is actually goose, uncomfortably prophetic.

In 1390 he started his studies at the university of Prague. He would later say that he spent far too much time playing chess and that he occasionally participated in carnival processions. That is the medieval equivalent of running through a field of wheat – a reference for our British listeners. For the rest of you, Jan Hus was a bit of a swot. Not that much of a surprise given he was a poor boy from the provinces trying to get a job in the church. An ambition he was certainly not alone in. After all, the church was one of, if not the largest employer in a city like Prague and many coveted a comfortable vicarage or – even better – just the income from a parish without doing anything. And he had come to the right place.

Prague in 1390 was a city on the move.

Thanks to emperor Karl IV’s grand plans his capital of Prague had grown from about 10-15,000 inhabitants to one of northern Europe’s largest cities with a population of nearly 40,000. Building work on the New Town had begun in 1347 but was still ongoing in 1390.

The emperor had endowed the new city’s churches with some of the greatest pieces of his immense collection of relics. These included such items of reverence like a fragment of the staff of Moses, a finger of St. Nicholas, the head of St. Wenceslaus, half of St. Sigismund and the most venerated of them all, the breastmilk of the Virgin Mary. That was on top of the imperial regalia that included the holy lance and purse of St. Stephen to name just two.

These holy objects attracted pilgrims by the thousands, even tens of thousands. Praying before a holy relic was one of the few ways one could cut down the thousands and thousands of years in purgatory the average sinner had to endure. But it also attracted a lot of permanent residents who sought not just work and advancement but also spiritual nourishment from the presence of so many objects of veneration. Prague had become a holy city, a second Rome, just as Karl IV had intended.

The other major draw of the city and the reason Jan Hus had come to the shores of the Vltava was its university, the first to be founded in central Europe. Thanks to the sponsorship of Karl IV and then even more significantly, his son Wenceslaus IV, it had become one of the great centers of learning in Europe. Students from the lands of the crown of Bohemia as well as Germans and Poles came to train with some of the great doctors of theology and law.

The purpose of the university had been two-fold. One was simply to elevate the status of the city of Prague. If Paris, the capital of the French monarchs had a university then the home of the emperor needed one too. The other, more prosaic objective was to produce a class of well-educated bureaucrats and clergymen that could be deployed in the increasingly sophisticated management of the Bohemian state. As for Jan Hus, he was very much in this latter category.

Organizationally, the university of Prague, like all medieval universities, was split into different nations. These nations were usually established along linguistic and cultural lines. In Prague there were four of them, Bohemians, Bavarians, Poles and Saxons. Since the Polish nation was mainly staffed with German speaking Silesians, three out of the four nations were actually German speaking, giving them dominance over the Czech speaking members of the university.

The situation at the university was replicated across much of Prague. German-speaking immigrants had come on the invitation of king Ottokar II in the 1250s and had gradually obtained leadership positions in civil society. They dominated trading and manufacturing, as they did across much of central europe. The German speaking merchants had developed efficient trading networks based on trust and cultural affinity, if not intermarriage. Goods and money moved across these networks comparatively efficiently based on a system of mutual trust and social control. We did a couple of episodes about that in the season on the Hanseatic league, particularly Episode 119 if you want more detail on how these networks functioned. Access to the network was extremely difficult for anyone not speaking German and not being immersed in the culture. And competing against these networks as a sole trader was even more difficult.

Beyond just trading, these German merchants also provided loans to the government and the church. These loans were secured by pawns, often estates, mines and other money generating assets, which then gradually shifted into the hands of this German-speaking upper class. Being the source of finance, the bankers also had ready access to the king who would bend the state to their will.

Bottom line, many Czechs outside the nobility, felt as second class citizens in their homeland and language was an important marker of this division. That occurred despite both Karl IV and Wenceslaus IV making a point of speaking Czech as well as German and French at court.

If you combine these three things, a religiously motivated citizenship, a university that churns out progressive ideas and a population chafing up against a linguistically and socially superior group and you have a medieval powder keg.

The long fuse that will ultimately explode the device was lit a long time before Jan Hus first set foot into the golden city. It all began in a notorious brothel on a street called Venus street. That is where John Milic, a canon of St. Veits cathedral who had an epiphany, began dissuading the prostitutes from their illicit lifestyle and offered them shelter. Milic became a very popular paster, much admired for relentlessly laying out the hypocrisy of the official church. Having good contacts amongst the ladies of the night, he exposed their clerical customers, one of whom had even built a separate entrance to his house to facilitate his partying. But where he really hurt the clergy was when he exposed the rampant simony in its ranks, the purchase of spiritual appointments for money. That was something the population hated even more than the lack of sexual probity.

Despite or maybe because of his relentless criticism and demands for reform, Milic was popular with the highest ranks of society, even with the emperor himself, so popular indeed that Karl overlooked that Milic had once called him the antichrist.

Under imperial protection, Milic built up a community of preachers, often laymen rather than trained clergy who spread his ideas. This community moved into the brothel where Milic had started preaching and that had now become a home for rescued women. He called this community his new Jerusalem and acquired more and more of the surrounding buildings.

Milic preached not just in Latin as was commonplace at the time. He firmly believed that the faithful should understand the word of god and should hence be preached to in their own language, namely Czech and German, the two main languages used in Prague. Milic also demanded that the bible should be translated into Czech, though he never got round to doing it. Another of his ideas was that everyone should receive the sacraments as often as possible, in particular the eucharist, to be closer to the spiritual body of Christ. This focus on the spiritual body then led him to question whether all these dusty relics had any real relevance, and even the veneration of saints was in his eyes a distraction from the true faith.

His community of the new Jerusalem did however not survive its founder’s death in 1374. But his ideas continued to circulate. One of his disciples, a certain Matthew of Janov pushed Milic’s ideas even further. Matthew was another one of those ambitious men who had studied at university, in his case, even at the famed university of Paris, and had returned to Prague in the hope of a plumb job with the church. But that did not work out and instead he became a radical critic of the holders of such offices.

He embraced Milic’s criticism of the worldly clergy, the focus on regular prayer, the eucharist and the use of the colloquial language. But by now the schism had happened and many of the ideas we discussed in our episode about the impact of the schism on European thought had begun circulating. When he was in Paris he witnessed the debates at the university about whether a church council was superior to the pope and by 1390 he had heard that the French church had subtracted itself completely from papal obedience.

This terrified him and he was looking for reasons why the church had ended up in such a calamitous place. He zoomed in on the year 1200 when the church abounded in the greatest riches and glory and when “magna Mulier formicaria” the whore of Babylon took her seat upon the scarlet beast, and antichrist extended his swollen body throughout the church. What he meant was the pontificate of Innocent III , the most powerful of the medieval pope and convener of the fourth Lateran council – and initial sponsor of emperor Frederick II – Episode 75 if you are interested.  

According to Matthew of Jenov the primitive church of the apostles who had been poor and dedicated to the people had been distorted by “Greek rules, Aristotelic justice and Platonic sanctity”. What he meant by that were the rules and regulations of canon law and scholastic theology that obfuscated the true faith and in the process made its practitioners rich and powerful. His opposition was against the lawyers who had taken hold of not just the papal administration but the papal throne itself.

Into this already febrile climate of anticlerical, anti-papalist sentiment dropped the teachings of John Wycliff. Wycliff was an Englishman, a professor in Oxford whose theories we have already encountered in episode 168. His thoughts travelled down to Prague through the entourage of Anne of Bohemia, the sister of Wenceslaus and Sigismund who had married King Richard II of England in 1382.

Wycliff’s ideas poured oil on the fire of the Bohemian reform movement. Bohemian scholars would travel to Oxford and bring back treatises that members of the Prague university debated, translated into Czech and adapted into their own thinking.

They zoomed in on one particular element of Wycliff’s investigation, the question of what the church was. The sanctioned view was that the church was the community of the faithful and that Christ had put St. Peter in charge of this community when he said that Peter was the rock on which he built his church. And St. Peter had thereby inherited all of Christ’s powers in the temporal world, to bind and to loose. And that power passed through him to every one of his legitimate successors. That was the justification for Gregory VII’s claim that all monarchs are to kiss his feet and that he could depose them, even the emperor and Boniface VIII statement that there was no salvation outside the Roman church.

This stringent argument fell apart when the Western schism appeared. We now have two popes, but only one could be the true successor of St. Peter. As the schism progressed and the popes refused to yield as we discussed, the only viable solution was to call a church council that would decide who was the true pope and depose all the false popes, which is what they did in 1409 in Pisa.

Now by doing this the church council claimed to represent the community of the faithful, the holy church itself, that ranked above false and corrupt popes. If these popes could be ousted on account of their sinful claim on St. Peter’s throne, then they weren’t members of the Holy Church any more. Which leads to the next question, which is – who is a true member of the holy church?

That will only be conclusively revealed at the last judgement, when the faithful are admitted to heaven and the sinful are cast down to hell. That does not help because we need to find out right here and now who is one of the faithful and hence a member of holy church with a vote on who should be pope and who is a black sinner who can be ignored. And that runs into a major problem. It would not be just preposterous but outright blasphemous to preempt the final judgement by stating that John was a faithful and Jack was a sinner. So the only thing we can do right now is to look for the signs. Someone whose demeanor and actions emulates the teachings of Christ is more likely to be predestined to heaven, whilst someone living a dissolute life was more likely to end up in hell.

That makes a lot of sense, but is totally explosive. Because if you come across a drunken, fornicating bishop, who acquired his post through simony,  well that guy is unlikely to be one of the faithful. If he is not one of the faithful, then he is not a member of the church. If he is not a member of the church he cannot tell me what to preach or who to preach to. Meanwhile someone with an impeccable lifestyle and deep faith but no church license would be not just entitled to preach but should be listened to above the debauched prelate.

What Wycliff proposed would lead to a complete dissolution of discipline in the church in its current state of corruption, which is why he proposed a fallback. The temporal authorities, the kings and princes were to maintain the discipline in the church until such time that it was completely reformed.

That was grist to the mill of the Bohemian reformers, who had been looking for the theological justification for their rejection of the corrupt prelates at the top of the church.

Jan Hus was one of these Bohemians who picked up and digested Wycliff’s theses. There is a tremendously complex debate about what of Wycliff’s theses Hus exactly endorsed and which ones he did not. That mattered for the legality of the judgement that led to his execution at Constance, but did not matter much for what went down in Bohemia. Bohemia embraced much of Wycliff’s theses.

But I am jumping ahead.

Last we saw Jan Hus the person was in 1390 when he arrived in Prague. He studied at university and by 1401 was ordained as a priest and took holy orders. He preached in a number of churches in the Old Town before he was appointed the main preacher at the Bethlehem chapel. The Bethlehem chapel was an unusual set-up. Though called a chapel, it was huge, able to take 3,000 worshippers. The reason it wasn’t a full church was because it was a private chapel created and funded by two pious Prague merchants. That made it on the one hand less prestigious than a full parish appointment, but left Jan Hus with a  lot more freedom than an ordinary priest.

When he took up the role in 1402, Jan Hus was well within the mainstream of the Bohemian clerical set-up. Though many ideas the reformers promoted were radical and not in line with general church doctrine, the majority of the established church, all the way up to the archbishop were supportive of their demand for reform. They even tolerated the preaching in Czech practiced by the reformers and something Jan Hus did very much from the beginning.

But though he had helped translate some of Wycliff’s works, his theological writings of that time were fairly tame.

What radicalized him were a sequence of events that unfolded over the coming decade.

In 1405 he became part of a commission to investigate a miracle a parish priest of a burned down church claimed to have witnessed. Something about a bleeding host. What Hus uncovered was a greedy priest who had made the whole thing up to raise money for the rebuilding of his church and the recovery of his main income stream. That investigation led him then to doubt not just the veracity of some of the relics but also whether any relics, in particular those directly physically related to Christ himself were compatible with scripture.

At the same time his career as a preacher was going great. Bethlehem chapel filled up with worshippers not just on Sundays but also on workdays. Jan Hus was a gifted orator and had a knack to convey rather complex theological ideas in a way the common people could understand. His most famous quote is: “Seek the truth, hear the truth, learn the truth, love the truth, speak the truth, hold the truth and defend the truth until death.” And at another point he said “Love the truth. Let others have their truth, and the truth will prevail.” This made it even into the national motto of the Czech Republic “truth prevails”.

When I first read this I stumbled over the term “their truth” which is one of my bugbears. There is no such thing as my truth. There a facts and fiction. But then I do not think that Jan Hus was talking about the modern idea of “my truth”. For him, like his contemporaries faith was truth and truth was faith. There was no differentiation between scientific truth and faith as we see it today. So the correct interpretation of these statements would be to replace the word truth with faith. And then these statements take on a different and a much more amenable connotation. Hus was prepared to die for his truth, his faith, when he said “defend the truth until death”but he did not want to do harm to those who held different beliefs. He demanded “Let others have their truth, their faith”. Because he believed that they would come around to his beliefs sooner or later. And there is another one of his statements I like: quote “From the very beginning of my studying I made it a rule that whenever, in any matter, I heard a sounder viewpoint, I abandoned the one I had – since I know well that we know far less than what we do not know.” Or to say it with Keynes, if the facts change I change my opinion, what do you do? So whatever his teachings are later used for, he himself was no fanatic.

I like that and so it seems did many inhabitants of the city of Prague. And what they also liked was that he would celebrate the eucharist almost every time as Milic and his reformers had demanded. That went straight against church rules that wanted to restrict the sacrament to only once a month.  Hus responded quote: “if ever a pope should command me to play on the flute, build towers, to mend or weave garments, and to stuff sausages, ought I not reasonably judge that the pope was foolish in so commanding” end quote.

Alongside this thriving business, Hus kept a role at the university. He published further treatises which now incorporated elements of Wycliff’s thinking. How much and how far away from the official doctrine these views were is again ultimately irrelevant. What mattered was that Hus was increasingly seen as one of the followers of Wycliff.

In 1409 tensions at the university boiled over. The Czechs who were the most numerous nation kept getting voted down by the three German-speaking groupings. And this was not just a linguistic and social conflict but also a theological one. Whilst the Czechs embraced Wycliff and became increasingly radical, the Germans stuck with the orthodoxy. When it became clear that the squabbling parties could not reach compromise, they brought their case before King Wenceslaus IV. By now Wenceslaus had succumbed to full on alcoholism, so it is unclear how much of the proceedings he really understood. But his wife Sophia was very much on the side of the Czech reformers. The crown also needed the university’s support as they wanted to transfer their allegiance from the Roman pope Gregory XII to the Pisan pope Alexander V. The Germans were leaning to the Roman pope, the Bohemians to the Pisan. So the crown passed a decree that from now on the Czech nation’s vote would count as much as the vote of the other three nations combined. That outraged the German-speaking nations and they simply walked out. Many of these doctors and students left for the recently founded universities of Leipzig and Heidelberg, which propelled these schools up the European academic rankings, whilst the university of Prague turned into a more provincial institution catering for Bohemians only.

What also happened was that the king appointed Jan Hus as rector of the University. And since the university was now free to embrace Wycliff’s theories, Jan Hus as its rector became the face of Wycliff’s theories in Bohemia, irrespective of his personal conviction.

Over the next 3 years the university doctors embraced more and more radical ideas. That triggered a backlash by the archbishop who referenced 45 Wycliffian theses that had been declared heretic. In this debate the king sided again with the reformers against the archbishop. This time it was mainly for monetary reasons. In the tradition of Matthew of Janov, the reformers supported the idea that the king should not only maintain discipline in the church, but should also cleanse it from the swollen body of antichrist, aka take away all the church’s lands and estates. And that was exactly what Wenceslaus did. He took the reins of the church, forced the archbishop into submission and diverted the church funds into his own pocket.

This alliance between king and reformers fell apart, as one would expect, over the same thing it had kept it together in the past – money. The new Pisan pope, John XXIII had declared a crusade against king Ladislaus of Naples, the one who had attempted to take the crown of Hungary from Sigismund and whose father had died trying. To fund this most Christian effort John was selling indulgences all across the lands of his obedience, including Bohemia. As we mentioned in episode 168, indulgences had become key to papal finances now that the church was split into three and many obediences regularly refused to pass through tithes and other incomes. The  indulgences of 1412 were so egregious, they truly shocked Jan Hus. Already deeply skeptical of saints and relics, this blatant money grab pushed him over the edge. He began to equate John XXIII with antichrist and declared all prelates selling these papers corrupt. And when he found out that Wenceslaus was supporting the indulgences because he had been promised a cut of the profits, he condemned his king as well.

The pope immediately excommunicated Hus. The king was still more interested in continuing the cooperation and first tried to calm him down. But Hus kept preaching against indulgences, called the archbishop a Simoniak, which was true, and just generally turned from a useful tool of royal politics to a genuine nuisance.

After Wenceslaus had tried several time to get Hus back on side, he sent a brutal message. Three of Hus’ young supporters had protested against the selling of indulgences and stopped the pardoners from going about their business. The king had them arrested and the next day, he had them hanged. Meanwhile the  pope had declared an interdict over the city of Prague, banning all church services and sacraments for as long as Jan Hus was allowed to preach.

That was too much for Jan Hus. To protect his friends and fellow citizens, he went into exile.

In the following 2 years, from 1412 to 1414 he did write like a man possessed. He published no fewer than 15 books, the culmination of the previous decade of thought. The most important one was de ecclesia, about the church.

There he compared the church to a field where wheat and weeds grow together. But only the wheat, the good parts belongs to the actual church. And if the church itself was unable to pull out the weeds, it falls to the king to do that, and if the king was unwilling or unable to do it, it was down to the laity to clean up the field. And since most of the weed, the corruption in the church stems from the property they had obtained over time, that should be all be given over to the secular authorities.

This is where the rubber hit the road. Dietrich von Niem, a German chronicler called Hus’ ideas as great a threat to Christendom and papal power as the Qur’an. And it was this book that the judges in Constance used most extensively to prove the heresy of Jan Hus.

These books, but even more the relentless persecution by the church had made Hus the face of the Bohemian dissent, a dissent that was about to tip over into revolt. As early as 1412 pamphlets were circulating that mixed religion with violence. They declared that all those intended to be Christian were to take up swords and be prepared to wash their hands in the blood of God’s enemies. Jan Hus they declared was no longer a timid goose, but a ferocious lion prepared to confront the papal antichrist and all its wickedness. There is no evidence that Hus endorsed or encourages such talk, nor is there evidence that he made efforts to stop it.

It is in late 1414 that Jan Hus is summoned to the council of Constance that had gathered since November of that year. He was asked to come and subject his teachings to review by the doctors and senior clergy at the greatest of church councils. Sigismund, by now elected king of the Romans and presiding over the council promised Hus safe conduct.

One cannot know whether Hus believed Sigismund’ promise or whether he willingly walked straight into his martyrdom. This again mattered as much or as little as the question whether or not he was guilty of heresy. Because what mattered was what the people back in Prague believed happened and what actions these beliefs triggered.

Some of that we will find out next episode when we finally talk about the great council of Constance. I hope you will join us again.

In the meantime, should you feel so inclined, listen back to some of the older episodes when we talked about Bohemia, for instance way back in episode 26 when we look at the murderous Bohemian succession crisis in the early 11th century, episode 54 when a Bohemian ruler tilts Barbarossa’s campaign in Italy in favour of the Germans, or some of the more recent ones, like episode 140 about the fight between Rudolf of Habsburg and the Golden King Ottokar II. And what you could also do is make a one-time donation at historyofthegermans.com/support, just in case you feel like it.