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.
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:
- 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.
- We stand for the proper and free preaching of the word of God and of his every truth
- 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.
- 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.
