Hussite Wars

For fifteen years after 1419, the followers of the executed Czech reformer Jan Hus fought for control of the Kingdom of Bohemia against King Sigismund, the papacy and a series of crusading armies drawn from across Europe. Using wagon forts and early firearms, Hussite armies of townspeople and peasants defeated five crusades and raided neighbouring lands, before their moderate and radical wings turned on each other. The wars ended with a compromise that let Bohemia keep its own form of worship, a century before the Reformation.

From around 1402 the Prague priest Jan Hus attacked corruption in the Church, drawing on the ideas of the English theologian John Wycliffe. He won wide support in Bohemia, particularly when he condemned the sale of indulgences in 1411. Summoned to the Council of Constance under a safe conduct from Sigismund, King of the Romans and brother of King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia, he was imprisoned, tried and burned on 6 July 1415. Bohemian and Moravian nobles sent the council a furious protest. Hus's followers split early into moderates, called Utraquists or Calixtines after their demand that lay people receive communion wine from the chalice, and radicals, later known as Taborites after their stronghold of Tábor.

On 30 July 1419 Hussites marching behind the priest Jan Želivský broke into Prague's New Town Hall and hurled royal officials from the windows, the first of the Defenestrations of Prague. Wenceslaus died on 16 August, and fighting broke out across Bohemia, with many Catholics, mostly Germans, driven from the towns. Jan Žižka emerged as the leading Hussite commander, winning the first pitched battle at Sudoměř on 25 March 1420.

Žižka's armies were largely untrained commoners, women as well as men. He arranged carts into wagon forts that stopped cavalry charges, and armed his troops with crossbows and early firearms that needed little strength or training. By the end of 1421 wagons and guns had become offensive weapons. Czech names for Hussite weapons later gave English the words "pistol" and "howitzer".

Sigismund claimed the Bohemian throne, and on 17 March 1420 Pope Martin V proclaimed a crusade against the Hussites. The Hussites united behind the Four Articles of Prague, demanding free preaching, communion in both kinds, an end to the Church's worldly wealth and the punishment of public sin. Sigismund's army was beaten at Vítkov Hill in July 1420 and near Vyšehrad that November, and almost all Bohemia fell to the Hussites. Further crusades failed at Žatec and at Německý Brod in January 1422, at Aussig in 1426, at Tachov in 1427 and at Domažlice in August 1431, where the crusaders reportedly fled on hearing the Hussite battle hymn. After Žižka died in October 1424, Prokop the Great led the radicals, and the Hussites carried out raids, called "glorious rides", into Silesia, Saxony, Hungary and other neighbouring lands. In 1433 a Hussite force fighting alongside Poland against the Teutonic Order marched as far as the Baltic.

The Hussites were never united. Želivský was beheaded by the Prague council in 1422, Žižka suppressed extreme sects, and Taborites and Utraquists fought each other more than once. As talks with the Council of Basel went on from 1431, the moderates drew closer to the Catholics. On 30 May 1434 an alliance of Utraquists and Catholics crushed the Taborites at the Battle of Lipany, where both Prokop the Great and Prokop the Lesser were killed.

On 5 July 1436 Sigismund, Hussite delegates and Church representatives signed the Compacts at Jihlava, which allowed communion in both kinds in Bohemia and Moravia. Sigismund was accepted as king. Bohemia had been devastated: by some estimates the population of the Czech lands, around 2.8 to 3.4 million in 1400, stood at only 1.5 to 1.85 million by 1526. The Utraquist church remained Bohemia's established church until after 1620, and many later Hussites embraced the Protestant Reformation.

Our 1400 map shows the Holy Roman Empire, which included the Kingdom of Bohemia, shortly before the wars. For the region today, see the Czech Republic.