Hussite Wars (1419-1434): Jan Zizka and the War Wagons

The Hussite Wars were a series of religious and political wars fought in Bohemia and the surrounding lands between 1419 and 1434. After the execution of the reformer Jan Hus, his followers rose against the Catholic Church and King Sigismund, and with new tactics built around armoured war wagons they defeated five crusades sent against them. The wars ended only when moderate Hussites crushed the radicals at Lipany in 1434.

Causes

The burning of Jan Hus at the Council of Constance in 1415, despite a royal safe-conduct, turned a reform movement into open defiance. The execution of Jan Hus united much of the Czech nobility, the towns and ordinary people behind his followers, who adopted communion in both kinds, bread and wine for lay people, with the chalice as their symbol. They became known as Utraquists, from the Latin sub utraque specie, “in both kinds”.

On 30 July 1419 a procession led by the radical preacher Jan Zelivsky stormed the New Town Hall in Prague and threw several councillors from the windows, an event known as the First Defenestration of Prague. King Wenceslaus IV died on 16 August 1419. His heir was his half-brother Sigismund, King of Hungary and King of the Romans, whom Hussites blamed for Hus’s death.

The crusades against Bohemia

In 1420 Pope Martin V proclaimed a crusade against the Hussites, and Sigismund led a large army to Prague. On 14 July 1420 Hussite forces under Jan Zizka beat back an attack on Vitkov Hill, outside the city, and the crusade broke up. That year the Hussites agreed the Four Articles of Prague as their common programme.

Four more crusades followed, in 1421, 1422, 1427 and 1431. All of them failed. The last ended on 14 August 1431 at Domazlice, where, according to chroniclers, the crusader army fled almost as soon as it heard the Hussite war song approaching.

Meanwhile radical Hussites founded a new town on a hill in southern Bohemia, which they named Tabor after the biblical mountain. The Taborites, as they were called, rejected much of traditional church practice, while the moderate Prague party wanted to keep most Catholic doctrine apart from the Four Articles.

Zizka and the war wagons

Jan Zizka, a minor nobleman who had lost the sight of one eye before the wars, turned peasants and townsmen into an effective army. His key tool was the war wagon. Strengthened with boards and manned by crossbowmen, flailmen and soldiers with early handguns and light cannon, wagons could be chained together into a fortified camp. Enemy cavalry broke against the wall of wagons, and then Hussite troops counter-attacked.

The Hussites were among the first in Europe to use gunpowder weapons systematically in field battles. Two Czech words for weapons they used, pistala and houfnice, are thought to lie behind the English words “pistol” and “howitzer”. Zizka lost the sight of his second eye at the siege of Rabi in 1421 but went on winning battles. He died of illness, probably plague, near Pribyslav on 11 October 1424.

Prokop and the “beautiful rides”

After Zizka’s death the priest Prokop the Great, also called Prokop Holy, led the radical field armies. From 1426 the Hussites went on the offensive, launching raids, which they called “beautiful rides”, into Austria, Hungary, Silesia, Saxony and other German lands. In 1433 a Hussite force allied with Poland even reached the Baltic coast near Gdansk.

Lipany and the settlement

War-weariness and the cost of the raids pushed both sides towards talks. The Council of Basel invited Hussite envoys in 1433 and agreed to the Compacts, which allowed communion in both kinds in Bohemia and Moravia. The radicals rejected the deal.

On 30 May 1434, at Lipany east of Prague, an alliance of moderate Utraquist and Catholic nobles defeated the Taborite and Orphan armies. Prokop the Great was killed. The Compacts were ratified at Jihlava on 5 July 1436, and Sigismund was finally accepted as king. He died the following year.

Timeline

• 1415, 6 July: Jan Hus is burned at Constance.
• 1419, 30 July: the First Defenestration of Prague.
• 1419, 16 August: King Wenceslaus IV dies.
• 1420, 14 July: Hussites defeat the first crusade at Vitkov Hill.
• 1424, 11 October: Jan Zizka dies near Pribyslav.
• 1431, 14 August: the fifth crusade collapses at Domazlice.
• 1434, 30 May: moderates defeat the radicals at the Battle of Lipany.
• 1436, 5 July: the Compacts are ratified at Jihlava.

Why it matters

The Hussite Wars were the first time a European people successfully defended a break with the papacy by force, a century before the Reformation of Martin Luther. Bohemia kept its own Utraquist church, a tradition of religious dissent that led to later conflicts such as the Defenestration of Prague in 1618. The wagon tactics of Zizka also became a model studied by armies across central and eastern Europe.