Hussite Wars

1419 – 1434

Overview

The Czech reformer Jan Hus was burned as a heretic at the Council of Constance in 1415. His followers in Bohemia, the Hussites, rose in revolt, and in 1419 a Prague crowd threw the city's councillors from the windows of the town hall. The Emperor Sigismund, heir to the Bohemian crown, and the Pope answered with a crusade. Between 1420 and 1431 five crusades were sent against the Hussites, and all of them failed. The Hussite commander Jan Žižka, a veteran soldier who lost one eye before the wars and the other during them, won at Vítkov Hill in 1420 and in a string of later battles, and the Hussites went on to raid deep into Germany and Hungary. After Žižka's death in 1424, Prokop the Great led their field armies. The wars ended when the moderate Hussites, the Utraquists, defeated the radical Taborites at Lipany in 1434 and made terms with the Church.

The Wagon Fort

Žižka's great invention was the vozová hradba, the wagon fort. His armies were largely peasants and townsmen who could not fight armored knights in the open, so he gave them a portable fortress: heavy wagons chained together into a ring, with boards to protect the gaps. From behind the wagons, crossbowmen and handgunners shot down attacking cavalry, and when the enemy was disordered, infantry sallied out to finish the fight.

Weapons

The Hussites made early firearms a field weapon. Their small Hand Cannon, the píšťala ("pipe"), gave its name to the pistol, and the light field gun called the houfnice gave its name to the howitzer. At close quarters their infantry fought with pole arms and the Military Flail, a threshing flail reinforced with iron, as well as crossbows, spears and war hammers.

Legacy

The Hussite Wars showed that disciplined infantry with gunpowder weapons and field fortifications could defeat the mounted knights who had dominated European battlefields, a lesson Europe absorbed over the following century. In Czech memory Žižka and the Hussites remain national heroes.

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