Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans. Episode 178. No Hill to die on From Thabault to Witkow 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 which have seldom been seen in history. So it is written in the very pretty chronicle of the life of John Shishka, which tells the not so very pretty story of the war against the Hussites.
That is the war 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 this 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 similar 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 set. My limit is paragraph 8686A of the German Penal Code, which bans the distribution and use of National Socialist propaganda. That does include the Hitler Gruss. The Hitler's Salute. Elon Musk did perform the Hitler's salute on January 20, 2025.
That needs to be said. That is why the History of the Germans podcast had commented on political events on social media. It had to be done. 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 Ika 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 around 400 found itself under attack from a much larger and a 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 center of radical Hasidism 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 Ika and his small warband arrived, they found friends and fellow Hussites from southern Bohemia who, like them, had left Prague in November 1419. This particular group had gone to the town of Pisg when Pisg was besieged by a Royal army in February 1420, they left and handed out for the city of Osti.
They hid in the woods until Ash Wednesday, when they knew the predominantly Catholic inhabitants would be nursing an almighty post carnival hangover that allowed them to capture the city with ease. Barusti proved difficult to defend, so they put the whole city to the torch and chose this abandoned hill fort 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 Josiah and revealing himself to be the bridge between the divine and and the temporal. This was not the first hill the radical Hussites had named after Mount Tabor, at least one of the mountains 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's how one Taborite writer described a 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 laborer 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, and nor would they stay in better tenser houses.
The sacred 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, just as the apostles had done. 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, no chasubles or church chants, just the prayer and the Eucharist. They did however, have one problem. Like Wenceslas Karanda, who had led the radicals in Pilsen, the Tabarite priests had called the end of days for February 14th. And like in Pilsen, not much had happened on that day. Babylon did not fall. Now there are two well trodden paths for any prophet of the Apocalypse to deal with this so far quite inevitable occurrence.
One part of the Tabarites just pretended they had never made any such claim and that they should simply soldier on, build their community of the faithful up on the hill. There's nothing to see here. The other group went the other way and dialed it up to 11. Now I never thought I would find myself reading the book of Revelation, but now that we're deep in the weeds of the debate of what happens at the end of the world, well I had to.
And to say it in the inimitable words of George Walker, that's some weird shit. It's open to literally any kind of interpretation. There's this whole debate about the millennium. Is it before or after Antichrist, or before or after Jesus? Is it going to be bliss or horror? Or is it not going to happen at all? Just you take your pick. The interpretation the Tabarite millenarians went as the day of wrath, the 14th of February that 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 the five cities and had now all come together on Mount Tabor, well, they will now be ruling the world. They would no longer have to pay rent to their lords. They can take over all the villages, fish ponds, meadows and forests. In fact they will be drowning in abundance of silver and gold.
The only bit that was required to get there was the extermination of the sinners, which God has failed to do, but has now assigned to them as one chronicler. 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. 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. That's when the forces of the counter revolution brings the process to a halt. But the Hussite revolution still had a lot of emotional energy back in the physical world. We should note that this 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 there had ever been material, were gone, as were their 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 organizes things. Just 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 Ika, who would soon take charge of all military matters.
The first thing they did was getting on with building defences. Day and night. The Tabarites, 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 two months, between March 27 and May 18. The people who built it lived in tents inside the walls. There had been no time to build houses or churches, or even any kind of shelter. Even the mightiest walls and towers are of no use if there aren't soldiers able to defend them.
And that is where Jan Ika's true genius played out. At the same time, as the walls rose up around Thabor, did he create an army such like had never been seen before. Medieval military doctrine stated that no infantry force could withstand a charge by armored riders. This doctrine had already been challenged hard at Mudorf, at Morgarten, Poitiers, Agincourt and Nicopol, where the flowers of chivalry had been decimated by the people they regarded as beneath them. There's a difference, though.
The janissaries at Nicopol and the English longbowmen at Poitiers and Agincourt had trained for years before they got deployed in mettle. The Swiss and Bavarian infantry, too, had training and benefited from knowledge of their very specific geography. What Iska 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 27, he had brought 400 men from Pilsen, who may have had received some military training during the fighting there. But Ika will leave Tabur at the head of an army of allegedly 9,000 on May 18. The early 15th century was a time of such brutality that everyone had a weapon and everyone knew how to use it.
That means townsfolk, even artisans, would likely have a sword 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 defense. Now, just in case, like me, you do not know exactly what a flail is, here's what I found. 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 thrashing, that is, for separating grains from their husks. The flail has some advantages. An agricultural flail has a fairly long handle, and because of the striking head is on a chain, it's quite hard to parry. It can go around a shield or it can hit you over a wall. By adding spikes or studs to the striking head, it can become quite deadly.
Now, these agricultural flails are not to be confused with the military flails you see, for instance, in many depictions of Jan Husband. These have shorter handles and small metal spiked balls at the end. Germans called them morgensterns or 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.
These men carrying flails were only one of the three major infantry formations. Another one were the pikemen or lances. They carried long sticks meant to unseat riders. And the third formation were archers and crossbowmen who provided long distance firepower. Mustering the men and optimizing their weapons was one thing, but the most crucial component of infantry going up against a cavalry charge was discipline.
I think I have said that many times before, but there are few things more terrifying than than a thousand riders on heavy horses 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. And this is where his first major innovation came. The war wagon.
The wagons Ika had used at the previous two encounters had been just ordinary carts of the kind used to transport foodstuff to market or the materials for the campaign. The war wagons that Ika used later, and presumably developed further as he went along, were of a different kind. These were designed as movable fortresses. They were heavy and robust carriages. The sides could be reinforced with movable boards for soldiers to take shelter behind.
Other boards could be deployed to protect the wheels and stabilize 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, then these mobile fortifications were almost impregnable.
And as we will see, he also found a way to turn the war wagon from a defensive tool into an offensive weapon. 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 or 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 Nikopol, 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 sort of battle plan. Now, an army that fights out of a formation of wagons was forced into coordination for the simple reason that the movable footers 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 also required specializations.
Some soldiers were manning the wooden walls under 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.
Discipline did not just come from the imposition of authority, though that surely existed, given the religious fervor and the respect for the Scar's military experience, but from the structure of the warfare that Gizka had invented. The last component that made the Hussite army so special was the use of field artillery. Now, artillery had been round for at least 50 years by then.
The oldest surviving European firearm, the Tannenberg handgun, dates back to 1399, but they had been mentioned far earlier. Guns were predominantly used in static warfare, that is, as a way to break walls during sieges. There were guns deployed at the Battle of Tannenberg in 1410, but it is in the Husseid wars that they started to make a material difference.
Shooting balls from behind the walls of their mobile fortresses not only terrified the riders and the horses, but as aim and speed increased, they became a way to overcome the advantages of steel armor. We do not know when Ika exactly developed this form of warfare. It might have already gone round in his head when he fought in the wars against the Teutonic Knights. We've 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. And that 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 neighbourhoods of Tabor. They raided the castles of the lords who had broken the promise of safe conduct. They attacked a small army of Nicolas of Giemniste, the man in charge of the massacres in Kutna Hora.
They inflicted damage to his forces and forced him to release his prisoners. And once the truce between the royalists and the Hussites had ended on April 23, he felt free to attack pretty much 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 of them was prepared to decapitate all his five colleagues. And one of them did, and that person then joined the Asite army. Zizka himself ordered seven monks to be burned at the stake. However, the next great battle was not fought over Tabor, as the leaders of the community had feared, but it was fought 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 utter pointlessness of their attempt at compromise became abundantly clear when Sigismund sanctioned the burning of a Prague merchant who had been reluctant to give up his Hussite beliefs. And then, to make it absolutely, absolutely clear where he stood, he issued an order that anyone who was found practicing any of the Hussite beliefs by the time he arrived in Bohemia would be punished by death and the loss of all of their possessions.
At that point, the leader of the moderate Hussite barons, Cenk of Wartemberg, who had been appointed as 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 there was no other option than to fight. On April 3, 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 to all the various factions of Hussites that hopefully they could all agree upon and thereby unite. And this is what the Four Articles 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 His every truth. All priests from the Pope down should give up their pomp, their 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, 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. So from now on, whenever Bohemia is threatened from the outside, the various Hussite forces will coalesce around these forward demands. And every time they are left alone, they will fall out over what exactly they mean. But for now they are under attack, and hence they are united.
The city of Prague was readying its defenses. They expelled the remaining Catholics, most of them German speaking. The viscerat 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, Tassians, Ruthenians, Russians, Slavonians, Prussians, Serbs, Thuringians, Styrians, Miznians, Bavarians, Saxons, Austrians, Franconians, Frenchmen, Englishmen, and so forth, and so forth. Sigismund's Chronicler talks about 80,000, but neither of these numbers are believable.
The French and English side at Agincourt in 1415 counted each about 15,000. At Tannenberg, Grunewald, high estimates talk about 30,000 men. And these were battles involving some of the richest and the most powerful monarchs of the Middle Ages. Not an impecunious claimant to the crown of a medium sized kingdom. But it was still a huge army by the standards of the empire, 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 they may also have become disconcerted about the increasing brutality of the Tabarites, or both. Amongst them was the grand magnate and leader of the moderate Hussite barons and recent recruit to their cause, Cenk of Warttemberg.
Cenk of warttemberg, in another 180 degree turn, 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 the royal garrisons in Prague Castle and the viscerat. They tried to take either of them and failed. With the main forces of the enemy approaching at pace, despair spread through the city.
And again they were considering a truce. And again they 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 very end. One of the most 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 now put to. And they locked themselves up against their king.
And the city now called for help from the other Hussites. And they came from all across the country, mustering their forces and journeying to Prague. On March 18, an army allegedly 9,000 strong, armed with flails, swords, crossbows, lances and pikes, accompanied by war wagons and led by Jan Ika, set off from thabor on the 50 mile journey to Prague. Medieval armies tend to be slow and it would have usually taken a week or so to cover this distance.
But Ika 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 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 smoldering ruin.
The royalists held Prague Castle, one of the largest medieval fortresses in the world, that sits 150 meters above the town. And they hold the Vizerat, a somewhat less imposing hill, but still a mighty fortress to the south. Both sides assumed that once Sigismund had 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, along or on the river, either from the north or the south, and by road either from the southeast or from the northeast. Three of those routes were blocked by Prague Castle and by the Vishirat. 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, that is on the side where the old and the 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 70 meter high long ridge called the Wittkop Hill. The destiny of Prague. And now that all Hussite forces were gathered inside its walls, the movement itself was to be decided on the Hospital Field and on Witkof 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 takes 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, Witkov 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. Ika then had two more wooden bulwarks built at the other end. They were comparatively small, each holding maybe 30 defenders. Around these bulwarks all trees had been felled and houses that could impede axis or visibility had been taken down.
And then they waited. The big action began. On July 14, 1420, Sigismund planned an all out assault. One contingent of a few thousand cavalry, mostly troops from Meissen and Thuringia, were to take Witkoff 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, which once another large army was to attack the new town from the viscerat. So overall, that would be a sound plan.
Either the defenders would give up as soon as Wittkopf Hill had fallen, or if they continued to resist, they could be starved to death. Now here I leave the storytelling to Lawrence. Of those from Meissen, climbed the mountain with their own troops and the 7,8000 cavalry allied to them in 4 cent 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, one girl and 26 men who had remained temporarily in the bulwark, offered brave resistance with stones and spears and 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 defense, and he himself would have been killed had his own men not come with flails and rescued him from the hands of the enemy. 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. Now, I understand that this tale, as told here, is one of the foundation stories of Czech national identity. So I will not dig too deep into the embellishments our chroniclers might have added to the story. But let's just say that Jan Ika would probably 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's also somewhat doubtful that a thousand battle hardened mercenaries would be turned into panicked wrecks by the sight of a priest with a Holy Sacrament and 50 archers. Now, despite this spot of myth making, the fact remains that Sigismund's army was unable to take Witkoff Hill on that day. In the following days, the citizens of Prague dug deeper moats and built larger forts on Wittkop 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, realizing he could no longer take the city by force, began to lend his ears 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 then ultimately on their own king. One by one, the imperial princes left the camp and went home, burning and plundering as they went.
Sigismund still was crowned King of Bohemia and St. Vitus Cathedral, but immediately afterwards retreated to Cotna Hora and the center of Catholic power in Bohemia to await the peaceful resolution of the conflict. We'll see next week whether Jan Gizka and Emperor Sigismund will hold hands and ride off into the sunset. But even more importantly, we'll find out what repercussions these events have in the German lands, how they change the institutions of the empire and the position of the ruler.
I hope you will join us again, and in the meantime, if you feel inclined to support the show, you can do so@historyofthegermans.com support SA SA.