The Hussite Age

The Hussite age occurred during a bellicose time in later medieval Europe. Three rival popes jostled for control of the papal throne. Social and religious discontent ran high, and there was a sense of crisis in the fabric of society.

In Prague, the priest Jan Hus strove to see the church reformed. Like many reformers, Hus pressed his agenda quickly and aggressively. The church responded to these efforts by putting him on trial and eventually handing him over to the secular authorities to be burned alive as a heretic. A similar fate befell his colleague Jerome of Prague, and more burnings followed.

Many Czechs were outraged and vowed to oppose the holders of political and ecclesiastical power. Naturally, the church took umbrage at such impertinent behavior. Its leaders enlisted the aid of Emperor Sigismund, heir to the Czech throne, who declared that he could hardly wait for the day to come when he would exterminate every last heretic in Bohemia.

A formal crusade was announced against these so-called Hussites, which provided the emperor with the opportunity he had been looking for. Sigismund promptly agreed to accept the crusade cross, and the Hussite crusade was born.

While a formal military solution was being arranged by the pope, his bishops, and the imperial authorities, the Hussites did not sit idly by, fearfully awaiting the arrival of the crusade cross borne by foreigners armed to the teeth. Some of them determined to continue the reform plans begun by Jan Hus.

The more striking experiments occurred away from the capital city of Prague, particularly in southern Bohemia. Motivated by visions of a more just society, believing that social equality was an ideal that should be realized, and frustrated by social and religious oppression, some Hussites took daring steps.

Bold Experiments

A bold experiment emerged whereby social divisions and most hierarchical structures were summarily abolished, while payment for land rent and service was outlawed. Everything was held in common, and those wishing to join the community surrendered their personal possessions.

Many laws were set aside, and debtors were released from prior obligations. Everyone now became brothers and sisters, irrespective of their former status. Private property was abolished in a radical quest for a new social order.

A new city was established and named Tábor. Its inhabitants assumed the moniker of Táborites. At Tábor and other centers, community chests were set up to provide for the needs of the community. An anonymous song, hostile to the Hussites, grudgingly conceded that the Táborites had achieved an ideal of sorts: “They meet together in peace, unity and love, sharing eggs and bread with one another.”

Peasants and disadvantaged people naturally were attracted to these egalitarian communities. Enthusiasm occasionally caused entire villages to become ghost towns almost overnight as residents abandoned their homes and embraced Tábor. Surprisingly, burghers, village magistrates, craftsmen, priests, and town councilors also became active in Táborite society. Not all of them supported the radical principles in their entirety. But they were united by a desire for a more just social order.

The spirit of egalitarianism extended to all. Angry opponents of the Hussite movement alleged that cobblers, tanners, butchers, and even women were allowed to preach. This was insufferable! Not all Hussites supported such developments.

Civil authorities were perplexed, and the church became outraged. All of this was deeply troubling and only magnified concerns over doctrinal deviance associated with Jan Hus and his followers. The Hussites had to be stopped dead in their tracks. The crusade was on.

Crusader Fury

While Tábor emerged as a social reality, Sigismund’s crusaders were bearing down on Bohemia. By July 1420, a huge army massed outside Prague. Chroniclers report that each day crusaders gathered on a high hill and “howling like dogs” verbally abused their opponents: “Ha, Ha, Hus, Hus, Heretic, Heretic!” Atrocity and violence followed and persisted.

The Hussite movement unavoidably took up arms in 1419 and remained at war almost without reprieve for fifteen years. Crusades were launched against the heretics in 1420, 1421, 1422, 1427, and again in 1431. There were counter-crusades, religious wars, foreign invasions, and unspeakable carnage, all wrought in the fog of war and motivated by hatred and the worst impulses of organized religion.

Revolution, heresy, and disobedience often attracts retribution, and Hussite Bohemia was not exempt. Robbery, arson, gratuitous rape and murder, destruction, mutilation, abuse of children, and what we would now call attempted genocide and crimes against humanity targeted the Hussites.

Time after time, the crusaders besieged Bohemia. Dead bodies filled entire fields and on one occasion, according to reports, so many invaders had been killed that the bloodshed turned a nearby stream red. Yet Sigismund was rebuffed repeatedly, and large armies were left befuddled.

At the final encounter, while the Hussites were still three miles from the battlefield, the crusaders panicked at the sound of the approaching wagons and the rumble of the heretics who were loudly singing. They broke ranks and fled. The Hussites now had an unbroken run of five victories over their opponents.

Žižka’s Army

The role of Jan Žižka and the military tactics that he devised for the Táborite army should not be underestimated. Žižka, who came from a noble background and had experience of warfare, created the Hussite armies. He designed their famous war wagon, developed artillery, and became a fortress builder.

Žižka’s résumé is filled with distinguished achievements in military strategy. His innovations included the formation of what would later be called a “people’s army.” Farmers, peasants, and even women fought alongside him. He experimented with unconventional tactics to compensate for the conventional disadvantages he faced on various battlefields in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds.

The accolade “military genius” is appropriate for Žižka. He was a master of strategy, and none of his armies ever suffered defeat (despite being outmanned and outgunned). He possessed superior mastery of crude weapons and guerrilla warfare, and his use of war wagons as a strategic defense tactic befuddled his enemies.

The wagon fortresses were armored vehicles, protected by movable wooden shields. Behind each shield were up to twenty soldiers with war clubs, halberds, flails, maces, hand cannons, crossbows, and other firearms. Žižka expertly transformed ordinary tools like farm flails into lethal weapons.

In preparation for battle, wagons were grouped in circular formation, wheels chained together, gaps filled with other shields to protect the wheels and keep opponents out. The Tabórites set medium-sized cannons on stands while larger ones were mounted on wagons. The firepower across the parapets of the wagons was exceptionally dense. Attacking warriors lured into the wagon fortress were easily captured and killed.

Tabórite foot soldiers cut down some of the other enemy troops while others still were picked off by missiles fired from the wagons. Outside the wagon formation, the cavalry fought. If things went badly for them, the wagons opened up, providing an opportunity for a safe retreat before slamming shut against their adversaries.

These wagons were defended much like a walled city and proved to be strategically successful. Žižka waged impressive tactical defensive battles. Sometimes he changed the medieval rules of engagement by fighting at night, using fire weapons for offensive operations, or rolling rock-filled wagons down steep slopes onto unsuspecting attackers.

Militarily, the Táborites were never defeated on the battlefield. After the death of Žižka, divisions among the Hussites themselves came to a head, and this fracturing created the circumstances in which they were now vulnerable. In the end, Czech defeated Czech in the interests of Rome.

Foundations of Revolt

The Hussite revolt began with the ideas of fourteenth-century Czech reformers, drawing on concepts advanced by John Wyclif (an Oxford don) and the work of Jan Hus. These principles included questioning the prevailing ecclesiastical system, opposing the idea that the church should be defined by its hierarchy (popes and bishops), and asking when (or whether) it was right to obey traditional authorities, as well as highlighting abuses of spiritual power and raising social concerns.

In the beginning, Hussite ideas aimed to counter the corruption of simony (the buying of spiritual power), rampant immorality, and social injustice. This program produced a four-part syllabus adopted by all Hussites.

The syllabus included a commitment that every Christian, including children and small babies, should be allowed to receive Holy Communion in both bread and wine. Free preaching should be permitted, and the church should be stripped of its wealth, while serious sins should be punished. One may appreciate the lack of enthusiasm on the part of Catholics for this platform.

The experience of conflict spurred on a firm belief that the end of the world was imminent. The focus of religious reform was moral rather than theological. The main emphasis was on the law of God (founded on the proper use of Scripture), and the idea of democratic eucharist (Mass or Holy Communion) remained key. Many nobles and Czech cities were united in stout defense of the program.

The radicals at Tábor broadened the initial foundation considerably by building upon the social implications of the reforms proposed by Hus, which involved religious, political, and socioeconomic factors. Although they secured the lion’s share of attention, there was also a less radical Hussite wing that wanted to preserve social order and maintain the monarchy while lobbying for reform in matters of religion. In practice, radical Hussites rejected both feudalism and traditional church authority.

The Hussite uprising has some prior parallels with the Albigensian Crusade in southern France during the thirteenth century, and the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt in England. Later parallels emerged in the German Peasants’ War of 1525 and in various communal experiments associated with sixteenth-century Anabaptists.

Medieval Hussites in Modern Times

Could any of the radical tendencies apparent in the Hussite period be said to prefigure later forms of egalitarian and socialist thought? Jan Hus is regarded as a national hero and July 6 (the day of his execution) is a public holiday in today’s Czechia, though many see it in more mundane terms as a day off work.

The Hussite period is considered the golden age of Czech history. The modern battle over how we should understand the Hussites began in the nineteenth century. In the post–World War II period, as Czechoslovakia became a communist state, the struggle became acute in political and academic circles.

It is possible to regard the Hussite Revolution in the same terms as the German Peasants’ War. There are strong grounds for identifying the foundations of the European Reformations within the Hussite uprising. The currents of reform and social change evident at the end of the Middle Ages constitute the seeds of modernity.

Some historians have identified ideas emerging in Hussite Bohemia that are of ongoing political relevance. These statements and reflections of an ideology of revolution go beyond the limitations of the fifteenth century. Were there causal connections and explanations? How did reform become reformation, and exactly how did revolt end in revolution?

Some influential postwar historians believed a total revolution had transpired as social, religious, national, and political interests merged and diverged in a serious effort to reconstitute medieval society. It became commonplace in Marxist analysis to understand theology as being subordinate to nationalist or economic considerations in explaining the Hussite movement. In this perspective, such considerations became the principal engines of the revolt.

The dominant school of historical thought in Prague after World War II dealt with Hussite history through the lens of a Marxist political analysis. Nationalist inclinations were downplayed as a driving motivation. Religious ideas continued to be recognized as important, but social concerns predominated.

Newspaper headlines in Prague declared that modern Communists in the 1950s were completing the medieval Hussite program. On July 6, 1952, the leading newspaper in what was then Czechoslovakia proclaimed that the state and its ruling party were “Building Socialism in the Reality of the Hussite Revolutionary Tradition.”

Should We Believe the Headlines?

Marxist historians sought to provide a proper class basis for the Hussite revolt by understanding the dramatic events in late medieval Bohemia as a class struggle. This approach interprets socioeconomic data in a historical sense. At its core, it sees the revolution as an uprising of peasants against the wealthy ruling aristocracy. An evaluation of the social and agrarian context of the period advances this thesis.

It is also possible to interpret the Hussite revolt by describing the function of ideas as a mechanism through which social action explodes from religious controversy. The core meaning of the Hussite moment thus becomes an attack on feudal ideology. This framework of interpretation elevates the Hussite struggle as the first modern European revolution.

In turn, the fellow who seems to have started it all, Jan Hus, becomes from this standpoint a figure of nationalist ideology, the role of which is best appreciated in terms of its potential revolutionary implications, both social and political. Religion in general is deemed to be a phenomenon best understood as a mask for significant social issues that were brought to the fore in the bold Táborite experiments.

Newspaper headlines in the twentieth century and histories of the Hussites written by scholars between the 1940s and the 1980s suggested that the radical tendencies of these medieval Czechs definitely prefigured modern-day forms of egalitarian and socialist thought. However, to sustain this perspective, it becomes necessary to view the followers of Hus as being chiefly concerned about economic and social crises.

The danger of this approach is that it will lead to an oversimplified form of determinism, with the significance of other factors like religious faith and practice minimized or eliminated. It risks privileging an ideology of history over history itself.

Explaining Failure

Ultimately, the Hussite revolutionary movement failed. Ideological commotion and native bickering doomed the uprising. After two decades of dynamic progress, the Táborites were defeated as a social and military force. Their ideas remained, though increasingly marginalized and largely impotent as a driving force in social, political, and religious affairs.

Aeneas Sylvius, an Italian cleric who would later become Pope Pius II, visited Tábor in 1451, several decades after the high point of the movement. He gave a hostile account of what had become of Táborite ideals:

Formerly they wished to live in imitation of the Primitive Church, and they held all things in common; they called each other Brother, and one provided what the other lacked. Now each lives for himself, and one thirsts while the other is drunk. Brief was the fervor of love, brief the imitation.

Aeneas Sylvius also described Tábor as “a haven or asylum of heretics, for whatever monsters of impiety and blasphemy are uncovered among Christians take refuge here, where they have protection; here there are as many heresies as heads, and there is freedom to believe whatever one likes.” He attributed this to the Táborite rejection of “the bridle of superior authority,” which meant that they “must necessarily admit all errors.”

The Hussite experiments with egalitarianism were powerful but transient. Because they believed the world was nearing its apogee, the Táborites failed to take the necessary steps to proceed from a communism of consumption to a communism of production. The idea of doing so conflicted with their religious convictions. This limited the possibility of a fully realized egalitarianism, suggesting that religious ideas and practices were ultimately more powerful in shaping their actions than social and economic considerations.

As time passed, Táborite ideology was abandoned, and medieval feudal structures reemerged. The effort to establish egalitarian communities fell victim to the intellectual disconnect between socioeconomic principles and theological idealism.

What seems clear is that Hussites of all stripes were determined to fulfill the Biblical mandate of being in the world but not of it. Táborites strove to combat oppression and exploitation. They labored to achieve justice and social equality. They provided options and opportunities that were not limited to their own time, as demands for freedom and equality continue to be made.