Between 1419 and 1436 the diets were primarily concerned with forging national unity, with questions of social order, the conditions under which to accept Sigismund as king, and the nature of the agreement with the Catholic Church to the fore. Before 1419 the king or his representative had called the diet, and sometimes the meeting of the high court took on the character of a deliberative assembly. After 1419 there was neither a king to convene a diet nor a set order of procedures. During the revolution, in order to be effective, resolutions had to be accepted almost unanimously, which was possible only if one or more of the extreme parties was absent. The Catholic barons often refused to attend, and sometimes the leading Hussite barons, too, were absent. Enforcement of decisions depended upon who controlled what territory. In effect this meant that resolutions of the diets were applied only in Hussite territories, and even there only partially. Historians of Hussitism are not in agreement as to whether some sessions should be called official diets or only strategy meetings of one party. None the less, diets claimed country-wide jurisdiction, and it was out of them that national government emerged in the 1430s.
At the beginning of the revolution the most significant change in government was the reduced role of the barons. The religious convictions of the townspeople and of the gentry, along with the economic power emanating from Prague, encouraged them to play a more self-confident and influential role in the polity. Royal towns claimed legal equality with the nobility. They took the initiative in convening diets according to the needs of the moment, and helped set the agenda. At some diets even the common people were represented.
The first diet of the revolution recognised urban power and was determined to give Czechs the dominant position within the realm. The session of August 1419, attended by all factions, issued a number of demands which, in some ways, simply continued traditional requirements made of rulers since the coming to power of the Luxemburg dynasty. But the diet also reflected growing national self-confidence, in particular the interests of the urban population now literate in Czech. In 1413 the king had decreed that half the town councillors in Old Town Prague were to be Czech, the other half German. The diet of 1419 excluded Germans from office where Czechs were able to govern. Whereas in the previous century Charles IV had proposed that the Czech language be an option in government, the diet of 1419 demanded that court actions be carried out only in Czech. In church, Latin was no longer to be exclusively the language of sacred rituals. The diet resolved that Czech should be allowed in worship, which included singing and the reading of the epistles, and stated that, in general, Czechs should have the first voice throughout the kingdom. In expressing Prague’s concerns, the diet, including the nobles, spoke for a national community in which, for the first time, the common people had some say.
The foreign armies which entered Bohemia hoping to extirpate heresy and reap material benefits inflamed national feeling among the Czechs. In March 1420 Sigismund decided to take his crown by force. To assist him, Pope Martin V issued a bull declaring a crusade against Bohemia. The Hussites responded with propaganda designed to rouse the people to resist. They attacked the king’s moral character and religious faith in order to destroy any aura of majesty which he might enjoy among the people. They also appealed to national feeling. In April 1420 a Hussite manifesto described the German crusaders as natural enemies of the Czech language. The radicals called the Czechs to fight first for God’s law, then against the age-old enemy of their language. In addition, they evoked the memory of valiant Czech fathers and of the glorious patron, St Wenceslas, all lovers of their country, to inspire the people to free their most Christian kingdom from oppression. As Prague intellectuals groped for ways to exalt their national feeling, so they exalted their own city, describing it as the first-born of the Czech crown, personifying the nation and the state. A spokesman for the towns asserted this political self importance when he censured the nobility’s all too rapid and irregular coronation of King Sigismund in 1420. The nobles, he claimed, had no right to crown him, ‘because you did not have the consent of the capital city, nor of many other Czech towns and communities; you simply did what you wanted, placing a crown on him and declaring him king in a blacksmith’s shop’.
Prague’s leadership was evident at the Caslav diet held in June 1421, at which both Hussites and Catholics were present, and which issued a list of grievances and a declaration of unrelenting war against King Sigismund. The fragile national unity among Hussites was expressed in the Four Articles: communion in both kinds (bread and wine), free preaching of the word of God, limits to priestly property and the purgation of public sins. The diet established a twenty-member council of the kingdom. Five of its members were to be nobles, eight or nine were gentry (although Zizka and Chval of Machovice represented Tabor, and in that sense the common people) and seven were townspeople. Several of the diet’s official statements ranked Prague, rather than the barons, as heading the national community. What was particularly revolutionary was the voice that the commons of both Old and New Town Prague received on the national council. The diet held at Zdice on 28 October 1424 also gave the commons representation on a governing council.
Despite gains by the commons, the three-tiered social structure remained deeply ingrained in the minds of most people. This mentality, characterised by distinctions of estate, facilitated the effort of nobles to regain control of the country’s government. The Diet of St Gall, which met in Prague in November 1423 and took a moderate stand towards Sigismund, marked the decline of Prague and the return to influence of the nobility. In order of precedence Prague was now placed third, after the archbishop and the lords. The twelve-member governing council which it established was made up of six lords from each religious camp. Three of the Hussite lords were allies of Prague, but the city itself was not represented, its activity being confined to issuing safe-conducts and providing notarial and secretarial services. However, the conservative politics of the diet of 1423 hardly reflected the realities of power. Zizka’s armies had won major battles against the royalists, and the diet could not address the question of Sigismund’s succession or reconciliation with the Church without reference to Zizka and to the radicals. The conservatives who wanted a return to Europe’s ecclesiastical and political order had to wait until after the defeat of the radicals in 1434.
Towards the end of the 1420s internal divisions among the Hussites, a general war-weariness and, a little later, a seeming willingness to negotiate shown by the Council of Basle facilitated the efforts of the nobility in the moderate Hussite camp. At a diet in late 1433, poorly attended by the gentry and the towns, the nobility prepared itself for government by first appointing Ales Vrest'ovsky as the country’s regent. Although a nobleman, he was acceptable to a wide range of Hussites since he had fought alongside Zizka and had helped found one of the radical brotherhoods in eastern Bohemia. Barons such as Menhart of Hradec, who drifted between the Catholic and Hussite parties, wanted him in power because of his status as a noble. Aless was to keep order with twelve assistants, mostly barons and gentry. The diet gave legitimacy to the nobles’ move to restore order to the polity. Meanwhile the radical field armies, dispirited after a long siege of Catholic Plzens and squabbling among themselves, lost a number of allies from among the gentry. This gave the conservative townspeople, the nobility and the gentry their opportunity. In 1434 they defeated the radical armies at Lipany, and then began implementing their resolutions. Henceforth the more conservative Hussites became the spokesmen of their cause in Bohemia.
The diet of March 1435 reflected the gains of the revolution as well as its programme in its most moderate form. The Bohemian estates, the towns, gentry and nobility, now drafted the requirements to be submitted to King Sigismund. The fact that the nobility made separate demands from the towns reflected its refusal to accept these fully into the national polity. All three estates called for freedom to receive communion in both kinds, and required that foreigners be excluded from public office. The gentry claimed regional representation on the high court for both knights and esquires, asserting that the baronial monopoly had created serious difficulties for them. Prague stipulated that the city’s sub-chamberlain should be a Praguer of the Hussite faith. The towns, too, demanded representation on the high court, as well as the right of approval of the king’s choice of military captain, and exemption from extraordinary taxation. They wanted, too, to be able to decide property disputes involving exiled citizens, and insisted that no German should be appointed as a city councillor. The cities further distinguished themselves with religious demands which included the right to resistance should they be hampered in exercising their faith. The demands of the gentry and towns were unprecedented. Whereas the barons’ demands were consistent with a long tradition, the gentry and towns expressed a new sense of self-confidence as they sought to exploit the gains of the revolution. The requests were granted by Sigismund on 20 July 1436 at an elaborate ceremony at which he was accepted as king.
Prague’s struggle for autonomy and for the country’s political voice continued through the fifteenth century, success coming only after Catholic and Hussite towns had patched up their political differences. After the quarrel between Matyas Corvinus of Hungary, the Catholic choice for king of Bohemia, and Vladislav (son of King Casimir of Poland), the choice of the Utraquists (as Hussites were known in the late fifteenth century) had been resolved in 1479, Vladislav supported the attempt by Catholic lords to reintroduce Catholicism. But by means of a spirited revolt, the people of Prague prevented the effort to recatholicise their city. One of the outcomes of Prague’s success was that nobles began to identify more with other nobles, and townsmen sought the interests of other townsmen, even when they did not share the same confession. Catholic and Hussite lords co-operated in the Peace of 1485, in which each group agreed to allow the other to live in peace. After 1487, the gentry acquired the right to sit on both royal and high courts, and the upper and lower nobility turned their combined attention to curbing the claims of the towns. The result was the Vladislav constitution of 1500 which excluded the towns from representation in the diet. In response, the cities also created a general confederation of Catholics and Utraquists in order to protect their political rights. It took the cities until 1517 to gain representation on the country’s diet. But the noble estates still dominated as they determined the composition of the royal council and courts and, by 1500, they required council members and officials to take the oath of loyalty to the diet as well as to the king. The nobility’s narrow base contained the seeds of the eventual submission of the estates to the centralising might of the Habsburgs.
The impact of the revolution was most dramatic in its redistribution of property. It is estimated that between 30 and 40 per cent of productive land changed hands. The Church was reduced to the role of a minor property owner, and the crown lost, too, as Sigismund, in 1436 and 1437, reimbursed his allies and confirmed many Hussites in their new holdings. Both Catholic and Hussite nobles gained land, but a minority of noble families secured the lion’s share of ecclesiastical property. This redistribution of property led to major upheavals as the estates of individual gentry and the new nobility came to exceed those of many of the old families. For example, Nicholas Trcka of Llpa, once a member of an insignificant gentry family, acquired an immense estate which, by 1450, comprised nine castles and manors, fourteen towns and over 320 villages. The estates of most gentry, however, continued to be too small for their owners to live off the rents. Yet the shift of property owning from the Church was a significant factor in the nobility’s drive to power.