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Ye who are God’s warriors and of his law, Pray to God for help and have faith in Him; That always with Him you will be victorious.
Christ is worth all your sacrifices, He will pay you back a hundredfold.
If you give up your life for Him you will receive eternal life.
Happy is he who dies fighting for the truth.
The Hussite Battle Hymn, sung as late as 1937 at the funeral of the Czechoslovak President, Masaryk
As a response to the siege of Constantinople in 1422 Pope Martin tried to form a league between Crusaders and the Italian republics. This was hampered by the Hussite heresy’s emergence in Bohemia. Jan Hus, strongly influenced by the English Wycliffites, had attacked sinful clergy and the privileged positions of German lords in the Czech lands. He was burned in 1415 but the Hussites took control of Prague and a war of words as well as a very bloody conflict on the ground ensued. Polemical verses such as the allegorical Hádání Prahy s Kutnou Horou, which presented Prague in the form of a lovely lady, symbolising the Hussites, battling the ugly hag of the Catholic city of Kutná Hora circulated and were answered by violence. The German miners of Kutná Hora tortured Hussites and flung them alive into the shafts of their mines. Indeed, so popular was the ‘sport’ that Catholic barons from across Bohemia could sell Hussite prisoners to the miners.
Sigismund, the Holy Roman Emperor, proclaimed that he would ‘shit in the faces of the Hussites’, and a markedly more intellectual argument was prepared by Pope Martin who called a universal Crusade against all heretics. It was proclaimed in March 1420 at an imperial diet in Wrocław. Sigismund took an army to Prague in early July comprised of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians and surrounded the city on three sides. The Hussites sat atop the long, narrow Vitkov Hill which dominated access to Prague from the East.
Sigismund moved on the hill late in the afternoon with a strong cavalry force. His opponent, the wily Jan Žižka, fortified the hill with ditches, blockhouses and walls built by peasant followers of the faith. Women joined the defenders of the hill, one of who was heard to shout ‘Rather death than the Antichrist!’ and though the Crusaders crossed the first and second ditches without difficulty they stalled when faced by infantry with pitchforks and flails. As the cavalry charge faltered Žižka attacked with a small group of his men and deployed crossbowmen to trap the Crusaders between them and the blockhouses. Behind the first wave more Crusader cavalry came up the hill, but they only made the situation worse for the knights trapped on the narrow ridge. As night came on the Crusaders tried to disengage themselves by riding to the steep cliff on the northern side of the hill and many of them were killed in the fall, while others tried to escape on the more gentle eastern slope and across the river but drowned in the attempt. A thousand Hussites, many of them peasants, had defeated an army of 20,000 Crusaders. Sigismund withdrew to his tent and gave no further orders. Vitkov Hill was commonly referred to as Žižka’s Hill from that day on.
The dominance of the knight on the battlefield was over. Battles of attrition won by crossbows, gunpowder and war wagons, such as those that the Hussites would deploy at the Battle of Německý Brod (now Havlíčkův Brod), were the future. Perhaps the nobles knew this from as long ago as 1139 when a Lateran Council had denounced the crossbow ‘as being hateful to god’.