Through the second half of 1420 Žižka had to engage in some
intra-Hussite fighting. The poorest people of Bohemia not only embraced the
teachings of Hus but carried them further into a millennial belief that a
completely equal society would bring about Christ’s second coming. The middle
class and minor aristocracy opposed this for economic more than religious
reasons, and Žižka depended on the city burghers (his own background) for the
majority of his support. Thus, the poor who rallied around the most radical
priests found themselves suppressed and ultimately defeated in battle. Some
survivors left for more radical settlements, but the bulk of the poor, both
rural and urban, realized that what progress they could make in advancing
themselves in any socioeconomic way was by following Žižka. The fortress town
of Tabor was still regarded as one of the more radical communities, but it was
controlled by the middle class. By early 1421 Žižka had solidified his position
as commander in chief of the Hussite forces, in and out of Tabor.
Early in 1421, Sigismund had withdrawn from Bohemia back to
Germany, leaving the Hussites time and opportunity to deal with their own
issues, and bringing an end to the first crusade. For the Hussites, the absence
of any crusaders gave them the chance to spread their own influence. Many towns
were attacked, with sieges lasting at times a few days and other times a few
months. It was during one of these sieges that Žižka suffered a significant
injury: during the siege of the town of Rabi, near the Hussite-held city of Tachov,
Žižka led the first assault and was hit in the face by an arrow. This took out
his second eye and almost killed him, but several weeks in Prague allowed him
to recover his health, though he was now blind. It mattered little: Žižka
fought some of his greatest battles and campaigns after he lost his second eye.
Although he could have sustained himself on his reputation alone, his talents
were undiminished. His reputation did indeed precede him, however. In late July
German forces from Meissen crossed the border to successfully relieve the
Hussite siege of Most. The Hussite Prague army was reconstituted a month later
with Žižka in command and marched back to face the leading elements of the
second crusade. When news arrived that Žižka was leading the Hussite force
toward them, even as he was still recovering from his wound, the German army
turned and went home rather than face him.
The second crusade consisted of larger forces than the
first; estimates range from 120,000 to 200,000. The crusaders had orders to
kill all Czechs but small children. The initial force marched east out of the
Upper Palatinate through Cheb on the way to Zatec, a Hussite stronghold. A
second force came out of Meissen in three prongs, attacking a number of towns
northwest of Prague before joining with the first army. Zatec was soon
invested, but held off six major assaults. Collapsing morale from the
crusaders’ failures and Hussite sallies were compounded by word on 2 October
that Žižka’s army was on its way. Again, that was all the Germans needed to
convince them to pack up and retreat. To make matters worse for them, a fire
broke out in their tent city just before they were ready to leave. The
defenders sallied out and inflicted serious damage on the already hurting
crusader force, leaving them with a total of some 2,000 dead. Worse still, this
defeat came even before Sigismund got his army moving, leaving the second
crusade in a less than hopeful state.
Kutná Hora and
Německý Brod
A third offensive from the south kept Žižka busy through the
autumn of 1421. During that time Sigismund was finally getting his offensive
under way. A Hungarian force of 60,000 (including 23,000 cavalry) marched into
Moravia under the command of Philip Scolari, an Italian mercenary general
better known by his nickname Pipo Spano; Sigismund joined him in late October
at the town of Jihlava on the Moravian-Bohemian border. Instead of immediately
marching for Kutná Hora to recover the mint and mines, Sigismund practiced his
normal hesitation and waited for reinforcements. This gave Žižka’s army of
12,000 time to reach the city first (on 9 December) and strengthen its
defenses. The imperial army also took twenty days to march the fifty miles from
Jihlava to Kutná Hora. Heymann describes the advance: “All the time [Sigismund’s]
Hungarians destroyed Czech villages, burned the men, mutilated the boys, raped
the women and girls. The behavior of his troops was so atrocious that not one
of the Czech chronicles which describes this invasion omits reference to it.”
Sigismund and Scolari arrived at Kutná Hora on December 21.
As the imperial army of some 50,000 approached, Žižka
deployed his wagon fort in front of the city walls, stretched over a sufficient
length to cover both western roads into the city. Scolari, in military command
of this operation, stretched his cavalry in a thin line to face the wagons and
attacked repeatedly throughout the day. The Hussite cannon inflicted heavy
casualties, but this action also kept the Hussite attention focused to the
west. Scolari and Sigismund appreciated the leanings of the Germanic citizens
of Kutná Hora and had secretly contacted their leaders. With the battle raging
outside the walls, an imperial cavalry force had swung wide south and
approached the gate on the Malesov road, which conspirators opened to them. The
small garrison Žižka had left in the city was quickly overwhelmed and the
Hussites were now surrounded.
Žižka found himself in the most dangerous position of his
career, but his brilliant mind was not daunted. Sigismund had delayed entering
the city until he could do so in triumph; he was still in his headquarters on
the imperial left flank. Žižka decided to launch an ambitious surprise attack,
assailing the enemy leader’s headquarters at sunrise. Knowing the enemy once
again provide invaluable, as Žižka knew that Sigismund never put himself in
danger; he always commanded from the rear. Thus, the Hussites were sure he
would not lead any resistance that was aimed directly at him, being too
interested in getting himself out of the way. Just before dawn on 22 December,
Žižka formed his wagons into line and opened fire on Sigismund’s headquarters.
No one expected this gunfire to come out of the night and, as Žižka had
planned, panic ensued in the imperial ranks. Although the column stopped now
and then to reload and shoot again, preventing a constant moving line of
artillery fire, it was nevertheless enough to scatter the defenders and leave a
hole in their lines through which the Hussites made their escape. Žižka’s
decision to attack at night had been a good one; a daylight gambit along these
lines probably would not have been successful.
As dawn broke the Hussite wagons were out of sight, and
Žižka deployed them on a hill about a mile away and prepared for the pursuit,
which never came. Once positive he would not be caught in the open, Žižka moved
his men to Kolín, from whence he spent the next two weeks scouring the region
for reinforcements. In the meantime, Sigismund (assuming his enemy was on the
run and would not be a bother until spring, if at all) had settled himself into
Kutná Hora. He could not quarter all his men in the town, so he dispersed them
to villages around the region, paying particular attention to Cáslav, a Hussite
stronghold just to the east, and to Nebovidy, about halfway to Kolín, to act as
a covering force. Žižka took advantage of this dispersal on 6 January when he
surprised the force at Nebovidy. Unfortunately, no sources give details of the
next few battles, other than to say the Hussites attacked and the imperial
troops broke. An anonymous late nineteenth-century description, probably taken
from the George Sand biography of Žižka, says that Žižka “suddenly burst upon
Sigismund’s scattered troops like a thunderbolt. Hundreds of Hungarians were
cut down at the first onslaught, and the panic spread with awful rapidity from
village to village.” No one else provides any more detail.
What is important is that the crusaders fled toward Kutná
Hora and created a panic there, especially in Sigismund’s heart and mind. He
fruitlessly begged the German town elders to defend the city from Žižka’s army
while he withdrew, then ordered the city burned rather than let it fall into
Hussite hands. The citizens were hustled unprepared out of the town while a
Hungarian cavalry contingent remained behind to light the fires. Their desire
for loot, coupled with the speed of Žižka’s pursuit, however, meant that few
fires were actually set, and those were quickly extinguished. The pursuit
continued, as did the panic. Sigismund decided to make a stand a few miles to
the southwest at Habry. His advisors, particular Scolari, counseled against it:
the troops were too demoralized. The advisors were right, though Sigismund
didn’t listen. When the Hussites did attack, the defenders once again turned
tail. The rout was total, with the crusaders abandoning everything but personal
arms in their haste. Again, no details of assault or defense are available.
Sigismund fled for the Moravian border town of Jihlava. He
crossed the Sázava River at Německý Brod, well ahead of his army, some of whom
again tried to make a stand, but the hot Hussite pursuit forced a mad dash
across the frozen river. It was not, however, totally frozen, and the breaking
ice led to the drowning of a reported 548 knights. A hasty defense of the town
was soon rendered useless by Hussite heavy artillery that made short work of
the walls. An attempted negotiated surrender fell apart when a Hussite patrol
found a particularly weak section of wall and broke through without orders, setting
the fighting off once again.
In the wake of the Hussite victory and the ensuing pillage,
and a similar lapse of control a year later, Žižka developed one of history’s
first sets of regulations of war, dictating the behavior of troops in and out
of combat. Overall, the combat between 6–9 January 1422 cost the imperial
forces at least 4,500 dead; there is no account of Hussite casualties, but they
must have been very light.
The campaign beginning at Kutná Hora and ending at Německý
Brod showed Žižka at his best on offense and defense. He had several days to
prepare his wagenburg outside Kutná Hora, and it dealt heavy casualties to the
imperial cavalry that attacked it. When he found himself betrayed by the
townspeople and cut off, Žižka massed his combat power at a single weak point,
the king’s headquarters, and through firepower and psychological intimidation
paralyzed his opponent and made good his own escape. Taking advantage of his
opponent’s assumption of victory, his innate proclivity not to fight, and the
dispersed nature of his army, the offensive that began on 6 January combined
all the elements of the offense: surprise, concentration, control of tempo, and
audacity. His movement to contact led to a deliberate attack, followed by
immediate exploitation and long-range pursuit. One has to be amazed at the
ability of a blind general to command a breakout from encirclement, then follow
it up with a cross-country pursuit of a broken enemy, and all in the dead of
winter. This was not typical medieval warfare.
In the grand strategic scheme of things, the campaign had
major significance as well. It ended the second crusade and so disheartened
Sigismund that he did not approach Bohemia himself for years. By keeping
himself in Hungary and letting the German princes conduct the future crusades,
he alleviated Bohemia’s necessity to prepare for or fight a two-front war.
Žižka’s reputation, as well as that of his followers, remained one of the most
important factors in the three crusades that followed over the next few years.
One of the crusading armies barely got inside Bohemia when the sounds of
Hussite soldiers singing one of Žižka’s war songs frightened the invaders out
of the country without a battle. Hans Delbruck notes, “Once the warlike
character had gained the upper hand and had become completely dominant, the
Hussites were preceded by a wave of fear so that the Germans dispersed before
them whenever they simply heard their battle song from afar.”
Unfortunately for the Hussite cause, internal feuds caused
more troubles than did invasions. Although the wagenburg tactic became standard
for all Hussite forces, they used it against each other at times, as in the
last of Žižka’s great victories at Malesov against a rival religious faction.
Žižka would ultimately die of the plague while preparing an invasion of Moravia
in 1424, and his leadership position was ably taken up by Prokop the Great, who
continued the long line of Hussite victories over German Catholic crusades.
Finally, in 1434, a truce was signed that granted the Hussites some
concessions. They remained outside the good graces of the church, which,
however, did not reestablish its authority in Bohemia until two centuries later
at the Battle of White Mountain at the start of the Thirty Years War.
Žižka’s Generalship
Jan Žižka was certainly the most imaginative general of the
late medieval–early Renaissance period. Although he was not the first to use
gunpowder weapons, he was more forward-thinking than anyone of his time in how
to employ them. His use of soldiers from the lower economic classes was also
employed by England with the longbowmen of the Hundred Years War and by the
Swiss pikemen, and as Charles Oman observes, contributed to “the overthrow of
feudal cavalry—and to no small extent [to] that of feudalism itself.” The
strengths of Žižka’s leadership were his mastery of maneuver, surprise,
simplicity, and morale.
The goal of maneuver is to place the enemy in a
disadvantageous position. For Žižka, this meant obliging his heavy cavalry
enemy to attack a position across terrain for which it was not suited. The
first two battles covered, Sudoměř and Vitkov Hill, show this perfectly. The
Bohemians were on narrow raised ground with steeply falling sides, forcing the
attackers into a narrow front where their strength of numbers was negated. The
Bohemians drew their enemy into an attack against a fortified position in order
to employ superior firepower. The ability to force a disadvantageous position
depended on knowing the nature of the enemy’s mind-set as much as their
tactics. Žižka knew the knights would not take a peasant force seriously, no
matter what their position. Hence, he drew the imperial cavalry into attack
after attack against fortified positions that horses could not penetrate and
where infantry or dismounted knights had to fight hand-to-hand against soldiers
with a height advantage in the wagons. The peasant defenders, using spears and
flails, also had superior reach against foot soldiers armed with swords.
Žižka also employed maneuver in the offensive-defensive
nature of his warfare. Although he did engage in siege work, that was a
traditional practice of warfare albeit with the newly implemented heavy cannon.
His wagenburg, however, could be used across most of the relatively level
Bohemian terrain. Thus, he could take war to the enemy, but employ the strength
of a defensive position against armies that did not employ the necessary
weaponry. As long as Žižka carried the firearms and his enemy did not, all he
had to do was make sure his wagenburg was deployed before the enemy struck.
This, of course, is what made the wagenburg a relatively short-lived aspect of
warfare, for armies would soon be employing their own firearms, and the wooden
wagons could only absorb so much gunfire, unlike the archery fire they had
dealt with in the early fifteenth century.
The first time any new tactic or weapon is introduced it
produces surprise, and Žižka’s wagon-borne firearms were no exception. This is
what makes Žižka, like the other generals studied in this work, stand out: he
saw the strengths and weaknesses of his own forces and the enemy’s, and he
adapted his strength to their weakness. His first two surprises therefore went
hand in hand: the wagenburg and the peasant soldier. The shock of facing
gunpowder arms in large numbers had to have amazed the knights at Sudoměř, no
matter what actual damage was inflicted. This was the first time that guns had
been used in massed defensive positions, and the effects were notable. The
noise was terrifying in itself, and it combined with the gunpowder flashes and
thick smoke to confuse enemy troops. The horses apparently began to get over it
after a time, for by the battle at Kutná Hora the imperial cavalry attacked
repeatedly throughout the day. Even if the actual damage inflicted by the
handguns and small cannon was not great, it was supplemented by arrows and
crossbow bolts.
The nature of the wagenburg would have been surprising
enough when first encountered, but his quick shift from defense to breakout at
Kutná Hora, as well as the fact that he attacked at night, again show Žižka’s
ability to think outside the box. He knew his enemy’s general attitude toward
the nature of combat and the personal attitude of Sigismund, and he played on
them both to paralyze his enemy—even if he inflicted few casualties. In the
battles that followed, his quick strikes and close pursuit were like nothing
his enemies had encountered. This again was not normal medieval warfare, for
the usual aftermath of battle was a peaceful withdrawal. The Hussites, however,
did not act in accepted knightly fashion and the crusader knights don’t seem to
have adapted. Heymann notes that while it was fairly common for medieval
generals to pursue an enemy, “to follow up a victory by a continued pursuit
over scores of miles, to press on after a beaten enemy so as to achieve his
complete destruction—this was by no means usual or ‘normal.’ It was ‘normal’
only for Žižka who always acted according to the military needs of the
situation as his unfettered mind saw them.”
Žižka’s soldiers were a surprise to their enemies not
necessarily because they were peasants, but because they were disciplined.
Showalter observes, “Medieval armies lacked anything like a comprehensive
command structure able to evoke general, conditioned responses…. At their best
the civil militias of urban Europe were part-time fighting men. Their tactical
skills were correspondingly limited.” Žižka benefited from his own military
experience as a guerrilla fighter and also had the all-important motivating
factor of religion to help keep his troops disciplined. Žižka did not really
ask his soldiers to do anything out of the ordinary as far as their abilities
were concerned, as driving wagons and handling tools were second nature. In
this way Žižka brilliantly implemented the principle of simplicity. The
gunpowder weapons were so basic that no real training was necessary to handle
them. He also taught his army of farmers to fight as well as they could with
the tools they knew best: scythes, iron-tipped grain flails, axes, rakes,
picks, hoes—implements that turned out to be vicious at close quarters when
wielded by people who were very strong, very motivated, and used to hard labor.
Žižka’s experience, coupled with a zeal that matched or
exceeded their own, made him a leader his men could follow into any situation,
and they could easily accomplish the assigned tasks within the wagons on the
move or when deployed into the fortress. The Hussites’ early victories sufficed
to give them the confidence they needed to buy into the fixed way of doing
things, and their do-or-die attitude of fighting for God against heretics and
aristocrats tapped into their already existing attitudes and emotions. None of
the disciplined movements or fanatical willingness to fight were things for
which the invading crusaders were prepared. The most complex maneuver Žižka
ever asked of his men was forming up in a straight line and following each
other into Sigismund’s headquarters, stopping periodically to shoot into the
dark to keep the enemy disorganized. Other than that (and the necessary
movements to create the wagenburg), all their actions were straightforward
attack or defense. Only the two-pronged attack out of Prague up the Vitkov Hill
showed anything like sophistication.
Žižka was also a skilled commander when it came to the
principle of morale. Religion is an incredibly motivating cause, and Žižka used
this to his advantage to keep the morale of his troops high. He showed himself
to be more religious than the conservatives controlling Prague, but not as
radical as the millenarian sects that emerged in the wake of Jan Hus’s death.
His belief was never in doubt, even when he made war against the radical
factions, made up of the lowest rung of society. He maintained the loyalty of
the rank-and-file Hussites and the respect of the conservatives, who looked for
some sort of compromise with the church. But it was for social and economic
advancement and freedom from outside rule, as well as religious freedom, that
his people followed him. Žižka could therefore rely on the support of the
country people and urban poor who brought their own weapons with them.
While religion may have been the glue holding the army
together, it was discipline that gave it shape. A disciplined force always has
greater unit cohesion and therefore fights better than one lacking in those
traits. Žižka set rigid standards: each man was assigned a place in ranks with
a specific tactical mission. Straggling, disobedience, and disorderly conduct
were severely punished. Promotion was based on ability rather than social
status and the serf was considered the equal of the noble. We have seen this
same attitude in most of the generals discussed thus far: ability trumps birth.
That was just as true concerning punishment, and equal justice maintained
belief in the system.
And then, of course, there was the man himself. When he
still had his sight, he fought alongside his troops. Sharing dangers and
conditions always promotes loyalty to a leader. Then, when he completely lost
his sight, he still commanded in the field for another three years. For a
religious peasant army, that was surely a sign of God’s grace. It also
illustrates how Žižka’s reputation became a demoralizing factor for his
enemies. Žižka’s regular victories gave him an air of invincibility on both
sides of the battlefield, and the songs he wrote for his troops (a mixture of
hymn and military instruction) were as frightening to his enemies as the
Hussites’ crude weapons.
Jan Žižka is unfortunately not a widely known figure outside
central Europe, but no work on him or on the Hussites fails to describe him as
a genius, the most talented general of his time. Although his wagenburg was
effective for only a short period in military history, it shows what one
imaginative leader can do with the materials at hand to exploit an innate but
often unseen weakness in his enemy. Unseen, that is, except to a blind old man.
