Hussite Wars

Hussite Wars, series of conflicts within the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire, centred in Bohemia between 1419 and 1436.

The burning at the stake of John Huss (Jan Hus) at the Council of Constance in 1415 aroused violent indignation among his Bohemian followers, the Hussites. Subsequently, when King Wenceslas tried to uproot them from among the clergy and city councilmen, the Bohemians rose in revolt. The rebellion acquired a nationalistic character after the death of the king, when his brother, Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, claimed the Bohemian throne. The Hussites, holding Sigismund responsible for Huss's death, rejected the Emperor's claim. Pope Martin V declared a crusade against the Hussites in 1420, and Sigismund invaded Bohemia with a German army, which was thoroughly routed.

The Hussites, however, were split, not only on religious matters, but also socially divided. The moderate Utraquists, or Calixtines, were recruited mainly from the nobility and the bourgeoisie, while the radical Taborites were mostly peasants and villagers. The two were united only in their opposition to Sigismund, and together they defeated another imperial invasion in 1421. Their army was led first by the Taborite general John Zizka and then after his death, by Procopius the Great, a priest who defeated three more Catholic crusades (1426, 1427, 1431). After this, the Council of Basel initiated negotiations with the Hussites, and in 1433 compromise was reached under which the Utraquists were reunited with the Church, although the Taborites continued to fight. The Utraquist nobles, by now themselves alarmed by the Taborite forces, then joined with the Catholics to defeat them at Lipany, near Prague, in 1434; Procopius was killed in that action. A precarious peace was restored, and Sigismund assumed the throne in 1436.

In the end, despite military superiority, the Hussites were the losers. The Utraquists were granted little of their demands (only sacrament in two kinds), and even that was revoked by the Church in 1437; the Taborite villagers and peasants gained nothing: they were, in fact, worse off than before. The wars, however, profoundly influenced Czech national consciousness and significantly altered the social structure of Bohemia by shifting power in the cities to the Czech bourgeoisie from the immigrant Germans, who were driven out during the fighting.