Introduction

Throughout the fifteenth century, the struggle against the Hussites in Bohemia constituted Europe’s most important theatre of crusading warfare against Christians. The present chapter focuses on the first and most warlike phase of this protracted conflict, i.e. the years between the so-called First Prague Defenestration (July 30, 1419) and the Jihlava peace agreement (July 5, 1436). Over these seventeen years, the papacy undertook five large-scale invasions, in collaboration with the lay powers of the Holy Roman Empire, against the allegedly heretical inhabitants of Bohemia. However, these operations were all frustrated by the Hussite armies which, in turn, went on the offensive and embarked on penetrating incursions into neighbouring countries before they were eventually destroyed in intra-Bohemian strife.

Before exploring these events in detail, some clarifications on concepts and terminology are needed. First, the agents and targets of the anti-Hussite crusading endeavour should be specified. By “Hussites,” contemporaries and modern scholars understand the followers of the Czech reformer Jan Hus, who was condemned as a heretic by the Council of Constance and burned at the stake on July 6, 1415.Footnote 1 Building on Wycliffite teachings, the Hussite movement sought the reform of the Church and in the process developed ideas on ecclesiastical property, the role of lay authorities, and the nature and proper reception of the Eucharist, which were denounced as heretical by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.Footnote 2 These “heretics” were opposed by their Catholic neighbours, most notably by the Holy Roman Empire of which the Bohemian lands were a part. In the early fifteenth century, the Empire did not function as a centralised kingdom, but rather various political actors (the emperor, princes and prelates, the lower nobility, the imperial cities) interacted within different kinds of personal and legal relationships, constantly negotiating the Empire’s actual functioning at various assemblies. These structures and dynamics also determined the practical organisation of the anti-Hussite crusades, which were negotiated within a delicate power-triangle between the papacy, Sigismund of Luxembourg (d. 1437)—the Hungarian king, emperor-elect, and the presumptive heir to the Bohemian throne—and the imperial estates.Footnote 3

Secondly, the usage of the term “Bohemia” requires explanation. Since the fourteenth century, the kingdom of Bohemia was ruled by a personal union along with the Margraviate of Moravia, the Silesian duchies, and Upper and Lower Lusatia. Together, these territories constituted the lands of the Bohemian crown. For reasons of practicality, “Bohemia” is used below to designate the two “core lands” of the Bohemian crown, Bohemia and Moravia (roughly today’s Czech Republic). During the Hussite Wars, these two lands tended towards Hussitism, whereas the rest of the crown lands remained Catholic. However, it should be noted that throughout the war, a significant part of the population in both territories remained loyal to the Catholic Church and the heir-apparent Sigismund (Map 14.1).

Map 14.1
A map of Bohemia highlights the lands in the early fifteenth century. The cities include Prague, Brno, and Wroclaw. Other lands include Louny, Tabor, Nysa, Znojmo, and Plzen. The neighboring countries are Poland, Hungary, Austria, and Bavaria. The scales of 50 kilometers and miles are at the bottom.

The lands of the Bohemian crown in the early fifteenth century

Full size image

Thirdly, it is important to remember that two ethnic groups, Czechs and Germans, populated medieval Bohemia. One of the specifics of the Hussite conflict—and of the corresponding historiography—involves its relationship with the social and political rivalries between these groups. In general, Hussitism appealed more to Czechs than to Germans, who tended to oppose the reform movement, although this is a simplification; for instance, the most important Catholic stronghold in west Bohemia, Plzeň, was predominantly Czech. Nevertheless, anxiety and violence against the Hussites quickly assumed a distinctively ethnic character, readily equating “Czech” with “heretic.”Footnote 4

Finally, the most complex point to be discussed in this introduction is how to aptly describe and classify this multifaceted conflict. Pavel Soukup recently observed that “Hussite Wars” seems to be the most widely accepted term to designate the events between 1419 and 1436.Footnote 5 The advantage of this term is its descriptive rather than interpretative quality, avoiding the privileging of one aspect of the multifaceted conflict over others. If one nevertheless wishes to classify the strife, one can essentially distinguish three overlapping layers: First, the Hussite Wars can be described as a civil war, arising from social, political, religious, and ethnic tensions within Bohemian society. Naturally, the opposing sides were the Catholics and the Hussites. At the same time, the Hussite movement itself was divided into rival factions which regularly took up arms against one another.Footnote 6 Secondly, the Hussite Wars can be seen as a controversy over the succession to the Bohemian throne, opposing the Hussite estates and Sigismund, the heir-apparent. As king of Hungary and emperor-elect, the latter naturally resorted to the resources of both territories, thus elevating the conflict to an international level. As such, the Hussite question also became tied up with ongoing power struggles within the Empire (emperor vs prince-electors) and the Catholic Church (papal hegemony vs conciliarism). Thirdly, one can apply the interpretive framework of religious warfare to the Hussite Wars. Both Catholics and Hussites were convinced to fight a war for the faith; discourses and conceptions on either side were deeply entrenched in the intellectual and rhetorical framework of holy war, inciting both sides to relentless warfare.Footnote 7 On the Catholic side, this blurs the line between papally initiated and endorsed crusade campaigns and other types of anti-Hussite warfare. The five large invasions referred to as individual crusades in this chapter (1420, 1421, 1422, 1427, and 1431)Footnote 8 can also be regarded as manifestations of one overarching, quasi-permanent crusade against the Hussites, which encompassed the said invasions, the everyday border war, the struggle of the Bohemian Catholics, and the defensive warfare against the Hussite incursions. This is why the following outline will have to draw as broad a picture as possible of anti-Hussite crusading, even if the main focus is on the said five invasions.

Sources

Editing sources from the Hussite period enjoys a long-standing tradition in both Czech and German scholarship.Footnote 9 During the national “reawakening” of the nineteenth century, the Hussite age gained widespread popularity in Czech historiography. This resulted, among other things, in the publication of a series of source editions, associated first and foremost with the name of the politician and prolific historian František Palacký. The collections assembled by Palacký and his collaborators, as well as the work of the editors of the Deutsche Reichstagsakten and the Regesta Imperii series, are to date indispensable for the study of both the Hussite and the Catholic sides of the conflict.Footnote 10 In recent years, this tradition has been renewed by ambitious contributors.Footnote 11 However, the archives and libraries outside of the Czech Republic in particular still hold many sources which shed further light on the organisation, functioning, and cultural significance of the anti-Hussite crusades.Footnote 12

Scholars interested in the Hussite Wars can draw from a rich variety of documents. Besides the charters and letters of King Sigismund, Pope Martin V, the papal legates, and the various Hussite protagonists, we also have theological and propagandistic literature, occasional administrative sources, and a handful of contemporary chronicles.Footnote 13 These historiographic works represent a surprisingly wide variety of outlooks. On the Catholic side, one needs to mention the Czech nobleman Bartošek of Drahonice (d. c. 1443),Footnote 14 the Mainz burgher Eberhard Windeck (d. 1440/1),Footnote 15 and the Augustinian canon Andrew of Regensburg (d. after 1442).Footnote 16 These three men wrote from various degrees of proximity to the events, and from very different personal backgrounds: Bartošek served at the garrison of Karlštejn castle, a royalist outpost some 35 km southwest of Prague, Windeck was a member of King Sigismund’s itinerant court, and Andrew belonged to the clergy of Regensburg, a south German town with a tradition of economic and cultural exchange with nearby Bohemia. Due to the Hussite movement’s remarkable success and perseverance, these Catholic accounts are supplemented with—otherwise rare—voices from those subjected to the anti-heretical crusades, i.e. authors coming from a Hussite background. The most important among these accounts is the anonymous compilation known today as the Old Czech Annals,Footnote 17 and the historiographical work of the learned writer and Prague town clerk, Lawrence of Březová (d. after 1437).Footnote 18 The latter in particular provides us with a vivid—although highly biased—account of the events preceding the Defenestration and the first two years of the Hussite Wars.Footnote 19

Historiography

Given both the Hussite movement’s specific significance for modern Czech nation-building and its interest for Reformation history, the historiography on the subject is abundant. The points of departure for every scholar interested in Hussite history are the three most recent comprehensive syntheses written by Petr ČornejFootnote 20 and František Šmahel,Footnote 21 along with the relevant volume of Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition series, edited by Michael Van Dussen and Pavel Soukup.Footnote 22 These works bring together and critically assess the vast corpus of earlier scholarship on the Hussite Revolution in general.Footnote 23 Regarding the anti-Hussite crusades in particular, we have two older but concise depictions of the history of events, written by Ferdinand SeibtFootnote 24 and Frederick G. Heymann.Footnote 25 Furthermore, most English-language works dealing with particular aspects of Hussite history contain at least some synopsis of the political history of the war years.Footnote 26 What is noteworthy, however, is the fact that all the authors mentioned tend to write the history of the anti-Hussite crusades from the point of view of the Hussites, reflecting a general—and fairly unsurprising—trend in Hussite historiography. For more than a century, the only notable exception has been the (still indispensable) work of Friedrich von Bezold.Footnote 27 Yet a growing interest in the history of the later crusades, of religious violence in general,Footnote 28 and the publication of important synthetic works on the Catholic protagonistsFootnote 29 have stimulated new research into the Catholic side of the conflict. Recent studies have shed new light, for instance, on Sigismund’s Bohemian followers,Footnote 30 some of the leading figures of the crusades,Footnote 31 the interconnectedness between crusade and Church reform,Footnote 32 the practice and debates around crusade preaching,Footnote 33 crusader recruitment and the size of the crusader armies,Footnote 34 and the role of economic warfare.Footnote 35 Nevertheless, a comprehensive modern synthesis of the anti-Hussite crusades is yet to be written.Footnote 36

The Agents and Course of Events of the Anti-Hussite Crusades

By virtue of the Council of Constance’s condemnation of Hus’ teachings, everybody adhering to the Czech reform movement was considered a heretic.Footnote 37 Though this sentence officially ended debate about the permissibility of the former’s doctrines, it failed to quell the movement as such. On the contrary, the combined protection provided by a large proportion of the nobility and by many town magistrates, in addition to the inactivity of the Bohemian King Wenceslas IV, allowed the reformers to grow in influence during the second half of the 1410s and to further elaborate their programme of spiritual and moral renewal. The fundamental principles of this programme were eventually condensed in 1420 in the so-called Four Prague Articles, which demanded that (1) the word of God should be preached freely, (2) the Eucharist should be administered in both kinds, i.e., both bread and wine, (3) worldly possessions of the clergy should be abolished, and (4) public sins should be exposed and punished by the appropriate authorities, including lay ones.Footnote 38 Confronted with these increasingly radical ideas, which in essence came down to the abolishment of the Church hierarchy and a huge transfer of Church property into lay hands, the Council and the heir-apparent to the Bohemian throne, Wenceslas’ half-brother Sigismund, before long started to contemplate the possibility of a crusade.Footnote 39 In 1418, the newly elected pope Martin V confirmed the Council’s anti-Hussite decrees and commissioned Cardinal Giovanni Domenici to reinstate order in Bohemia and prevent the spread of the “heretical contagion” into neighbouring countries. The campaign was eventually foiled by the legate’s untimely death one year later, but tensions in Bohemia continued to grow. The events came to a head when Wenceslas attempted to move in earnest against the movement in the spring of 1419 by ejecting Hussite preachers from most of Prague’s churches and replacing pro-reform councillors with staunch Catholics. In reaction, a radical Hussite faction seized control of the town hall of Prague’s New Town, killing several members of the Catholic city council after throwing them out of the building’s windows (First Prague Defenestration, July 30, 1419). The power struggle in the capital was still ongoing when Wenceslas died shortly thereafter (August 16, 1419) and the Bohemian throne officially devolved to Sigismund.

During and after Constance, Sigismund had presented himself as a fervent opponent of Hussitism, but was now forced to move against the Hussites with caution given their support from the Czech nobility and the bulk of the towns, especially Prague. Rather than attempting to enter the insurgent capital immediately, the emperor-elect rallied support in Moravia and Silesia and convened an imperial diet in the Silesian city of Wrocław. After several months of diplomatic manoeuvring, Domenici’s successor, bishop Ferdinand of Lugo, proclaimed the first papal crusading bull against the Bohemian heretics on March 17, 1420.Footnote 40 Sigismund had originally been wary of papal interference, but could now draw on unsalaried crusaders from all over the Empire in addition to the usual hired mercenaries and feudal levies from Hungary, the Empire, and the Bohemian lands.Footnote 41 In late spring, the crusader army moved into Bohemia and laid siege to Prague, but was unexpectedly repelled in the battle of Vítkov Hill (July 14, 1420). Unprepared for an extended siege, the emperor-elect had to dismiss his troops, unable to achieve more than a rather disputed coronation as Bohemian king (July 28, 1420).

Following the crusade’s unexpected failure, Sigismund campaigned for several months in Bohemia before attempting a second attack on Prague. However, the Hussite defenders again repelled the assault, resulting in the royalists’ defeat at Vyšehrad castle (November 1, 1420), constituting a severe moral disaster for the emperor-elect.Footnote 42 During the following months, the armies of the various Hussite factions (the radical Taborites and Orebites who had their power bases in southern and eastern Bohemia, respectively, and the Prague League of Towns, headed by the relatively conservative Old Town of Prague, but including more radical elements from Prague New Town) brought the Bohemian heartland under their control, and Sigismund and his followers lost most of the kingdom of Bohemia and a considerable part of Moravia. Apart from some scattered strongholds in the country’s interior—the most important of which was Karlštejn castle—they were pushed back to the predominantly German border regions of western and southern Bohemia. In Moravia, the bishop of Olomouc and the Catholic royal towns were faced with a predominantly Hussite nobility. By March 1421, the royalists’ position had become so precarious that Sigismund was forced to withdraw to Hungary, while even the archbishop of Prague converted to Hussitism. Finally, in June 1421, a general diet convened in Čáslav declared Sigismund deposed and offered the Bohemian crown to the king of Poland, Władysław II Jagiełło (d. 1434), or his cousin Vytautas, Grand Duke of Lithuania (d. 1430). The Jagiełłonian princes, however, were wary of openly antagonising the curia and declined the offer. Nevertheless, throughout the following years they repeatedly used the Bohemian question as leverage in the various political and territorial conflicts between the Jagiełłonian and the Luxembourg dynasty.Footnote 43

In the meantime, attempts at organising a new crusade took shape in the Empire. The new papal legate, Cardinal Branda da Castiglione, travelled in the spring of 1421 as far west as Liège, energetically preaching the cross while simultaneously promoting Church reform. His meticulous rulings on votive masses, supplicatory processions, indulgences, and crusade preaching became the blueprint for the following campaigns.Footnote 44 In Sigismund’s absence, he quickly joined forces with the prince-electors, who were disgruntled about the inglorious end of the first anti-Hussite crusade and suspicious of the emperor-elect’s determination to destroy the Hussite “heresy.” Invoking their responsibility to defend the Christian faith, the electors happily availed themselves of the opportunity to claim a role in the Empire’s rule.Footnote 45 Sigismund had to follow suit and support their initiative if he did not want to lose face. However, the coordinated attack of troops from the Empire, Austria, Hungary, and Silesia, planned for the summer of 1421, failed due to his tardiness. The imperial army, which advanced from the west and the north, came to a standstill when the relatively insignificant west Bohemian town of Žatec resisted the assault. Conflicts over leadership, logistical problems, and Sigismund’s absence eventually led to the rout of the imperial army upon news of an approaching Hussite force led by the redoubtable Taborite captain Jan Žižka (d. 1424).Footnote 46 Meanwhile, Sigismund spent several weeks with the ostensible pacification of Moravia before he finally advanced into Bohemia in late autumn. This time, he refrained from directly attacking Prague and instead prepared for an assault on the capital by first ousting the Hussites from the strategically important town of Kutná Hora east of Prague, which at the time possessed Central Europe’s richest silver mines. However, after this initial success, the tide turned; Žižka moved against Kutná Hora while Sigismund’s troops were dispersed in their winter quarters in the countryside. The royal army suffered two crushing defeats at Kutná Hora (January 6, 1422) and Německý Brod (today’s Havlíčkův Brod) (January 8, 1422) and fled headlong into Moravia. After campaigning there for several months with rather limited success, the emperor-elect finally retreated to his Hungarian kingdom in late April 1422, never again personally assuming command of a crusading campaign—instead, the elector Frederick of Brandenburg headed the remaining three crusades. In spring 1422, Sigismund could not know that it would take another fourteen years before he would set foot on Bohemian soil again.

Seemingly unperturbed by these events, the curia immediately began lobbying for another invasion. Branda da Castiglione was commissioned anew with the task of organising a crusade and set out for another journey north of the Alps. In the Empire, however, his plans were met with severely diminished enthusiasm.Footnote 47 Sigismund and the prince-electors locked horns, after which an imperial diet was assembled at Nuremberg in the summer of 1422. Under the joint direction of Sigismund and Cardinal Branda, the diet resolved to organise a so-called daily war—i.e. continuous small-scale border warfare—and a simultaneous invasion into Bohemia aiming to relieve the besieged Karlštejn castle. However, both operations were poorly organised from the start and finally petered out in the winter of 1422/1423 without noticeable results after the Karlštejn garrison concluded a truce agreement with their besiegers.Footnote 48

For several years, this third anti-Hussite crusade remained the last successful attempt at organising a full-scale invasion, even if Cardinal Branda continued his efforts north of the Alps until the spring of 1425. In close collaboration with the pope, he worked to induce the kings and princes of Central Europe to mount another anti-Hussite campaign, an endeavour ultimately frustrated by the power struggle between the emperor-elect and the prince-electors, bloody feuds among the Empire’s princes, and a general battle-weariness. In addition, after three years of unsuccessful attempts to take possession of his Bohemian inheritance, Sigismund had to turn his attention to other problems of his vast realm, particularly the protracted conflict with Poland and the Ottoman advance towards the southern border of his Hungarian kingdom. Nevertheless, discussion about extirpating the Hussite “heresy” continued, even if a first attempt was made at resolving the conflict peacefully in 1424.Footnote 49 Simultaneously, warfare between Catholics and Hussites continued on a regional level, for instance, in Moravia and along the Austrian border.Footnote 50 However, power struggles between moderate and radical Hussite factions, further complicated by Polish-Lithuanian intervention, tied up most of the Hussite forces within Bohemia during the early 1420s. From these conflicts the radicals emerged victorious. Under the military and spiritual leadership of Žižka’s successor as the head of the Taborite Brotherhood, Prokop the Bald (d. 1434), a new form of military organisation spread among the radicals. In addition to the town militias (the “home communities”), units of professional soldiers started forming so-called “battlefield-working communities,” whose only occupation was fighting. As opposed to the ragtag imperial levies and the professional mercenaries hired for individual campaigns, their contracts never expired. They followed an established chain of command and continuously trained together, which gave them a clear edge over their opponents inside and outside Bohemia.Footnote 51

Based on these powerful field armies, Hussite warfare transformed in the mid-1420s. The earlier reactive defence of the country gave way to a policy of military offensives. This dynamic came into full play for the first time in the summer of 1426, when the curia launched a new attempt at reviving the armed struggle against the Hussites. In the spring of that year, Branda da Castiglione’s successor, Cardinal Giordano Orsini, had travelled north of the Alps to preach the cross and negotiate a new invasion. Before long, however, events in Bohemia overtook the decision-making process in the Empire. On June 16, 1426, an army dispatched by the elector of Saxony to protect his endangered possessions in north Bohemia was defeated by the joint Hussite armies. The disaster of Ústí nad Labem brought crusade preparations in the Empire to a temporary halt and spread fears of imminent counter-attacks, fears which were soon confirmed. During the decade or so following the battle of Ústí, the Hussite field armies took the war to the neighbouring countries in their soon widely feared penetrating incursions (spanilé jízdy in Old Czech, i.e. “beautiful” or “successful” raids). These raids inflicted destruction, especially upon northern Austria, Upper Hungary, Silesia, and Upper Lusatia, and even reached as far as the lands of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia.

Catholic responses naturally took the form of renewed calls for crusade. After five years of abortive plans, the lesser nobility of the region around Bamberg concluded in early 1427 a solemn alliance with the purpose of fighting the Hussite “heresy.”Footnote 52 This bottom-up initiative was adopted by an imperial diet, which decided on another large-scale invasion. To avoid the problems of the previous campaigns this diet enacted, among other things, a detailed military ordinance, which—probably not by accident—echoed earlier Hussite rulings.Footnote 53 However, the structural problems persisted and led to a course of events very similar to those of 1421: after getting caught up in a fruitless siege in west Bohemia (this time at Stříbro), the imperial army withdrew in confusion at the appearance of Hussite relief forces without even offering battle, allowing the Hussites to capture the strategically important Catholic border town of Tachov (August 14, 1427). The new papal legate, Cardinal Henry Beaufort, who had been commissioned by the pope to supervise the war effort, was personally present in the crusaders’ camp but proved unable to stop the rout, as were the lay princes. Aroused by this failure, Beaufort launched a novel initiative at levying an Empire-wide mandatory war-tax in money instead of the usual hiring and equipping of individual contingents of mercenaries, before he set out to preach the cross in Burgundy and his English homeland.Footnote 54 However, rather than fuelling a new crusade, the Hussite tax became a bone of contention on both financial and spiritual levels.Footnote 55 In addition, the legate himself—much to the scandal of his contemporaries—diverted the funds and soldiers he had raised in England for the Bohemian campaign to the war against the French in the summer of 1429.Footnote 56

It was not until the summer of 1431 that another large-scale invasion of Bohemia materialised, but warfare was continuous. In ever more audacious raids, the Hussite field armies exerted pressure on the Church, the Empire, and Sigismund. Contemporaries were especially alarmed by the massive incursion of 1429/1430, when a large Hussite army in mid-winter ravaged Meissen, Saxony, Vogtland, and Franconia and even threatened the city of Nuremberg.Footnote 57 Faced with the impossibility of maintaining a two-front war against the Ottomans and Hussites while simultaneously pursuing his imperial coronation, Sigismund decided to reinitiate peace negotiations, though military preparations were again renewed after the failure of a personal meeting with the Hussite leaders in Bratislava in the summer of 1429. In light of the previous invasions’ failure, the emperor-elect pushed even more determinedly for a large-scale “daily war.” His plan, though, ran into opposition in the Empire due to the incalculable cost. When Sigismund finally returned to the Empire after several years of absence, an imperial diet assembled in Nuremberg in the spring of 1431 to discuss the Bohemian question and, against his wishes, resolved on a new invasion.Footnote 58 The fifth anti-Hussite crusade was finally launched in the summer of 1431 after further peace negotiations in Kraków and Cheb had failed.Footnote 59 This campaign, although energetically pursued by the newly appointed papal legate, Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini,Footnote 60 ended in much the same way as its precursors: after extensive pillaging in west Bohemia, the crusader army got stuck in the siege of Domažlice, before it ingloriously took flight from the approaching enemy (August 14, 1431). This crusade’s indirect outcome, however, turned out to be very different from that of previous campaigns, since Cardinal Cesarini was also president of the recently convened Council of Basel. His personal experience—he had only narrowly escaped the disaster of Domažlice—along with widespread war-weariness on both sides and the heartfelt wish to re-establish Christian unity, led to the realisation that the Bohemian question could not be solved on the field of battle. Instead, the Hussites were invited to discuss their religious practice at the Council of Basel—the first time in Church history that a “heretical” movement was recognised as an equal negotiating partner.Footnote 61

The Basel negotiations still fall into the range of the present chapter, insofar as they did not immediately end anti-Hussite warfare. In order to keep up pressure on their domestic and foreign opponents, the radical brotherhoods laid siege to the country’s most eminent Catholic stronghold, Plzeň, while simultaneously continuing their raids on the neighbouring countries. However, it soon became apparent that the permanent threat of a crusader invasion had played no small role in stabilising the brotherhoods’ intra-Bohemian hegemony. With peace and recognition by the Church within arm’s reach, the old differences between moderate and radical Hussites resurfaced. In the spring of 1434, the moderate party eventually formed a coalition with the Bohemian royalists. This coalition toppled the radicals’ hegemony in the last great battle of the Hussite Wars, the battle of Lipany (May 30, 1434), which ultimately paved the way for a compromise in the form of the so-called (Jihlava or Basel) Compactata, concluded in the summer of 1436. This agreement, which consists of several individual documents issued in the Moravian town of Jihlava and in Basel over a period of several months,Footnote 62 acknowledged the existence of a Hussite Church that was virtually independent of the official Church, with a self-governing ecclesiastical hierarchy, its own liturgical practices, and—above all—the lay chalice. In return, strife within Bohemia ended, at least temporarily, the penetrating Hussite incursions into the neighbouring territories ceased, and monarchic rule was re-established with Sigismund’s general recognition as Bohemian king.

Characteristics of the Anti-Hussite Crusades

In general, the crusades against the Hussites followed the traditional pattern of anti-heretical warfare. Determined to eliminate the Bohemian “heresy,” the papacy made full use of its established crusade apparatus. Contemporary discussion about Church reform, however, demanded some characteristic adaptations. As Birgit Studt and Norman Housley have shown, the anti-Hussite crusades were closely linked to attempts at reforming the Church from within.Footnote 63 This resulted, for instance, in a particular sensitivity for the potential abuse of crusade indulgencesFootnote 64 and was also connected to the quite novel “propaganda war” in which both sides engaged.Footnote 65 Other innovations occurred in the field of administration and military organisation. Faced with defeat at the hands of heretics, the crusaders recurred to traditional explanatory models. Andrew of Regensburg, for instance, attributed the crusade’s failure to the Catholics’ sins, such as—among others—the atrocities committed by some campaigners against the Catholic population of west Bohemia.Footnote 66 This did not, however, stop the crusaders from adopting Hussite military innovations or trying to increase the efficiency of the Empire’s administration for the purposes of the war—for example, Cardinal Beaufort’s projected war-tax, the first attempt ever to centralise the collection of a general monetary tax on clergy and laity in the Empire. In general, the Hussite Wars advanced the modernisation of Central European warfare, as well as what has famously been called the fifteenth-century “densification” (Verdichtung), i.e. the structural integration of the Empire’s political fabric.Footnote 67

If one asks about further specifics of the anti-Hussite crusades, it is important to again stress the fact that they constituted but one of several different strands of political, social, religious, and ethnic conflicts that merged in the Hussite Wars and cannot be isolated from the intra-Bohemian strife both between domestic Catholics and Hussites and among the Hussites themselves. At the same time, it is equally important to keep the particular structure of the late medieval Empire in mind. One of the most distinctive features of the anti-Hussite crusades is that they were simultaneously fought as imperial wars (Reichskrieg). This resulted in a quasi-triple and later even quadruple leadership: the pope and his legates, the emperor-elect, the prince-electors, and the Council of Basel, who all collaborated and competed in the effort to subdue the Hussite “heretics.” Shifts in the balance of power between these political agents, or changes in other areas of international politics—such as the war between the Teutonic Knights and Poland or the fight against the Ottoman Turks—had an immediate impact on anti-Hussite policy. The difficulties resulting from this entanglement, along with the imperial estates’ unwillingness to overcome their particular interests, help to explain the Empire’s blatant failure in subduing the Hussites militarily.Footnote 68 Nevertheless, the interconnectedness of the Bohemian theatre of war with imperial politics meant that for years the Hussite question remained an ever-present factor of political life in the Empire.

The fight against the Hussites, though, was not restricted to the Holy Roman Empire. The papal crusade-appeals were addressed to all of Christendom, and there were indeed beyond the Empire’s borders aspiring crusaders prepared to answer them. Werner Paravicini has demonstrated how the Western European nobility readily swapped Prussia, its once popular destination for the chivalrous crusade, for Bohemia.Footnote 69 Prominent Western European figures like the eminent member of the Lancastrian royal house, Cardinal Beaufort, and Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy publicly engaged in plans to subdue the Bohemian “heretics.” The Hussite affair may even at one point have aroused the attention of Joan of Arc.Footnote 70 Accordingly, the crusader armies of the Hussite Wars were not only remarkable in size;Footnote 71 the crusades also had an impressive international power of mobilisation, even if the majority of the participants certainly came from the German-speaking lands.Footnote 72 The Hussite threat to the established social and ecclesiastical order clearly reverberated throughout Europe, making the fight against them relevant for large parts of medieval Europe. This is further underlined by the fact that the reinvigorated papacy chose to renew the crusade against the Hussites in the last third of the fifteenth century. Pope Eugenius IV and his successors never officially acknowledged the Compactata; rather they hoped to gradually reintegrate the “Utraquists”—as those inhabitants of Bohemia who communed under both kinds were generally called after 1436—into the Catholic Church. When intra-Bohemian conflicts again erupted into religious struggle in the 1460s, Pope Paul II in 1465 declared George of Poděbrady (then Bohemian king and a confessed Utraquist) a heretic and eventually called for another crusade. This appeal was gladly answered by the Hungarian king, Matthias Corvinus, who tried to seize the opportunity to win the Bohemian throne for himself. However, the Utraquist party managed to largely hold its ground. Together with the imperial estates’ unwillingness to get entangled in another intra-Bohemian conflict, this led the papacy gradually to abandon its crusading fervour. Eventually, it stood back from further military efforts after King George died in 1471 and was succeeded by the Catholic Vladislaus II, making the crusade against the former a rather ephemeral affair.Footnote 73

Nevertheless, the campaign against George of Poděbrady and his supporters is another testament to the spiritual and cultural significance of the preceding generation’s anti-Hussite crusades. The rise of the armed struggle against the Bohemian “heretics” to such prominence can be traced back to a number of reasons. Among the most important is surely the Hussites’ exceptional success on the battlefield. Equally important, however, was the fact that the movement rested on a sophisticated theology which developed straight out of contemporary reform debates. Catholic authorities had good reason to fear that Hussite ideology might gain political and popular support outside Bohemia. They answered not only with the sword, but also with vast amounts of polemical writings, sometimes literally put to paper in the crusader camp. As Pavel Soukup has pointed out recently, these intense polemics, along with the obvious significance assigned to the theological backing of the fight against the Hussites, reveal considerable unease on the part of the crusaders.Footnote 74 For the first time, the Church faced dissenters who combined military success with an elaborate ideology. It is probably this palpable anxiety which most thoroughly distinguishes the anti-Hussite crusades from the other crusades against Christians discussed in this volume, and this fear was certainly also the best-grounded: as is well known, the Hussites successfully held their ground against the crusading efforts of the Church for no less than seventeen years and eventually enforced the official recognition of their movement, making them the first “heretical” movement ever to do so.