Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans, episode 180, Nude Dissenters and Blind Inventors, which is also episode 17 of season 9, the Reformation.

Before the Reformation, the Czech language has been a severe impediment to my storytelling this season.

You may have noticed that I often avoid to name places and people.

Instead, I talk about a major barren or a medium sized city.

There are, however, two Czech words I have no difficulty, howitzer and pistol.

Which may tell you what we will be talking about today.

The battle of Kutna Hora, when a blind general saw an escape route that changed the world irrevocably.

But on the way there, we will hear about an accelerating spiral of brutality and attempts at reconciliation.

We'll hear about austere dress and debauched dancing in the woods.

This is another one of these episodes that has it all and some.

And now is your opportunity to Frantically press the 45 second forward button.

Just be sure you do not get too far, because I can be brief.

It need be like today.

So here we go.

The History of the Germans, after all these years and for all the years yet to come, appears on your doorstep every Thursday morning, fresh and advertising free, thanks to the generosity of our patrons who have signed up on historyofthegermans.com support.

I'm talking specifically about Philip T.

Waverly, Christopher M.

Alexander K.

Andrew, Matthew L.

And Andreas BH.

And with that, back to the show.

Last week we looked at the period 1420 to 1423 from the perspective of imperial politics and Sigismund's role as the head of this almost collapsing political entity.

This week we'll talk at what happened inside Bohemia, and for that we'll go back to the aftermath of the Battle of the Viscerat.

In the summer of 1420, Sigismund was comprehensively defeated and had to return to Kutna Hora to lick his wounds.

He fought one more action when he relieved the city of Tahov in the westernmost part of Bohemia, just across the border from Bavaria.

This campaign ended in an even deeper humiliation when he ran away from a Hussite army without firing even a single shot.

With Sigismund and the Bavarians gone, the Hussites could roll up the areas of Bohemia they had not yet brought under their control.

They started with the city of Pilsen, which surrendered within a week.

The one year truce they agreed left Pilsen pretty much unscathed, not even having to receive a garrison inside its walls.

But soon after that, the gloves came off.

This is a religious war, and religious wars have a tendency to descend into levels of brutality that political wars rarely do.

These are conflicts where either side believes itself to be in the possession of incontrovertible truths that that make their opponent's position simply incomprehensible.

If you were a Hussite and you read your Corinthians 11:25, where Paul this cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

Now this is so abundantly clear.

There is no conceivable way the chalice could be denied to a Christian.

Which means those who refuse to take the chalice but be deluded or at a minimum hoodwinked by the despicable priests of the Catholic Church.

Therefore, burning Catholic priests was not only permissible, but a good thing, because there were deceivers leading their followers away from the pearly gates.

If you were a Catholic, you checked on your Matthew 18:18, where Christ gave St.

Peter and his successors the key to the kingdom of heaven and told him that whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

This is so abundantly clear that there is no conceivable way a Christian can refuse to obey the Holy Father, which means those who refuse to obey the Pope must be deluded or at a minimum hoodwinked by the despicable priests of the Hussite Church.

Therefore, burning Hussite priests was not only permissible, but a good thing, because there were deceivers leading their followers away from the pearly gates.

As a consequence, for two years now, the Bohemian hills were alive with the smell of burning clerics.

By February 1421, the level of brutality goes up a notch.

A Hussite garrison of about 700 men were defending a small city called Roteborg.

It was attacked by royalist under Nicholas of Jemniste, the mintmaster of Kutna Hora and all out Blofeld of this war.

The garrison surrendered under terms, but Gymnaste did not honour the agreement.

These were deluded heretics and promises made to them were therefore non binding.

He had 300 of them burned, not all of them priests.

The remaining 400 were forced into a hunger march to Kutna Ora, during which many died from exhaustion or were clubbed to death.

Whoever survived the journey was thrown down the infamous mine shafts, where they too perished.

Retribution was swift.

A month later a Hussite army killed all male inhabitants of the royalist city of Chomutov, even those offering to convert.

The only immunity was granted to Jews prepared to be baptized.

But many of them preferred to be burnt too.

In their fury, they did not spare the women and children.

The accounts of the number of victims vary, but it was somewhere between 1400 and 2500 out of a city of maybe a few thousand.

News of these atrocities spread not just across Bohemia, but we find reports as far away as Nurnberg and Magdeburg.

For all Bohemians, Hussites and Catholics alike, survival had now become a function of immediate surrender, and let's call it religious flexibility.

Almost every city that saw an army appearing before its gates, irrespective of Hussite or Catholic, immediately surrendered and handed over whoever the besiegers intended to have captured, killed or burned.

The city of berun handed over 34 priests and three masters of the university for execution after no more than token resistance.

Others didn't even pretend to fight.

Even Cotnaura, the center of silver mining, the jewel in the crown of Bohemia and bulwark of Catholicism, surrendered.

In a very evocative and also incredibly medieval scene, the citizens came out before the walls and knelt in front of the Hussite army.

Their leader, the priest Przewilski, he who had led the mob at the defenestration two years earlier, preached to them and as they repented, forgave them.

Remember, this is Kutna Ora, where hundreds if not thousands of Hussites had been thrown down mine shafts to die of hunger, thirst and sheer panic.

The city of Nicolas of Gymniste, the mastermind behind the massacre of Chotebol.

Forgiving the citizens of Gutenahora was a sign that not everybody wanted an ever accelerating cycle of brutality.

And there were many on all sides of the argument who wanted to reconcile, to stop the meaningless, incessant slaughter.

This time the the summer of 1421 might be the high point of the Hussite revolt.

Not the point of greatest military success, but the moment where the Hussite movement is most unified in its beliefs and has its widest reach.

Thabor and Prague are working together, not exactly hand in glove, but they agree on strategic targets and run coordinated campaigns.

There is a basic understanding between the main social groups, the barons, the city patricians, the artisans, laborers and peasants.

Even the Catholic barons, including the eternal turncoat Jennick of Wartenberg and the Catholic stalwart Ulrich of Rosenberg, have called off their allegiance to King Sigismund.

The authority of the University of Prague is, at least in principle, recognized by all.

And then there is another major, completely unexpected move.

In all this case, we still have an archbishop of Prague, a German from Bremen called Conrad of Fechter.

He had taken the job way back in 1413 and was a Catholic royalist, something that sort of came with the job.

In 1420, he had crowned Sigismund in St Fides Cathedral.

But then something must have happened.

Well, it's quite clear what happened.

The Hussites were winning.

At which point Conrad saw only two join his impecunious king in his exile or make a deal with the Hussites.

Conrad, who liked the good life and the income of his archbishopric, chose to make a deal with the Hussites and signed up to the Four Articles of Prague.

That was a total shocker.

The Catholic Archbishop of Prague reconciled with Europe's most prominent heretics, people who were subject to a papal crusade.

The Pope immediately dismissed him from his post, but he did not have the power to appoint a new archbishop of Prague for the next 140 years.

Things were changing, changing faster and further than anyone could have imagined two years earlier.

If we were in the 19th century, the next step from here would be to call a national assembly.

Right, absolutely right that we are not in the 19th century, but we're still going to get a National Assembly.

On May 18, 1421, the cities of Prague, the Old Town and the New Town, together with Archbishop Conrad and several of the important barons, sent out invitations to all the significant players in the Crown of Bohemia to come for a diet in the town of Czaslav.

This diet was a remarkably harmonious and effective affair.

It lasted just five days and ended with a manifesto signed by all the participants.

And these participants were, in order of Pre Eminence, the Burgomaster and councillors of the Old and New Town of Prague.

Conrad, by the grace of God, Archbishop of the Cathedral of Prague and Legate of the Papal See, or so he described himself.

The lords of the kingdom, the regions and people and towns of Tabor, the Mintmaster of Kutna Ora, of course, no longer Nicholas of Jamuniste, the knights and squires of the kingdom, other towns and communities.

This is a fairly unusual ranking.

The Bohemian kingdom had been dominated by the barons well, since time immemorial.

Prague had been stripped of its freedoms during the reign of the blind.

King John, Carl IV and Wenceslas had spent their time in a perennial struggle with the Rosenbergs and the Wartembergs and the Lichtenburgs and whatever other burghs there were rarely thinking about the cities.

But now Prague was in the driving seat.

Why?

Because the victory at the wizard had been first and foremost a victory of the city of Prague.

The Tabarites, the Few of them actually present at the time of the battle had not really taken part.

The victories in Western Bohemia, too, were brought about by the reinforcements Prague made available to Jan Ika.

Add in the university and the sheer size of the city and you get the preeminent political entity in Bohemia.

The barons, meanwhile, were divided into Hussites and those who until very recently had fought against the law of God.

Their list was headed by the richest of them, Ulrich of Rosenberg, until recently staunch Catholic and fierce supporter of Emperor Sigismund, and Zhenk of Wartenberg, the eternal turncoat.

No surprise that the councillors of the cities of Prague were taking the lead over them.

On the other left end of the political spectrum, we have Jan Ika as the leader of the Tabarite delegation, and Jan Zielewski, the firebrand preacher from Prague.

They all agreed on certain basic items.

First up, they repeated the four articles of Prague, that is, freedom to preach the Eucharist as bread and wine, the poverty and moral probity of priests, and the prohibition of all sins and other unruly things.

And then comes a fifth point, that we should not accept the Hungarian King Sigismund as our king or hereditary master until the end of our or his life, as it was he and his helpers by whom we and the entire Czech kingdom have been deceived most, and by whose injustice and cruelty great damage had been caused.

The king is an obvious abuser of the holy truth and a murderer of the honor and persons of the Czech language.6 sets forth that we have together and unanimously elected 20 wise, stable and faithful men from our number to administer and to manage the various matters of the Crown of Bohemia.

The General assembly of Bohemia has hereby deposed the King Sigismund and established a government without royal assent.

Whilst this is not a democratically elected government by any stretch of the imagination, but still it is a government without a king.

In the Middle Ages, not in a city state, but in a feudal Kingdom, only five of its members were barons, but two former royalists and three established Hussites.

Half of the 20 members represented cities, four for Prague, two for Tabor and four for the other towns, of which two remained Catholic so far.

And then there were five squires, that is, members of the lower gentry.

This was not your usual regency council of the most powerful magnates.

This was a government of national unity, aiming to reflect the wide range of views prevailing across Bohemia.

Sigismund had tried to influence this event.

He was allowed to send representatives who were asking for peace and reconciliation, even making the claim that Sigismund had not yet made up his Mind on the Four Articles.

Well, as we know, given the constraints on his government in the empire at the time, he had no option to recognize the Four Articles, even if he had wanted to, and nobody believed him anyway.

This council then began its work of pacifying the country and preparing for the next wave of invasions.

The were being prepared across the border at the Imperial Diet in Nurnberg.

As we had discussed last week, part of that pacification was to take out the remaining fortresses of Catholic barons, a task that fell to Jan Ika and his Tabarite forces.

These castles were small, and their fall wasn't ever really in doubt, but there were still fortresses of war, full of soldiers trained in archery and the use of guns.

Jan Ika was a general who led from the front, and that came with risks, including the risk of getting shot in the eye in the one eye that he was left with.

It was a miracle in and of itself that he survived at all, given the risk of infection, the total incompetence of medieval doctors, and the fact they transported him all the way to Prague on country roads.

He made it through, though.

But he was now blind, completely blind.

Some historians would later try to construct some argument that he retained at least some minor ability to see, at least shapes.

But all contemporary accounts are adamant the greatest of the Hussite generals was blind.

Completely.

Germans would say blind as a mole.

I think the British expression is blind as a bat, which is weird, given bats can see using echolocation.

No, Zizka did not have echolocation either.

He was thrown into total darkness.

There are two famous blind warriors in European history, and both are linked to Bohemia, Jan Ika and the blind King John of Bohemia.

One the epitome of chivalric valor and the other the military genius who put an end to the dominance of the armored rider.

The question how could Rizzka operate on the battlefield without being able to see anything?

We can only guess.

He had his trusted lieutenants, who knew their leader well and understood which bits of information he needed and which they could leave out when describing a situation.

Moreover, Zizka had been travelling and fighting across Bohemia for decades, and most potential battlefields were fairly familiar to him.

And finally, medieval armies, even the much more organized Hussite forces, left a lot of initiative to the commanders on the ground.

They did need some guidance and coordination from headquarters, but nowhere near as much as a modern army would.

Then there is the question what it did to him psychologically.

Again, not much can be asserted, but he appeared more gruff, more set in his ways.

And less prepared to accept different religious views.

And that is very much in line with what is going on.

More broadly, the Hussite revolt had been going for two years.

So if we take the timeline of the French Revolution, we are in the summer of 1792, the time Robespierre introduced the revolutionary tribunals to deal with traitors and enemies of the people.

In other words, the time when new ideas could be brought up and freely discussed was over.

It is time to establish and define exactly what is inside the permitted set of beliefs and what is not in Bohemia.

This task was given to a synod of the Hussite Church that met shortly after the Great Assembly.

The synod established 23 articles of religious faith and appointed a commission of four eminent masters of the university to adjudicate on Hussite doctrine.

But not everybody endorsed those wholeheartedly.

One of those who took a fundamentally different view were called the Picards.

They were called that, as their ideas had emerged from a group of immigrants from Picardy who have settled in Bohemia during the reign of Wenceslas iv.

Who they were exactly and what their beliefs were specifically is a bit vague.

One thing where they definitely deviated from basic Hussite beliefs was the significance of the Eucharist.

The Picards, or more specifically, one of the Bohemian priests usually associated with them, a certain Martin Husker, believed that the celebration of bread and wine was just commemorative.

Christ was present in all and everything anyway and did not need some hocus pocus by a priest to materialize in the host and wine.

Given the huge importance the Bohemian reform movement ascribed to the Eucharist since the very beginning, this was horrific to all Hussites, from moderates to radicals.

Huskar had already been apprehended back in February, but had abandoned his belief, seeing his comrades being burned for their reluctance to see the error of their ways.

In the summer of 1421, Martin Husker lived in Tabor as a free man, but out of fear the synod would condemn him, fled towards Moravia.

He was caught and interrogated.

He was then handed around between different authorities and priests.

Despite weeks of torture, Husker did not retract.

That created a bit of a dilemma.

He still had many friends amongst the masters of the university and was no fanatic, more of a thoughtful theologian.

He was quite a bit like Jan Hus, so nobody wanted to go the whole hog and burn him.

It was Zizka himself who took charge of proceedings.

Zizka was no priest or theologian, but he was motivated by his beliefs and in particular the Importance of the chalice.

Huskar's ideas somehow got under his skin, despite having no business to do.

So he demanded Huskar to be burned on Prague's Old Town Square.

The authorities refused because they feared an uprising of the Picards hiding amongst the population.

So Huskar was eventually burned in a smaller town controlled by the Archbishop.

Still, a huge crowd gathered for the event and Huskar's last words.

Not we are in error, but you who kneel before a piece of bread would continue to resonate amongst the more radical groups in Tabor.

That was, however, not the only piece of religious cleansing the Blind General went after.

There was another group of religious dissenters that were associated somewhat with the Picards, though the link seems a bit tenuous.

These became known to history as the Adamites.

There were probably only a few hundred people who believed that they had regained the state of innocence, that is, before Adam bit the apple.

Basically, they were already living in paradise.

There was no authority to obey, no captains or leaders.

Nobody owned anything in person.

But everything was communal.

So far, so old school Hussite.

But what made them completely unpalatable for Zizka and the puritanical Tabarites was their attitude towards clothing.

For them it was not only optional, but frowned upon, as was marriage or any kind of monogamy.

Refusing someone sexual advances was considered not just rude, but against Holy Scripture.

A very indignant Lawrence of Brezheva.

Their law is based on pimping.

As it says in Matthew 21:31, pimps and prostitutes will precede you on the way to the heavenly kingdom.

Therefore, they did not want to accept anyone who was not either a pimp or or a whore.

They implemented their law like this.

All of them, men and women, undressed and danced naked around a bonfire and sang the Ten Commandments as an accompaniment to the dance.

They looked at each other, and if any of the men was covered, the women pulled his clothes off and said, relieve the prisoner.

Give me your spirit and receive my spirit.

Then they performed the devil's act, and then they bathed in the river.

End quote.

I did check Matthew 21:31.

It did not say pimps and prostitutes.

But truly, I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.

Apart from that, everything else is almost certainly true.

Ah, probably more of an exaggeration.

Zizka on one of his patrols, came across them and motivated by the zeal for the law of God, attacked them immediately, without stopping to rest, catching them by surprise.

And though all of Them defended themselves, both women and men.

They captured 40 of them of both genders and killed the rest, sparing only one man so he could tell the world what had been done.

End quote.

The other 39 captives were burned to death.

Frederick Heyman, who wrote the seminal biography Jan Ika, summed it up best when he the number of people who during those years of war and persecution, had to die for their faith cannot be counted, nor can their suffering be measured.

Most of them were little people whose names were never remembered, people who did not ask for it, but were caught and crushed between the millstones of history.

All this now takes us to the late autumn of 1421.

As we heard last week, a crusade had set off from Eger towards Prague, but turned tail as soon as a Hussite army appeared.

By now, news of the effectiveness and relentless brutality of Hussite armies had spread far and wide, and often crusaders ran for cover when they saw the war wagons of arrive.

Unperturbed, Sigismund made another attempt to regain Bohemia for the Catholic faith.

As we have also heard last week and last week I promised to talk more about this battle, which turns out to be a crucial moment not just in Bohemian or German history, but in the history of Europe, if not the world.

Sigismund had gathered a sizable army, mainly Hungarians, Eastern Slavs and Romanians, under the command of his field marshal, a highly respected veteran of dozens of campaigns against the Ottomans and the Venetians.

His name was Philip de Scolari, Count of Osora, usually called Pipospano.

He was famous enough to be painted by Andrea del Castagno as one of his illustrious men, alongside Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and two other great Florentine commanders.

The initial goal was to take back the city of Kutna Hora, the center of silver mining in Bohemia and hence a source of much of the ready cash of the kingdom.

Cotna Hora, as we mentioned earlier, had submitted to the Hussite forces after a long period as a bulwark of Catholicism.

Its inhabitants still contained a large group of German mining specialists who operated the complex system of shafts and elevators, as well as the smelters and minting machinery.

Though these Germans had been, in the main Catholic and supportive of Sigismund, they had not been expelled by the Hussites.

That may be in part because the Hussites believed they had changed their mind on the chalice and or because they needed them to keep the mines going.

In any event, they were still in the town, the town that was officially a Hussite city.

Zizka, who had taken charge of the combined Hussite forces, had made the defence of Kutna Hora the cornerstone of his strategic plan.

So both armies converged upon that city.

Ika arrived first.

He decided not to bring his army inside the walls, in part because he wanted to avoid frictions between the citizens and his radical taborites.

His army came with the now famous war wagons.

These have by now come close to the final design, with reinforcements that protected the defenders and the car itself.

The shields to protect the gaps between the wagons, and crucially, a large number of artillery pieces.

These included long barreled guns on the wagons, as well as howitzers, short barreled pieces mounted on wheels.

Howitzers is, by the way, a checkword, as is pistol, another weapon they had plenty of.

Ika set up camp outside the walls, waiting for the enemy to arrive.

On December 21, IKA received news that Sigismund was approaching with his sizable forces from the west.

I spare you the numbers, which I believe are all nonsense, but it is likely that Sigismund's army was materially larger and comprised a much larger cavalry force.

When the royalist appeared, the hussard militia of Kutna Hora and all regular soldiers save for a small garrison came outside the walls to reinforce Zizka and his men.

Ika needed to block access to the city and therefore established his forces on an elevation that stretched from the road in the west that Sigismund was coming down on in a crescent shaped all the way over to the second major access road in the east that led to the Kulin gate of Kutna Hora.

The royalists set up a position opposite Ika, mirroring the crescent shape of Ikar's position.

Given Sigismund's army was larger and had more cavalry, its crescent was longer, stretching beyond Zizka's flanks.

As far as the blind general was concerned, this wasn't a major issue, since the city in his back was well fortified.

And the royalists would be simply mad getting into the gap between himself and the city, where they would be squashed from both sides.

The battle began with a series of cavalry attacks on the Hussard positions that were repelled with the various field guns and volleys of arrows.

The royalist lines were now stretched so far that they had to fill the gaps with cattle to give the impression of more riders than they actually had.

At that point, it looked like a rerun of many of the previous battles.

The royalists had superior numbers, but there was no way they could overrun the wagon fortresses of the Hussites.

As the sun was about to Set, the revolutionaries saw themselves, if not as victors, but very much en route to another success.

This was December 21, the shortest day of the year.

Dusk set in around 3:30 in the afternoon, and that is when the plan of Sigismund's cunning, Field Marshal Pippo Spano, kicked in for real.

All these frontal cavalry attacks that had been running for the last few hours had not been for real.

They were a diversion meant to keep the militia of Kutna Hora out in the field.

Do you remember the Germans inside Kutna Hora?

Well, they had never really given up their Catholic faith and their royalist affiliations.

And there were many.

They were determined and they had been in touch with Pipo Spano.

All they were waiting for was a sign to strike against the Hussite garrison.

And that sign was a large detachment of cavalry that went round Ika's position on the eastern flank, making for the city gate.

The militia guarding that gate had been made up entirely of Germans.

As the riders came closer, they opened said gate.

The knights rode in.

A fierce slaughter of the Hussite garrison.

An all armed men, not knowing the password, ensued.

Within less than an hour, the city of Catna Hora was in the hands of the royalists.

Whilst this was going on, Pipospano sent another cavalry regiment around Gizka's western flank, closing the last remaining exit route for the Hussite army.

Jizka and his men were now trapped between the city of Kutna Hora in the back, the grove, Sigismund's army in front, and the two flanking regiments in the east and in the west.

Very much like the Romans at Cannae, Ziska rearranged the wagon fortress to cover all four angles.

This fortress was still almost unassailable, and he and his men could get some much needed comfort from that following this sudden and dramatic turn in their fortunes.

But this was only a temporary reprieve.

They had counted on the support from Cud na Hora and had therefore brought only limited provisions and ammunition out to the battlefield.

If they stayed where they were, at some point in the next day or the day after that, they would run out and would have to surrender.

This army was the largest, the best equipped and the most experienced force the Hussites had.

Unless Zizka and his forces made it out of here before sunrise, the road to Prague would be open and the war would be over.

It is now all about getting out of this trap.

How did he do it?

At this point, I would have liked to quote Lawrence of Brezeva, but all his wonderfully vivid and somewhat ridiculously biased chronicle gives us is.

And then they approached the place that the king had occupied with his army, and having squashed the king's cannon, they drove the king together with his army from their position.

And then morning came.

End quote.

And that is literally the last sentence in the book.

Not useful.

So we should probably go back to Frederick Hyman, the biographer Jan Ika, who said, of course.

So we might think having artillery Zizka would use it to open the way through the enemy ranks.

But this was far from a matter of course.

On the contrary, we have in these few words the first clear proof of a tactical use of field artillery.

The use of fire weapons for a tactically offensive operation.

Otherwise, artillery had up to this time always been used in a purely static way in besieging towns, in defending them, and in defending entrenchments in the field, as in Grunwald Tannenberg in 1410.

Even the use of artillery in wagon fortresses were still stationary in a tactical sense.

Here, however, the guns shooting from Iiskar's wagons, which stopped rolling only to fire as well as the howitzers, were given the specific task and had the specific effect which field artillery was to have in battles for centuries to come.

Not just to block or discourage an enemy approach, but to destroy the enemy's chance or will to stay where he was, to dislodge him, to drive him back, to open the way for one's own troops.

The field artillery of our motorized present, including tanks and self propelled guns, can have no other basic task.

The history of this second phase of the battle of Kutna Hor is in this sense the history of another revolution in the art of war brought about by Jan Ika.

A tactical discovery or invention more permanent than the introduction of the battle wagon.

End quote.

And that is where we'll leave it for the invention of the mobile field artillery, the tank and all that came with it.

The conquest of almost the entire planet by European armies able to use firepower to smash through masses of armed men, two, three, even tenfold their number.

I'm no military man, but once in a while you stand before moments of human ingenuity that force respect, like when a blind man sees a way out of a desperate situation nobody else could see.

Next week we'll talk more about human ingenuity.

Dreams of a world without kings and rulers being destroyed by the circumstances and a revolution gradually running out of steam.

I hope you will join us again.

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