Hello and welcome to the History of The Germans, episode 177, the day after the End of Days, which is also episode 14 of season 9, the Reformation before the Reformation to our great shame and sorrow, we must acknowledge how our brethren have been cleverly seduced by Satan, and how they have departed from Holy Scriptures in strange and unheard of ideas and acts.

When Satan first came to them, it was not with an open face as the devil, but in the shining garb of voluntary poverty and in the zealous work of preaching to and serving the people, and in giving them the body and holy blood of God, and a great many people flocked to them.

Then the Devil came to them, clothed in another garb in the prophets and the Old Testament, and from these they sought to confect the imminent Day of Judgment, saying that there were angels who had to eliminate the scandals of Christ's kingdom, and that they were to judge the world.

And so they committed many killings and impoverished many people.

But they did not judge the world according to their words, for the predicted time has elapsed with which that terrified the people, telling them strange things, End quote.

Strange things indeed were happening in Bohemia.

Peter Chalczicki, whose words you've just heard, reported how the radical Hussites had called the End of days for February 14, 1420.

And when that day came, and instead of all the enemies of the faith laying dead with their noses pointing skywards, royalist forces surrounded the radical Hussites in the city of Pilsen.

Now the end really seemed nigh.

But cometh the time, cometh the men, Even if that man is a one eyed gruff ex highwayman.

Before we get to the delights only a fully blown apocalypse can offer, let me offer you nothing.

Nothing to buy, nothing.

Nothing to sign up for, nothing but the gratitude of your fellow listeners and your humble podcaster.

Protecting us against an ever rising wave of advertising is a noble pursuit you can indulge in@historyofthegermans.com support and hence we thank all the lords and ladies who have so graciously lent a hand, namely Phil Grass, Henry Genn, Brian K, Chris C, John F.

Martin W.

And very special thanks go out to History Girl Susan E.

Whose generosity and support all across social media is very much appreciated.

And with that, back to the show.

Last week we left the Hussites at a low point.

Though they had won the Battle of the Lesser town of Prague, their subsequent truce and kowtow before Emperor Sigismund had wiped out all of these successes, a massive Catholic backlash against the religious reformers was underway.

Sigismund had ordered the magistrates of Prague to lift the siege of the royal castle and to dismantle their fortifications, an order they were too weak to resist.

The monks and nuns returned to their ransacked monasteries, and the German merchant elite reoccupied their houses in Prague.

The mining town of Kutna Hora became the center of the repression of the Hussites, who were thrown down mine shafts, some dead, but also some while they were still alive.

Sigismund, rather than entering Prague for a coronation, went on to Breslau for an imperial diet.

At that diet, the electors and princes signed up for a crusade against the Hussites.

That crusade was initially intended to defend Hungary against the Ottomans.

But Pope Martin V had allowed for it to be diverted to eradicate the heretics of Bohemia and to make it abundantly clear that there was no room for reconciliation between even the moderate Hussite demands and the imperial will.

The diet convicted another Hussite priest, dragged him behind a horse over the cobblestones of the town, and when he still refused to die, burned him next to an abattoir.

What made all this even more disconcerting for the people was that quite a lot of that calamity had been self inflicted.

On November 5, 1419, the Hussites were a cohesive movement.

The citizens of Prague, both the more radical artisans and labourers in the New Town and the more affluent patricians of the old town, the provincial communitarians who had come from their mountains to support their brethren, and many of the Bohemian barons had all been united in their opposition to the royalists up in the castle.

They had fought together, they had died together, and they had won together.

But just eight days later, the moderate factions in Prague had agreed a truce with the royalists, which allowed the Catholics to retaliate.

The radicals were opposed to the truce and the movement splintered into factions.

For these radical Hussites, who had come from the provinces, the turn of events was almost impossible to understand.

How could they get through the cannon fire on the Charles Bridge and put experienced and well armed mercenaries to flight, only to see the enemies of the faith triumph?

And this was not the first time they had experienced hardship.

This is the early 15th century and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are riding high.

The rider on the white horse had brought the plague, the plague that had begun in 1348 and had come back again and again and again, taking its grim toll.

The rider of the red horse had come to take peace from the earth and to make men slay other men.

He had brought War, incessant war between the kings of France and England, between the princes of the empire over this, that or the other parcel of land between.

Between the cities of Italy and between the Hungarians and the Ottomans.

And then the war between Wenceslas, his barons, his cousins and at times his brother that had devastated Bohemia, the once richest and most august of the principalities of the empire.

The rider of the black horse came with a pair of scales weighing what little bread was allowed in times of famine.

And now that the climate was turning colder and colder, even a good harvest in 1410 was no better than a poor harvest a hundred and fifty years earlier.

Those who have stayed on their land and had failed to negotiate better wages found themselves re enslaved following the plague, whilst many who had left for the bright lights of the cities found themselves as menial laborers or domestic servants.

And the fourth rider on his pale horse of death was ever present, the catch all.

For those who had not succumbed to disease.

War of famine.

It was a brutally tough time to be alive.

It was very much the opposite of the beautifully illuminated images that early Renaissance masters, the Giottos, Lorenzettis, Martinis and Masaccios produced during that time.

And for the men and women who had left their homesteads in the autumn of 1419 to come to the Edo Prague, all this felt even more dystopian.

Because not only had they suffered the agony of disease, war, famine and death, they also thought that they had found the reason for all this suffering.

And that reason had been the corruption of the Church.

The Church that had turned its back on the example of the apostles that had denied them the sacrament of bread and wine, without which there was no salvation.

And they had not only found the reason for their suffering, but they had begun to remedying these ills.

They had gathered on the mountains and they had taken the bread and wine.

They had shared their worldly goods, as the apostles had done, and they had listened to and tried to live by the Scripture.

If they had done all that was required, how could it be that they found themselves leaving the city of Prague in fear of persecution and with nowhere to go?

Their priests were as confused as they were themselves and sought the answers in the one place they knew had all, all the the Holy Scripture.

Here is what our chronicler, Lawrence of Brezheva, reports they did.

During this time, some Tabarite priests were preaching to the people Christ's Second Coming, during which time all evil ones and adversaries of the truth deserved to perish and be annihilated.

And all the righteous ones would be saved.

In five towns there were warning that everyone who wished to escape the wrath of the Almighty God, which was supposed to be sent into the entire world, should move from their towns, from their castles and villages, like Lot, from Sodom, to the five cities of refuge.

And these were the names of the cities.

Pilsen, which they called the City of the Sun.

Zatek, L, Loony, Klatovy and Slani.

This was on account of the fact that Almighty God wanted to annihilate the entire world, with only those who fled to the aforementioned towns being spared.

End quote Medieval history is full of predictions of the end of the world.

From the millennial fears that gripped the contemporaries of Otto III and Henry ii, to the predictions of Joachim of Fiore that called upon Frederick Barbarossa to go to Jerusalem to bring about the thousand years of bliss that preceded the coming of the Antichrist.

Seeing the defeat of their side and hearing that Sigismund was about to arrive in Bohemia to strike the final blow, the Tabarite priests.

The lion has gone forth from his lair, and the heathen pillage has arisen.

The king of Hungary has gone forth to lay waste your land.

Your cities will be wiped out.

Therefore, knowing these things, give diligent heed to the Lord God himself, and do not be tardy.

He is at the gates.

And they gave a date for when he was to arrive.

They said soon, very soon.

In fact, in just less than three months, in mid February 1420, and with that date being so close, the persecution of heretics in full swing across the country, and a crusade against them being called, thousands of ordinary people left their homes, sold their belongings, and took their husbands and wives, their children, their livestock, to seek safety in one of these five cities.

At this stage, the biggest concentration was in the city of Pilsen, today more famous for Pilsen Abeer the original laager, Pilsen was turned into a fortress.

Many of its citizens who did not adhere to the Tabarite beliefs left, or, according to some accounts, were thrown out or even killed.

The monasteries were ransacked, as were the churches and the homes of the rich, in line with the tradition they had established in their gatherings on the mountains before they pooled their possessions, or, as our rather biased chronicler said, threw their money and the feet of their priests.

Conditions in these five towns were very difficult.

Pilsen may have been a city of a few thousand, but the influx of thousands of pilgrims from the countryside must have led to massive overcrowding.

Moreover, these people have no business in these towns, no work, no income, and since they were there only to wait out the coming apocalypse, there was no incentive for them to set up shops or create any kind of business or society.

Feeding these masses was a challenge even before the cities were put under siege.

And then there was the question on how to defend the city with nothing but pilgrims, most of them peasants and artisans, and very few soldiers.

The answer to that last question had Already arrived in November 1419, a grizzled old soldier with only one eye who had fought for decades but had never held command of a major force.

I have promised to talk about Jan Ika for three episodes now, and finally we are getting there.

And at this point a big thank you to Czech listener Jiri De, who kindly summarized some of the recent Czech historical research for There is precious little information about the first 50 years of the great Czech hero, the man who broke the dominance of the armored knights and whose bronze equestrian statue overlooking Prague is the third largest in the world.

But recently a major work has been published by Professor Petra Corne that sheds more light on his life before the Hussite revolt, and from that we can conclude that Jan Ika had already lived and survived more lives than the proverbial stray cat before he came into historical focus.

Jan Ika was born between 1360 and 1363 Mary, most likely in Trogno, 16 km southeast of Budva, yes, another town that makes great beer and also gave its name to something called Budweiser.

The family background was petty landed gentry, which provided him with the coat of arms of a red crayfish on a silver field, but not an awful lot more.

His parents and relatives owned two farms covering together not more than 40 to 50 hectares of very poor soil.

The place was later deserted and converted into pastures, so not enough to maintain the standards of even the lowest level of gentry.

The name Zizka, by which he is known, was actually a nickname.

It means one eyed.

As Jan lost an eye quite early, probably due to an accident roughhousing with a childhood friend, his early years upbringing or education left no trace.

He first appears in public records and four documents dated between 1378 and 1384 presenting him as a poor manager and householder, constantly in debt and incapable of taking care of his farm.

He gradually sold off all of his land and assets and disappeared from the local land register.

In the meantime Jan had two short lived marriages.

Both wives died very early, probably in childbirth d leaving him with only one surviving child, his daughter Catherine.

Jan Ika initially served Heinrich von Rosenberg, the all powerful lord of Southern Bohemia, but must have fallen out with him fairly early on.

Jan Ika and his brothers, once their money had run out, joined a gang of highwaymen under a certain Matthew, the leader, which operated between the years 1404 and 1409 in the border region between Bohemia, Moravia and Austria.

They were a particular menace to the lands of his former master, the Rosenbergs, and the citizens of Budva.

Jan Ika did what highwaymen do.

He took a load of herrings from the Rosenbergs, he killed one of the Lord's men, he shook down two brothers for cash and fleeced the merchants travelling between Vienna and Prague.

On occasion, and at the behest of Kleins, his gang would have a go at larger prey too.

They tried to capture the royal castle of Hus, and another time they had planned to seize Noviradi, scaling the walls with rope ladders.

That brought the authorities onto the scene, who systematically wiped out their local network and cornered, caught and hanged the gang members.

Janzicka somehow remained in hiding until he was saved by a royal pardon.

That royal pardon is seen as one of the great mysteries of his early life.

Why would a king of Bohemia suddenly pardon a robber down in the south of the country who he may have never met before?

We know that Mensellas IV wrote to all concerned on July 27, 1409, that he has accepted Jan the Sergiska, his beloved faithful, on his mercy, forgiving him gracefully all the offenses committed against him and against the Crown of the Kingdom of Bohemia.

A state prosecutor pardons a gang member whose affiliates have all been hanged.

Oni soi qui mali pons, as they said in the 14th century.

There is also a completely different story going around.

Records of the Court of Burgundy mentions a certain Jehan Susk de Beheinj, which sounds like Jan Giszka from Bohemia, who acted as a go between for King Wenceslas and Duke John the Fearless.

This Yehaan passed messages between the two princes, brought expensive horses to Dijon, and accompanied the Burgundian counselor on various diplomatic missions to Eastern Europe.

The problem is that the timing of these two stories overlaps.

And whilst one can certainly move from convicted felon to ambassador, nobody can be a diplomat and a highwayman at the same time.

So either Zizka was a highwayman and this Yehaan person was simply someone else, or Zizka was indeed a diplomat and the pardon was granted to him for a crime committed on occasion of one of his missions.

By 14:10, we are on firmer ground.

We find him fighting as a mercenary For Jugaila of Poland and Lithuania in the war against the Teutonic Knights.

He may or may not have participated in the battle of Tannenberg Grunwald in 1410, but he was definitely involved in the campaign and the defence of the castle of Readen.

This must have given him a good idea of how detachments of knights operated on the battlefield and how royal armies conducted large scale sieges.

And he also could see the use of fire weapons at scale for the first time, weapons that had only recently become deployed more broadly.

Sometime between 1411 and 1414, Germany, Jan Ika joined the household of King Wenceslas as a palace gatekeeper, someone close to the king acting as some sort of bodyguard.

Wenceslas was an alcoholic and famously unstable and erratic.

As a member of his immediate entourage, Zizka must have been good at gauging his master's moods, information that was exceedingly valuable to anyone with business at court and they were very happy to pay for it.

That may explain why his financial situation finally improved.

In 1414.

Zizka bought a representative house close to Wenceslas favorite palace.

Though he did not keep it for long, he sold it to fund his daughter's dowry.

Two years later.

As a member of the royal court, Zizka made friends with prominent political, religious and military figures.

It also brought him in contact with the Bohemian reformers, who had many powerful supporters at court.

There's a story that Ika regularly accompanied Queen Sophia when she attended Jan Hu's sermon at the Bethlehem Chapel in 1419.

When the Hussite revolt kicks off, Jan Ika is already in his mid to late 50s.

Very little makes him out to become one of the greatest military figures in European history.

Not only is he a relatively old man, he is visually impaired, had never held command of significant military forces before, and his backstory is, as we have seen, a little bit too chequered to lead a religious movement.

But then he did all that cometh the day, cometh the man.

And that day when Jan Shiska first stepped into the limelight of history was 30 July 1419, the day of the first defenestration of Britain.

Prague.

Our chronicler, Lawrence of Brezova tells us that the royal councilors were outrageously slaughtered by the common people.

And Jan Ika, courtier of the Czech king.

Many biographers describe Ika a significant role in this event, though there is no further evidence of him even being there.

I personally think that it's unlikely that he was one of the ringleaders at this event.

Simply because if he had been, the chroniclers would have made a big song and dance about it.

But they haven't.

Hence my guess is that at this point he was still only another man in the crowd.

More interesting is the question why he was there.

He was, after all, a royal servant, a familiaris of the king who had risen to wealth and prestige at court.

Taking part in the insurrection, even in a minor role, was an act of treason.

So why did he do it?

In a chronicle written about his life in 1436, it says simply that he took the field to fight against those who did not take the body and blood of Christ in both kinds, those he took to be his enemies.

And I think it was really likely as simple as that.

Jan Ika, like almost everyone in Bohemia at that time, had to make a decision to stand either with the Hussites or with the Catholics.

There was very little middle ground.

Zizka was close to the reformers at court who had just been dismissed, and he may simply have agreed with the Hussite view on Scripture.

And so he decided to stand with them, and that was that.

From here on we find Zizka at the forefront of events.

He led the attack on the monasteries following the death of Wenceslas, and then, as captain of the forces of the New Town, led the attack on Visharat Castle that kicked off the actual revolution.

During the Battle of the Lesser Town, some chroniclers describe Ika a major role alongside the overall commander, Nicholas of Hus.

And he seemed to have displayed a lot of personal courage during the fighting on the Charles Bridge and then in the streets of the Lesser Town, which is likely why he took the signing of a truce between the city of Prague and the royal castle so hard, in particular the decision to return the vigirrat to the royalists.

He had taken that castle, he understood its strategic importance, and he knew what a foolish decision this truce had been.

And like so many other disaffected radical Hussites, he left the city, passing through the gates of Prague, the city he had once defended and where he once had a handsome house and a position at court.

He headed to one of the five cities the radical Hussites had declared the safe haven in times of the Apocalypse.

He went to Pilsen, the City of the sun, where he arrived in the middle of November.

He had been invited to Pilsen by Wenceslas Kuranda, a Hussite preacher who had already established himself as one of the leaders of the more extreme branch of the Hussites.

Kuranda was one of the most vocal Adventists who had predicted the second coming of Christ for mid February 1420 and had urged the faithful to take refuge in one of the five cities.

After Kuranda and Zizka arrived, Pilsen began to fill up with those seeking safety from the Day of Wrath and or protection from the brutal persecution of the Catholics that was kicking off.

As these people arrived, the demographics of Pilsen changed.

Initially a city dominated by Hussite moderates, the radicals took up more and more space that gave Wenceslas Karanda the room to imprint more and more of his ideas onto the cityscape.

He started with stripping the churches of their idolatry images before moving on to the destruction of the monasteries.

The monks and the inhabitants, unwilling to fall in line, were expelled, and from there he whipped up the crowd with fear of the imminent Second coming, which got ever more aggressive as news of the massacre at Kutna Hora spread.

I have, by the way, found another source for these events we discussed last week.

A letter written by the magistrates of Prague to the city of Venice in July 1420 highlights both the incredible cruelty and the involvement of the largely German population in the massacres.

The leader of the atrocities was a certain Nicolas of Gymniste.

Gymniste had initially been sympathetic and had warned Jan Hus against going to Constance.

But he ended up as a fanatic anti Hussite.

He is supposed to have devised the murder by Meinschaft we discussed last week, earning him the nickname the Fierce.

Naturally, Pilsen refused to sign up to the truce with the royalists.

Therefore, the government in Prague sent troops to bring Pilsen to heel.

Initially, this was a small army recruited mainly from the local nobility.

They were unable to surround the city completely.

Instead, they ran a campaign of destruction of neighboring fields and villages, thereby reducing the availability of foodstuff in the overcrowded city.

Up until now, the Tabarites had been a peaceful lot, except for the destruction of churches and monasteries.

Their whole ethos was to replicate the lives of the apostles, who had spent their time preaching and living a communal life.

But now that the armies of the enemy had gathered, the question is whether they were allowed to defend themselves.

Ika and his fellow commanders were soldiers, and so they had already used military force in Prague.

But the question was whether the faithful civilians and even the priests could join them.

After all, the apostles had accepted martyrdom without resisting.

And does that not mean that those who follow them should do it too?

Ziska and his colleagues put this question to the masters of the university in Prague and the masters concluded that it was appropriate for the laity to use violence in defense of their faith, but reiterated the prohibition for priests to carry swords.

That is often seen as the moment when Koronda and Gizka began to fall out, something that will be relevant later.

For now, the defence of the city was priority number one.

The small contingents of royalists roaming the countryside were clearly just the advance guard of a much larger army that would be sent against Pilsen.

Rishka, as captain of the city, was in charge of defence.

We know little of the early skirmishes in that period, except for one significant event.

Sometime as early as December, Zizka made a sortie to take a small royalist fort at Neckeme, a few miles from the city.

What he did not know was that this had been a trap set up by the royalist commander.

As Ika arrived, he suddenly faced up against the entirety of the enemy forces, made up of dozens, maybe hundreds of knights, all in shining armor, confident in the knowledge, then nothing could resist that charge.

Ziska, it is said, had just a small group of men, not all of them trained soldiers, a few guns and seven wagons.

As far as we know, this was the moment where he first deployed the technique that would later make him the greatest military tactician of his day.

He ordered the wagons to form a circle on top of a hill and place the cannons in the middle.

As the knights attacked, they were met with cannon fire that could penetrate their armour.

And even if they were willing to dodge the shrapnel, they found their progress barred by heavy wagons.

The defenders, meanwhile, stayed behind in the safety of their mobile castle, taking shots at the enemy out in the open or hitting them with their flails.

This kind of warfare did not require years of training the knights had to go through, or all you had to do was to be mad enough to handle one of these early guns that were almost as likely to explode in your hands than to send a projectile and to hold still whilst the stampede of armored riders was coming at you.

And if you believe that the End of Days was coming anyway, well, that might not have been quite as difficult as it sounds.

Shishka's tactics prove extremely effective against medieval knights.

In this and many later encounters, the royalists fled the field of battle and a new form of warfare was born.

But before this model could be deployed successfully and at scale, Zizka and his men had to deal with a much, much larger royalist army that now invested the city of Pilsen.

If that was pretty bad, what had made their position inside the city even more untenable was that February 14, 1420, had passed as just another uneventful Saturday.

Instead of finding all the others dead with their noses sticking up in the air, instead the royalists were putting up their noses at those who had been deceived in such an ugly way.

The garrison of Pilsen was now running out of food, the population had grown hostile, and the royalist army outside the gates was growing by the day.

It was time to go.

There was one silver lining.

The commander of the royalist army was Wenceslas of Duba, the Bohemian nobleman who had accompanied Jan Hus to Constance and who had stood by his side until the end.

Duba may not have been a full blown Hussite, but he was definitely no Catholic fanatic either.

He offered Ika and his fellow commanders an honourable surrender.

If they gave up, they could leave the city with their camp followers and their weapons and utraquist communion would be allowed for those citizens of Pilsen who desired it, without punishment or even just molestation.

Janciska took the deal, and on March 22, 1420, a small troop of probably 400 armed men, accompanied by women and children, and now 12 wagons left the city of Pilsen.

Though they had been promised safe passage, they soon found themselves under attack from a much larger force of 2000, most of them armored riders commanded by some of the grandest barons of the realm.

One had been the baron who had been in charge of the previous encounter, and another was Nicholas of Gymniste, the cruel master of Kutna Hora.

And again the wagons proved to be their salvation.

This time the terrain was much less advantageous.

The enemy attacked when the group was crossing a river.

There was no chance for them to set up a defensible position up on a hill.

But Zizka spotted a number of fish ponds nearby.

That is where he guided the wagons and his men, forming a circle which incorporated the ponds.

Now, this time, the royalists were not so easily surprised by Zizka's tactics.

Instead of mounting rolling charges, one after the other going into the guns, the knights dismounted and fought their way hand to hand towards the Wagenburg.

At one time they nearly succeeded in breaching the line of waggons, destroying two or three of them.

But by then the battle had lasted for several hours, and night fell.

The royalist lines became muddled and ultimately so confounded that they could no longer distinguish friend from foe.

Having beaten each other over the head a couple of times, they realized that this was not going to work, and retreated.

Jan Ika and his ragtag band of a few professional soldiers, but mostly badly armed peasants, had again defeated a much superior and much better equipped force.

On March 25, 1420, they reached their destination, a place that had once been called Radishte and where their religious brethren were building a whole new city, a city they called Mount Tabor and that would become the epicenter of radical Husseitism, giving it its the Tabarites.

I would love to go on and now Talk for another 45 minutes about Mount Tabor, the people who congregated there, what they believed, and how they became the most powerful political and military machine of Bohemia.

But we've already been going on for more than 30 minutes and that's enough for all of us.

So Montabo will have to wait until next week.

I hope you will join us again.

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