Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans, episode 182, the Return of the King, which is also episode 19 of season nine, the Reformation before the Reformation, we have a tendency to overlook the history of the smaller European nations, even though they do quite often provide a laboratory where one could have seen the signs of things to come, or of calamities that could have been avoided.

And one of these nations is Czechia, where events took place that could, should or did impact the history of the Germans in 1989, in 1968, in 1938, in 1618, and in 1419-1437.

Today we'll talk about the very last one on this list, the moment when a complete confessional split was prevented, something Martin Luther, Emperor Charles V and Pope Leo X so disastrously failed to manage a hundred years later.

I will also provide links in the show, notes to books or podcasts relating to the other events, just in case you want to read ahead.

But before we start, just another very important if you want to sign up on Patreon rather than on my recently revamped historyofthegermans.com support website, be very, very careful not to do it on the Patreon app on your iPhone.

If you sign up using your iPhone, Apple will add a shocking 30% surcharge to your contribution, which also attracts tax that comes on top of an 8% Patreon charge, a 10.1percent PayPal charge plus tax.

What that means is that if you sign up on the highest accur first level, as one listener so kindly did yesterday, you may be charged $15 per month, of which I will receive only $9.58.

And that's before they rip me off on the exchange rate.

If you were making that same contribution on the historyofthegermans.com support page, my total expense would be 4%, meaning I would receive $14.40 from this exceedingly generous patron.

Note that the 30% surcharge only applies to new patrons, and only if you use the Patreon app on your iPhone, and it only kicked in this week.

That is why I have not yet pushed you guys to move across to the new platform.

However, it is something you may want to consider.

One of the perks of the new platform is the History of the Germans forum, where you can discuss all matters relating to the podcast and German history with your fellow listeners and and with me.

As for the website, it's been gradually translated into German as we speak.

This may take a few months to get to, but it is in progress.

I hope you enjoy that and you may want to send the link to some of your friends who may prefer to read the whole history in German.

Which gets me to my before last point.

Many of you have responded to the question about what we want to do next, and whilst this is definitely not a democracy, if the overwhelming majority of you want to do a tour of the empire, well, we will do a tour of the empire.

I'm actually quite excited about it and I've already started with the initial research and all that.

The website, translation, the forum and the next season is only possible because so many of you have signed up on historyofthegermans.com support and I in particular want to thank Harold W.

The exceedingly generous Robert Macmillan, Lars S.

Hunter T.

Murray V, Peter K.

Felix and Matthias T.

Who've already signed up.

And with that back to the show.

Now last week we ended on the death of Jan Ika, the man who turned the Bohemians into a near invincible military force.

Though the story of his skin being used as a drum that led his followers to victory is almost certainly fake.

The the Hussites remained undefeated for another 10 years.

The neighbours of the kingdom in particular the empire, mustered a total of five crusades to put an end to the heresy they found so difficult to accept.

The First Crusade was led by Sigismund in 1420 and ended with the battles on Witkow Hill and Wizharad.

The alleged 150,000 Crusaders returned without anything to show for except some ransacked villages and burned Hussite priests.

The Second Crusade in 1421 ended with the imperial forces running away when they heard a Hussite army approaching, and Sigismund's not quite simultaneous attempt ended with the battles of Kutna Hora and Nemetski Brod, where his heavy cavalry drowned in the ice cold sazava River.

The Third Crusade in 1423 was such a comprehensive failure that the only one to muster an army at all was King Eric VII of Denmark, who turned around before even getting to the Bohemian border.

The Fourth Crusade in 1426 ended with the Battle of Ausig.

Frederick the Belligerent of Saxony had invaded Bohemia in 1425, but got stuck in the town of Usti or Ausick.

His wife, the electress Catherine, sent reinforcements, allegedly 30,000 men.

This time the crusaders were a little bit more enthusiastic.

They believed that the success of the Hussites had been down solely to the genius of Jan Ika and that after his death things would be easier, and they had come up with ideas to break through the Wagenburgs.

The Knights had brought axes and hammers to break the retaining chains between the wagons, and they did indeed break into the circle of wagons.

But they found the Hussite cavalry had left around the back and was now attacking their flanks and their rear.

This battle left a large number of Saxon, Lusatian and Thuringian nobles dead on the battlefield.

Frederick I of Saxony, the belligerent, died in 1428 and was succeeded by Frederick II of Saxony, called the Gentle, which must have calmed things down a lot on that border.

The fifth and final crusade got underway on August 1, 1431.

Though Sigismund had initially promised to lead the effort in person, he ceded command to Frederick of Hohenzollern, the Elector of Brandenburg.

On August 14, the army which had begun a siege of the city of Nommerschlitze, heard the sound of Hussite warriors singing, ye, who are the warriors of God.

And then ran all 150,000 of them.

Now, these were the major actions, but alongside those ran dozens of smaller ones.

The main actors here were on the Catholic side, Duke Albrecht of Austria, who had received Moravia from Sigismund as a dowry for his daughter Elizabeth.

The Brandenburg and the Saxon electors.

Albrecht wanted to protect his dowry, and the other two were trying to add to their property portfolio with a side dish of a free ticket to paradise.

Well, neither of them was successful.

But more significant than these incursions into Bohemia were the glorious riots the Hussite armies led into Franconia, Austria, Silesia and even into Prussia.

Those took place mainly in the late 1420s and early 1430s.

These could be best described as funding rounds.

The armies of the brotherhoods of Tabor and of Horeb, who now called themselves the Orphans, were not only an extremely effective weapon, they were also a standing army that was extremely expensive to maintain.

One way of funding them would have been to collect taxes in the territories the two radical factions now controlled.

But who would want to do that?

The next best option was to rent them out as mercenaries.

In times, Bohemia was comparatively quiet, and finally one could fund them out of the plunder they made during their campaigns.

The problem with the latter option was that many of these initial campaigns had taken place inside Bohemia.

And after a decade of war, the economy was on its knees.

The rich had lost everything or had fled, and the country was utterly destroyed.

Hence, sparing their fellow Czechs and looting Austrians, Franconians, Saxons and Silesians, well, that was the patriotic thing to do.

These Hussite risen were anything but glorious for their reluctant hosts.

As we have heard, even battle hardened soldiers were terrified of the Religious warriors from Bohemia.

So they encountered barely any resistance to their ransacking and pillaging cities, closed their gates and paid them off, whilst villages and open towns had to let them do what they wanted to do.

In July 1432, such a Hussite army lay before Naumburg, home to a bishopric, an unbelievably beautiful cathedral.

And deep inside the empire, the citizens of Naumburg were terrified and pleaded with Prokop the Shaven, the new priest, leader and military commander of the Taborites.

In their despair, they sent out their children to the Hussite camp, the boys and girls wearing white shirts as a sign of submission and penance.

And they were singing and begging for mercy.

And here is their song.

Don't.

Don't panic.

Don't panic.

I will not sing it.

I'll leave that to rock on stage from Naumbor.

Now, just in case you were surprised about the upbeat tone of the song, here is the.

The Hussites marched before Naumburg over Jena and Camborg, all over the Vogelwies, that's a meadow you saw nothing but swords and spears, about a hundred thousand.

Now, when they lay before Naumburg, there came a great lamentation.

Hunger tormented, thirst hurt.

And a single shot of coffee came to 16 Fennecs.

It then goes on for a while.

And Ann Smith broke up the shaven, choosing not to massacre the little ones.

Instead he gave them cherries and then drew his long sword, commanded, turn right, leave Naumburg behind.

And ever since that event, the city of Naumburg celebrates a Hussite cherry festival at the end of June with medieval possessions, a market and music.

Unfortunately, the idea of the generous cherry distributing Hussite general is as much made up as the idea you get a cup of coffee for 16 pfennig.

The Hussites did not go to Naumburg in 1432, but Bohemian mercenaries did show up in a war between the heirs to the Duchy of Saxony roughly 25 years later.

And the whole thing with the cherries probably only came up in the 16th century as a festival.

Still August von Kotzebuer wrote a patriotic play that for very good reasons is no longer performed.

And Antonio Salieri wrote an entire opera which is still performed and which is what you hear in the background.

Ah.

And Naumburg is not the only city celebrating these Hussite invasions.

The city of Bernau near Berlin has one too, as does Neuenburg Vormwald in Bavaria.

What is nice is that this whole rather blood soaked story has turned not just into a number of jolly festivals, but has also brought several Czech, German and Austrian towns together to form the Husitische Kulturrute, where you can follow either Jan Hu's journey from Prague to Constance or do a tour of the major battlefields of the war, all in the spirit of reconciliation.

But the reality had really been pretty horrific.

These clashes between Hussites and their neighbours were terrifying the inhabitants on the border regions and inside Bohemia, warfare never completely stopped.

It must have been clear to all observers that this conflict had no military solution.

If it had not been obvious after Sigismund's defeat at Nemetski Broad, then Ausig should have made that abundantly clear.

But some people still needed another reminder, which came in the form of the Fifth Crusade.

But after that, pretty much everybody knew that this was it.

The only question that therefore remained was the Would Europe simply just isolate the Hussites and leave them to live their lives under a different religion?

Or could there be a reconciliation that reopened the borders?

It was time for diplomacy.

Some key players, like King Jugailar of Poland and Margraf Friedrich of Hohenzollern, had kicked things off before the Fifth Crusade had even started.

The whole process took almost six years.

But before we get into the who did or said what when, let's just take a look at how incredibly convoluted and complicated the situation had become in the 1430s.

At the heart of all this stood the religious differences between the Catholic Church and the Hussites.

The Hussites had been kind enough to narrow down their key demands into the Four Articles of Prague, which were, that the word of God shall be freely and without hindrance proclaimed and preached by Christian priests in the Kingdom of Bohemia.

Second, that the Holy Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ, under the two kinds of bread and wine, shall be freely administered to all true Christians who are not excluded from communion by mortal sin.

Third, that since many priests and monks hold many earthly possessions against Christ's command, and to the disadvantage of their spiritual office, and also of the temporal lords, such priests shall be deprived of this illegal power and shall live exemplary lives according to holy scripture.

And 4.

That all mortal sins, and especially those that are public, as also other disorders contrary to the divine law, shall be prohibited and punished by those whose office it is so that the evil and the false repute of this country may be removed, and the well being of the kingdom and of the Bohemian nation shall be promoted.

These ideas, maybe with the exception of the number four, had a sound basis in the way the original Church of Christ and the Apostles had been set up.

There was not an awful lot in the Bible the Catholic Church could use to refute these demands.

However, these ideas would have been the end of the church organization as it had developed over the previous 400 years, basically since Emperor Henry III had placed Leo IX on the papal throne and Gregory VII had laid down his Dictatus Pape.

Basically, the Hussites demanded the Catholic Church in its current form dissolves and the Catholic Church wanted the Hussites to give up on the demands of God.

This was an ideological rift as deep as that between communism and capitalism.

If history teaches us one thing though, it is that political expediency can bridge even the deepest ideological divides.

Just look at the expansion of the Chinese economy, a country that still is at least nominally communist.

This is, however, as far as the China America comparison goes, since the key negotiators, Sigismund and Prokop de Shaven were no Richard Nixon or Deng Xiaoping.

So let us start with Sigismund.

The word that is most commonly associated with him is ueber fordot, which is something like overstretched or out of his depth or unable to cope.

I know this is German efficiency.

We just need one word to say all of these things.

What it relates to is the almost impossible situation he found himself in.

Let me try to summarize only his main problems in the following bullet points.

1.

The Ottomans were at the gates of Belgrade, had a much superior military and a huge appetite for land and treasure.

The Venetians had left the seclusion of their lagoon and were taking control of territories along the Dalmatian coast, which is basically Croatia, and in the Northern Italian mainland.

The former was part of Sigismund's Hungarian kingdom and the latter part was part of the empire.

He was also in charge of number three, the Teutonic Knights and Poland had entered their own Hundred Years War that only concluded with the dissolution of the order in Prussia in 1525.

Sigismund was dragged into the conflict in his role as King of the Romans and hence protector of the order, whilst Poland Lithuania was of huge importance for his Bohemian and Hungarian kingdoms.

Number four was the expansion of the Duchy of Burgundy in 1428.

Duke Philip the Good had taken over the counties of Holland, Hainault and Zeeland and added them to the Franche, Comte, Brabant, Gelden and Luxembourg that had been picked up already.

The Dukes of Burgundy were nominally vassals of France, but very much on their way to create their own state.

What they were definitely not was faithful vassals of the empire, something that applied equally to the dukes of Lorraine.

The Counts of Provence and pretty much anyone else in the Rhone Valley.

Basically, the whole western side of the empire was sailing off into the sunset.

And number five, talking about the empire, Sigismund's attempts at establishing functioning institutions and a funding system for an army to defend the empire got stuck being busy with items 1 through to IV.

The empire was left pretty much to its own devices, resulting in the chaos we've already discussed in episode 179, then we have the minor issue that Sigismund had not yet been crowned emperor, despite having been elected 20 years earlier.

And then finally, but most importantly, Sigismund was seen as responsible for the Bohemian mass, not only by the Hussites, but also by the pope, the princes and the cities as well.

And these were only the major issues he had to deal with.

There were a lot of other minor ones, like for instance, his difficult marriage to one of the most interesting female figures of the age, Barbara of Chile, who may warrant her own episode if we have the time.

What made his situation completely untenable was his utter lack of resources.

The Hungarian kingdom would only grant funds for the defence of the kingdom, but would not pay for his efforts in any of the other theatres he was involved in.

Of his father's bountiful possessions, Bohemia, Moravia, Luxembourg, Brandenburg, Silesia.

All he still had was Silesia.

The rest was in revolt, sold, pawned and fieved, or handed over as dowry for his daughter.

He was almost constantly begging for cash.

At one point, he pawned his crown and he started a cash for honors trade, where he, amongst others, granted the Gonzagas in Mantua the title of Margraf in exchange for a mere 12,000 gold coins.

All he had going for him was his charm, his intelligence and the prestige as ruler of the empire.

In a world where might was right, that did not account for much, which makes what happened next so impressive.

Sigismund never had a very clear political direction.

All these various challenges left him swaying this way and that, desperately trying to find a path through these complex scenarios.

But one thing was quite obvious.

If he ever wanted to regain the position his father had occupied in European politics, and that was very much what he wanted.

He needed to have control of a rich and military powerful territory.

And after trying all sorts of other routes to riches and military might, he settled on Bohemia as the rich and military, very powerful territory he needed to regain if he ever wanted to be an effective emperor.

But that ambition came with an irresolvable conundrum, or several, actually.

He could become king of Bohemia on the back of the support of moderate Hussites and Catholic barons.

Any day, if only he signed up to some version of the Four Articles of Prague.

But if he did that, he would at a minimum be deposed by the prince electors of the empire, and he may even lose Hungary as well.

On the other hand, he had tried to take Bohemia by force, which failed.

And after the debacle of the Fifth Crusade, there was an exactly zero chance of success down that route, which meant the only viable way to become King of Bohemia, and with it an effective emperor, was to forge a reconciliation between Hussites and Catholics, which in turn meant getting the Church to accept some version of the Four Articles of Prague as canon, whilst at the same time preventing any actual change in church institutions from happening.

And let's assume such language could be agreed upon.

He then had to convince the Hussites, who hated him as the man who had burned Jan Hus, and then the Catholics who suspected him to be a closet heretic, both of them, to make him king.

So, piece of cake.

There was one thing, however, that made it all possible.

There was a new Church council underway.

The old Pope, Martin V, the one that had been elected at the Council of Constance, had, after much hemming and hawing, finally allowed a gathering of the bishops of all of Christendom to take place.

And at this council, the delegates were to debate church reform.

If you remember, the Council of Constance singularly failed to make any material progress on that matter.

Episode 173 if you want to look it up, this council, the Council of Basel, wasn't off to a great start.

When the papal legate opened the event in September 1431, there was hardly anyone there.

Things only really got underway properly when the new Pope, Eugene iv, tried to dissolve it.

The Council responded by reiterating that its authority was superior to papal powers, and by opening proceedings to depose Pope Eugene iv.

At that point, a lot of bishops experienced a severe case of fomo, made their way down to Basel.

The situation was actually quite precarious.

This could easily end up in another schism, dissolution of the council, or best case, a transfer of the Council to somewhere in the Papal states where the Pope would have had a lot more control.

Now, if any of these things had happened, the reconciliation between Hussites and the Catholics would be off the table.

Martin V and his successors had been working hard to turn the wheel of time back to the days before the schism.

In their heart of hearts, they wanted to do away with church councils, church reform and, if at all possible, the Hussites, which is what brings Sigismund onto the stage.

If there Is one thing he is good at, it is getting popes to recognize and call church councils.

In 1432, 33, he travelled down to Rome.

The journey was anything but easy, given he was in an on and off war with Venice, had no money, and his allies, the Duchy of Milan and the Republic of Florence, were wary of the fighting.

But he made it down to the Eternal city, and on May 31, 1433, he was finally crowned Emperor, aged 65, suffering horribly from gout.

This incarnation, though sparsely attended and badly received by everyone, the Hussites, the Church, and even the imperial princes, it did, however, guarantee the survival of the council.

Why is that?

Well, here we go.

Pope Eugene IV's main worry was that the council would depose him.

And he had a point with that.

Because his predecessor, John xxiii, had been deposed by the Council of Constance.

That is why he wanted to dissolve it.

Sigismund convinced him that he could control the council in part through the strength of his personality, but mainly because he had troops stationed inside and around Basel.

So you, master Pope, would be well advised to tie Sigismund to your side.

And if you crown Sigismund as emperor, he would not only be in your debt, he would also be incentivized to keep you on the throne of St.

Peter.

After all, the last thing Sigismund wants is to come back to the empire and find that the pope who had just crowned him was now deposed and illegitimate, which would make the whole coronation also illegitimate, at which point he would have to go down to Rome again.

And he really, really did not want to do that.

So pope and emperor made a deal.

The pope crowned Sigismund, Sigismund promised to keep him in place, and Eugene called off the dissolution of the council, at least until that Hussite question was resolved.

And with that, the first hurdle was taken.

The Hussites had a negotiation partner.

There wasn't the irreconcilable pope, but a council of theologians who at least understood what they were saying.

Plus, the council's decisions would be binding on any future pope.

But this was only level one.

The theological differences remained.

A first round of negotiations had taken place in 1432 in the city of Chep, which the Germans called Eger.

There, both sides agreed that a resolution would be sought by the law of God and the practices of Christ, the apostles and the early Church, along with the teachings of the councils and the doctors, confirming truly thereto, that was something both moderate and even the Tabarites and orphans could agree to.

In fact, the military and spiritual leader of the Tabarites, Prokop the Shaven, was at that meeting and signed on the dotted line, as did the four delegates of the Council of Basel.

So the Hussites were looking at this judgment of Cheb as the great success.

If this was the basis of the upcoming conversation at the Council, surely the whole of Mother Church would come round to their way of thinking.

In 1433, a delegation of four Hussite leaders came to Basel to hammer out the deal.

Amongst them was an Englishman, Peter Payne, who had come to Bohemia way back in 1413 to live by the teachings of John Wycliffe and Jan Hus.

And what followed was a slow and scholastic grinding down of the Hussite positions that was led by the Bishop of Barcelona, Juan Palomar, who described the Czechs as wild horses who need to have a halter put on their heads so that they could be captured, tamed and fastened to the manger.

A statement not exactly dripping with respect for the theological persuasiveness of the Hussite delegation.

So the negotiators played around with draft after draft after draft, weighing the other side down until each of the Articles was adorned with one of Palomar's halters.

Yes, there will be communion in both kinds, but only to those who have already received it, and only if the priest makes clear that the bread alone would have been enough.

Yes, sins shall be punished, but not by the individuals, only by the institutions of the state.

And yes, preaching will be free, but only as long as it does not undermine the authority of the Church.

And finally, the big one, the money question, that is, should the Church remain poor?

Well, yes and no.

There was no explicit restitution of the lands and properties of the Church.

But from now on, the Catholics could receive endowments from the faithful again.

Now, even if you're neither a lawyer nor a theologian, it's pretty obvious what has happened here.

Somebody had been, as the Germans would say, been pulled across the table, and the hoarse whisperer, Juan Palomar was the one doing the pulling.

News of these compacts, as they would later be called, were not received with enthusiasm.

But back in Bohemia, the Tabarites and Orebites saw right through this.

That would be the end of their religious beliefs.

And remember, for them, the four Articles were the bare minimum.

Their creed went a lot further than that.

A gelded version of the Four Articles were completely unacceptable to them.

At which point the civil war inside Bohemia resumed in full force.

For the last years, the foreign raids had provided an outlet for the more belligerent Hussites, so that they left their homeland largely in peace, but with the compacts.

It had become a question of defending the faith again.

The Taborites and Orebines besieged the forever Catholic Pilsen, but found resistance stronger than anticipated.

They also struggled to provision their troops as support amongst the local population had strangely waned.

A detachment was sent out to procure food and materials from across the border and was defeated.

The first such defeat since Zielewski was mauled in 1422.

Things got even more febrile when the two cities of Prague went up against each other.

After Zielwski's fall, the Old Town had fully reverted back to its conservativism and its alliance with the barons, whilst the New Town had shifted left again and allied closely with the orebites.

On May 5, 1434, the barons brought their troops into the Old Town, pooled together with the local councillors and attacked the New Town.

The New Town could not hold out and was sacked by the soldiers whilst prominent radicals were arrested.

That was the call to arms.

On May 30, the orebites and Tabarites under Prokop the Shaven and Prokop the Lesser lined up against the barons Catholic and Husseid and the city of Prague to fight it out once and for all.

The commanders on both sides were very experienced.

They had fought together before.

They had been pupils of Ika and they knew how to handle this sophisticated, disciplined, deadly military machine.

The commander of the Conservatives Divish, Borek of Militenek, had been the governor of Radec Kralove that Jan Ika had expelled, which had led to the previous battle between Prague and the Radicals.

And this time Divis would not yield to the Brotherhoods.

Both sides set up their wagon burks near the village of Lipani.

Divis was the first to attack.

His infantry ran up the hill onto the Taborite and Orebite defences and was repulsed.

In apparent panic they retreated and fled down the hill.

The two Prokops knew that this was the moment to strike.

The two great brotherhoods came out of their wagon fortress and pursued the infantry of Prague.

But halfway down the hill they realized what a catastrophic blunder they had committed.

Nobody had asked where the baronial cavalry had been.

Well, it was hidden in the woods.

And now that the brothers were out there in the open field, they came out and pushed into their flanks.

The fighting was over when the Tabarite cavalry fled, leaving their infantry friends to die in the field.

Those who put down their weapons were herded into several bounds and pitilessly burned to death.

Prokop the Shaven and Prokop the Lesser, the talented commanders of the brotherhoods, undefeated until that day, both died in the midst of the battle.

The Wishboric of Mlitinek had his revenge.

One would expect that immediately after this defeat, the city of Prague would open its gates to Sigismund.

But it would take another three years before that would actually take place.

Sigismund had to yield many of the executive, fiscal and religious royal prerogatives to the barons who had gotten used to life without a king.

The compacts, the rewriting of the four Articles of Prague were finally approved by the Church Council and the Bohemian Diet, giving the kingdom a separate religious status, but within the Catholic Church.

For the emperor, now 69 and suffering from regular br.

Brutal attacks of the gout, this was the long awaited moment when he took possession of the country of his birth, the kingdom and city his father had made into the envy of Europe, but which now lay in ruins.

On November 10, 1437, he put on his great vestments as emperor wore his laurel crown, and in his litter proceeded out of the city accompanied by his wife Barbara.

Hungarian magnates, Bohemian barons, papal legates and imperial princes, followed by a thousand knights, divisions of infantry and the whores who had been expelled from Prague due to the fourth article and headed home towards Hungary to die.

He made it as far as Njomo, which I think in German is called Znaim, near the Austrian border.

There he prepared his imminent death, instructed his daughter and son in law to take the Bohemian crown as quickly as they could, made his last will and testament, heard mass one last time in his imperial regalia, and on December 9, 1347, he died, sitting on his throne.

Finally, Emperor, King of Hungary and Bohemia, Markgraf of Moravia and Duke of Silesia.

He was buried in Oradea, modern day Romania, along the remains of St.

Ladislas.

But his grave was destroyed during the Turkish invasion, so that nothing remains of him except for a funerary crown now preserved in the Hungarian National Museum.

This is not going to be the last we hear about Emperor Sigismund.

When we will do our tour of the empire in a few weeks, he will almost certainly make an appearance again.

Next week we will look at the aftermath of the Hussite revolt, its implications beyond Bohemia and into the following two centuries, when there was another, more famous defenestration, the implications of which were even more catastrophic for the Germans.

I hope to see you next week, and until then, if you feel compelled to support what we do here, sign up@thehistoryofthegermans.com support and make sure you do not go anywhere near the Patreon App Ra.