Hussite Infantry Crushes Crusaders at Vitkov Hill

A one-eyed Hussite commander and a force of heavily outnumbered religious reformers held a hilltop outside Prague against a Crusader army sent by the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, preserving the radical Czech reformation and humiliating the Catholic military establishment. The Battle of Vítkov Hill on July 14, 1420, was Jan Žižka's first major victory and the opening engagement of the Hussite Wars that would convulse Central Europe for the next sixteen years. The Hussite movement emerged after the execution of Jan Hus at the Council of Constance in 1415. Hus had challenged papal authority, preached in Czech rather than Latin, and demanded that laypeople receive communion in both bread and wine. His burning outraged Bohemia, and within five years, his followers had seized churches, expelled Catholic clergy, and established a revolutionary government in Prague. Pope Martin V declared a crusade, and Emperor Sigismund assembled an international army of German, Hungarian, and Austrian troops to crush the heretics. Sigismund's forces besieged Prague in June 1420, and the city's position appeared desperate. Žižka, a minor Czech nobleman who had already lost one eye in previous fighting, recognized that Vítkov Hill on Prague's eastern flank was the key to the defense. He fortified the hilltop with a small garrison, wooden stockades, and wagons chained together in the formation that would become his signature tactical innovation, the Wagenburg. When Sigismund's cavalry attacked on July 14, they had to charge uphill against prepared defenses. The assault was repulsed with heavy losses. Hussite defenders, including armed women and common laborers, fought with a ferocity that stunned the professional soldiers. Sigismund's army withdrew from Prague shortly afterward, and the first of five papal crusades against the Hussites ended in failure. Žižka would never lose a battle, winning repeatedly against larger and better-equipped forces using his innovative combination of war wagons, handguns, and religious fanaticism. The Hussite Wars ended only through negotiation in 1436, and Bohemia retained its reformed religious practices for two centuries.