Hussites: Modern before Modernity?
All Eyes on Bohemia
In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain described Czechoslovakia as a ‘faraway country about which we know little.’ Yet five hundred years earlier, Chamberlain’s predecessor, English Lord Chancellor Henry Beaufort, was leading a literal crusade in that very place. The courts of Late Medieval Europe saw the Kingdom of Bohemia as all too close, like a dagger hovering over their world.
Why? Because 15th-century Bohemia was the beating heart of the Hussites, dangerous heretics in the eyes of the Roman Church, who couldn’t stop defeating their far richer, more numerous, and (supposedly) right-believing enemies. Everything they stood for seems to belong to the world that eventually supplanted the mediaeval: religious reformation, popular participation, and ethnic nationalism.
It turned out that the Hussites did not destroy the era, and eventually lapsed into obscurity. Nonetheless, those forces grew and radically reshaped Europe away from its mediaeval form. It’s almost like the Hussites were early to the party.
So, were the Hussites really before their time with their reformation, participation, and nationalism, or is it just that they bear superficial resemblance to later events? Are there any real connections between the Hussite revolution that rocked the mediaeval world and the modern revolutions that destroyed it? This article takes on the question force by force.
Reformation: Challenging the Church
Technical theological disputes don’t seem very modern and the Hussite movement is full of them. After all, they are named after the charismatic preacher Jan Hus, who was burned as a heretic in 1415 because he supposedly denied the Doctrine of Transubstantiation. That might seem abstruse enough but it gets better. First, Jan Hus did believe that the bread and wine at Catholic Mass were transformed into the body and blood of Christ. What he doubted was the specific philosophical explanation the Church gave for how that happened, i.e. ‘Transubstantiation’. Second, Hus claimed he didn’t even say that. What happened is that his accusers argued that Hus held another, even more abstract philosophical position — that universals exist separately to particulars, if you must know — and that logically leads to denying Transubstantiation, so he must be denying Transubstantiation. So far, so mediaeval.
The legal reasoning behind why Hus was burned, though, is not really relevant to the terrible, violent disagreement between the Hussites and the Roman Church. Hus is the most famous Hussite, but the most famous Hussite opinion is that ordinary believers should take Communion with both bread and wine (‘in both kinds’, or sub utraque specie). This was two hundred years after the Fourth Lateran Council decided that only priests could take the wine in Communion, and they would do so on behalf of all their flock. Hus himself was kind of ambivalent about this question, but it was part of the reforming zeal then burning through Prague. The wealthy could read books by scholars like Jakoubek of Stříbro (Hus’ successor as unofficial spiritual leader), and everyone could hear sermons by the enthusiastic preachers. There were even popular songs based on the latest arguments in the febrile University of Prague. These highly intellectual disputes went from the seminar room to the streets and gave voice to grievances against the Church and the Holy Roman Empire. What seem to us like abstract niceties became the lifeblood of a decades-long rebellion (1419–1434).
It’s easy to see the connection to the Protestant Reformation, not one hundred years later. Martin Luther led a massive schism from the Roman Catholic Church because he and his allies refused to accept key Church doctrines. Luther agreed with Communion in two kinds and attacked Transubstantiation. Like the Hussites, Protestants also went after ‘Church abuses’, the political power, immoral living, and worldly greed of priests. Both movements suffered acrimonious spats over niche issues and subversive splinter groups who turned the message into a radical political programme.
There are many differences. Protestants reject the Sacrament of Confession and the idea that ordained have a special spiritual status, which mainstream Hussites never did. Whereas Luther downplayed the importance of priests, Bohemians got very distressed during the wars, when they couldn’t get priests from the universal Church to ordain their novices. And, in the end, the Hussites did not break from the Church.
That’s perhaps the key difference. Protestantism is credited with, or blamed for, destroying the unity of Christendom. It may well have pushed people to start thinking of themselves, and their communities, as something separate from the Church, even into seeing religion as private, apolitical. Luther’s attack on the Pope inadvertently encouraged the end of that intertwining of Church and State that so characterises the mediaeval period.
No such ironic legacy for Hus. The Hussites foreshadowed the popular discontent with the Church hierarchy that sustained the Reformation, but the Church managed to contain them. The movement never managed to mobilise beyond the bounds of the Kingdom of Bohemia (some tried), and they never conclusively broke from the Catholic Church. Essentially, they would compromise and re-unite, the Catholic side would break the deal, and after some strife they’d compromise again. In the 17th century, the Hussites were all but destroyed in the wake of the Catholic destruction of Bohemian Protestantism, though some Hussite churches are still around. The mediaeval world simply managed to come to terms with the Bohemians. That’s perhaps why it’s just a reformation and not The Reformation.
Participation: Challenging the Knight
If the mediaeval age was the age of the knight, then perhaps it died on the bloody fields of Vítkov Hill or Kutna Hora. These battles don’t rank up there with Hastings or Crécy in the English-speaking world, but they have just as good a claim to our attention, for here peasants plucked from the fields decisively bested trained, armoured knights drawn from the social elite. What’s more, a small, relatively poor population kept the war up for decades, surviving invasion after invasion by far more powerful neighbours. How did they do it?
Military historians will gladly jump in with an answer here. Indeed, probably the second most famous Hussite is their remarkable military leader, Jan Žižka, who pioneered innovative and amazingly modern forms of war. He clearly looked at his rag-tag band of peasants who’d have to go up against the flower of European chivalry and, like any good protagonist, worked out how to turn that to his advantage. Žižka converted farmers’ carts into wagon forts and drilled the farmers themselves in how to defend them with only the most basic equipment: some would stick spears out the sides and from beneath, others would smash spiked threshing flails down from the top.
He also used cannons alongside his wagons. These were still new on the European battlefield so military commanders often didn’t really know what to do with them; they might use them to soften up the enemy at the beginning of the fight before falling back on a good old fashioned horses-and-spears-type plan. But cannons were not lone wolves to Žižka. Hussite cannons and wagons, and their cavalry too, were deployed to support each other in one big game plan. The idea was that the cannons would pepper the enemy coming up the hill to blunt their charge. After that they’d never get through the wagon forts and once they started to run off, the infantry and cavalry behind the wagons would swarm out and chase them down. Some historians consider his integrated use of guns, infantry, and cavalry as the first example of ‘combined arms’ tactics, something often associated with much later warfare. Hard to get more modern than that.
But enough soldier talk. Not to undermine Žižka’s achievement, and those of his successors, but wasn’t just wagons and guns that made peasants into the terror of Europe. After all, the Battle of Agincourt is nearly contemporary, and we all know that ordinary men had massacred knights there, too. What’s really remarkable is that the Hussites didn’t just manage to beat an organised crusade that outnumbered them many times over, it’s that they did it again and again over decades (1419–32). Tactics helped them win the fight, but what helped them to stay in it?
In a word, participation. Napoleon and the First World War seem completely unrelated to mediaeval Bohemia, yet the Hussites pipped them both. Napoleon is well-known for overthrowing the old style of warfare. He threw out the idea that the military was composed of noble leaders, their tenants, and whoever else they could harangue or bribe into joining them. Instead, a national army could conscript any man, and that man could rise through the ranks by merit. We can’t push the comparison too far but Žižka would have understood the similarity. Hussites were not only more meritocratic than their enemies, they also saw the common man (not the knightly celebrity) as the staple soldier.
I say man, but the Hussites had a particularly high proportion of women in their forces. It is just about plausible that Joan of Arc, another contemporary, was inspired by stories of the Hussite women. My point here isn’t that women fighters = modern. For one thing, many Hussites, not least Jakoubek, were dead against it. Rather, it shows that the whole country had a role to play. Historians talk of WW1 as the first with a ‘Home Front’, where whole societies were mobilised to achieve victory. On a much smaller scale, in a much patchier way, Bohemians were doing five hundred years earlier.
So here is people power in service to winning a war. Through much wider participation that was common in mediaeval Europe, Hussites could raise armies large enough, and keep them in the field long enough, to resist wave after wave of crusades. This wasn’t exactly democratic, but it was certainly a more modern way of fighting than their enemies managed.
Nationalism: Challenging Feudalism
Okay, I’ve put both ‘nationalism’ and ‘feudalism’ in the same title, and between them that’s bound to arouse the ire of near enough 100% of medievalists. Feudalism doesn’t exist, or at least not as it does in the popular imagination, and nationalism was totally alien to mediaeval societies. But before you storm off, let me explain.
My justification for feudalism is simply that I don’t have a better term for the character of social relations in a place and time in 15th century Bohemia. What it means, in this context, is that there is a political and economic system where people assume that ordinary folks will be ruled by noble families. If your local lot of aristocrats dies out, you’ll be inherited by their relatives, and you may end up in some hodgepodge set of lands that bear no sensible geographic, linguistic or, least of all, ethnic relation to each other. That’s important because no such thing could happen in a national state.
This is a big topic but essentially a nation-state claims rulership of all people inside a territory, and it claims that territory because those people belong to a nation. Normally that means the majority of people share the same ethnicity, because the whole legitimacy of the state rests on the national identity of the people in it. It’s inconceivable that an accident of birth might radically change its borders, removing people who belong or adding in people who don’t.
The reality of feudalism or nation-state is much more complicated than these neat theories. Still, it’s a major change in thinking about politics, and most historians agree that nation-states and the nationalism that sustains them came about no earlier than the 18th century. Talking about nationalism is an anachronism in the 15th century. Indeed, it is a potentially dangerous one, as modern nationalists use the idea that nations have always existed in one, immutable form since the primordial soup to justify very unsavoury behaviour.
There has certainly been plenty of that with the Hussites and Czech nationalism. The 19th century giant of Czech history, František Palacký, saw the Hussites as a high point in an immemorial story of resistance against Germans. Franz Lützow, a generation later, thought it was one branch of a grand racial war between Slavs and Germans during the Middle Ages. Historians are, rightly, very sceptical of such arguments — that doesn’t mean they reject Czech self-determination, they just reject bad history.
Nonetheless, it is possible to talk about mediaeval nationalism without falling into modern day nationalism. That’s what I mean. Indeed, it has been quite hard for those who see nationalism as a purely modern phenomenon to explain away all the signs of it among Late Mediaeval Bohemians. The massive, popular Hussite movement was filled with Czech-speaking Bohemians who deliberately and self-consciously arrayed themselves against a German dynasty, a German-dominated empire, and local Germans. Indeed, the whole dispute started in the University of Prague, where the German masters defended Catholic orthodoxy against the critique of their Czech counterparts. Most Bohemian Germans did indeed remain Catholic, so you could say these were religious rather than ‘national’ differences, but I’m not sure it’s so easy to draw a line between the two. Anyone familiar with modern Ireland, Serbia, or Myanmar might agree.
Participation also comes in here, because nationalism lets ordinary people into the political sphere, breaking down the feudal barriers that make politics a noble’s game. People can rally around popular symbols.Today the flag is the sine qua non of national symbols, but the Hussites had their own flags. One might show a stylised flail, the iconic weapon of the victorious peasant army, another might show a chalice, symbol of Communion-in-two-kinds. And, because the Czech word for everyone’s favourite belligerent waterfowl sounds like Hus, you might see an army marching under the banner of the goose. They even had a sort of anthem, the hymn ‘Ye Warriors of God’, which you can easily listen to on the internet. (Aside: it’s probably a coincidence that the Czech nationalist movement in the 19th century embraced many female activists and the cause of women’s suffrage, but it’s an interesting coincidence.)
However, to agree with Palacký that the apple never fell far from the tree is a misnomer. The divide between Czech and German was by no means as clear as in the 19th century. It is easy to read the Manifesto of Prague (1420) as a straight-forwardly nationalist document, for it denounces Germans and lauds Czech-speakers. Or does it? What has long been interpreted as ‘Czech’ is more accurately rendered ‘the Bohemian tongues’. It was translated into German, read out in German to German congregations, and broadly supported by many German-speaking towns. It was a rousing call for sympathetic locals, be they Czech- or German-speaking, to ally against the crusaders,
There’s also the simple point that most Hussite leaders wanted to export the revolution, so to speak, and reform the whole of Christianity. Many churches and communities in the surrounding Holy Roman Empire were clearly heavily influenced by Hussite teaching. So, it’s clearly not some kind of linguistic or racial nationalist revolt seeking Czech independence, but does that mean we can dismiss all the similarities to nationalism? Let’s turn to that now.
Hussite Harbingers?
Were the Hussites the heralds of the modern age? The general theme of this discussion has been ‘almost’. Whether it’s religious reformation without the legacy of protestantism, a new form of warfare embraced haphazardly, or a nationalism made up of a weird blend of cross-cultural religion and Czech pride, it seems like the Hussites were distinctively Other in the mediaeval world, but perhaps their Otherness wasn’t modernity.
A hundred years after the Hussites, everyone in Europe would have recognised popular religious enthusiasm shaking up stuffy noble politics. It would have been hard not to notice how ever stronger institutions were mobilising ever larger armies and tax intakes, or how guns were transforming the battlefield. Witch hunts and colonialism also belong to this era, an era that in my own country we would call Tudor. A better label might be ‘the Age of the Confessional State.’
Perhaps it’s not that the Hussites existed in a world we don’t recognise and foreshadowed one we do. The Hussites and the confessional state are neither mediaeval nor modern, nor somewhere in between, but their own special creatures who must be understood in their own times. When we investigate what we think we recognise, it turns out it’s a whole other kind of strange and wonderful. There are many, fascinating legacies of the Hussites. In their own time they challenged mediaeval assumptions about power; six hundred years later they are challenging modern assumptions about progress.
