Bohemian wagon forts and hand cannons beat five crusades
The Hussite Wars (also Bohemian Wars) pitted followers of executed reformer Jan Hus against Emperor Sigismund, the papacy, and Catholic crusaders after 1415. Yeoman general Jan Žižka turned peasant armies with early firearms and Wagenburg tactics into a force that smashed repeated crusades until Utraquists defeated radical Taborites in 1434.
From about 1402 the Prague priest and scholar Jan Hus attacked what he saw as corruption in the church and papacy, borrowing ideas from the English theologian John Wycliffe, many of which the church had declared heretical. In 1411, during the Western Schism, the antipope John XXIII sold indulgences in Bohemia to fund a crusade against Ladislaus of Naples, protector of his rival Gregory XII. Hus denounced it, quoting Wycliffe, which made him more enemies in the church and more friends at home.
Sigismund of Hungary called the Council of Constance in 1414 to end the schism. Hus travelled there under Sigismund's safe-conduct, yet was jailed, tried and burned on 6 July 1415. Bohemian and Moravian nobles sent a furious protest to the council that September, and Sigismund, then King of the Romans and hoping for a papal coronation, replied with threats to drown every Wycliffite and Hussite. When his brother King Wenceslaus IV died a few years later, Catholic Germans were driven out of Prague and other towns, and Sigismund, now heir to Bohemia, obtained papal backing for a crusade.
Crusaders from across Europe won early ground and took Prague, but the Hussites regrouped and recovered nearly everything. Command passed to the yeoman Jan Žižka, and despite infighting he crushed the next German crusade at Německý Brod. Three further crusades failed. Poland and Lithuania would not attack the Czechs, Germany was too divided to field a big army, and the Danish king simply went home. Hussite forces began raiding German lands in turn. Their edge came from wagon forts and early hand-held guns such as hand cannons, wielded by a movement that drew in much of Bohemia's Czech population.
The end came from inside. The moderate Utraquists switched sides in 1432 to fight alongside Catholics, and in 1434 they beat the radical Taborites. The Hussites then accepted the authority of the Bohemian king and the Catholic Church in exchange for keeping their own variant rite.
Source: Hussite Wars
