The Hussites fought off five papal crusades over a cup of communion wine
After the reformer Jan Hus was burned at Constance in 1415 despite a letter guaranteeing his safety, his Czech followers took the chalice as their emblem, demanding that ordinary worshippers receive wine as well as bread. Led by Jan Žižka, they repelled five successive crusades and kept Bohemia largely Hussite for two centuries.
The demand had deep roots. In the 9th century the missionaries Cyril and Methodius brought a Slavonic liturgy to the Czech lands, with bread and wine for everyone, but German-speaking bishops soon imposed the Latin rite, in which only clergy took both, and a papal bull banned the Slavonic service. Hus, influenced by John Wycliffe, revived the call for a Czech liturgy and communion in both kinds. From 1417 sympathetic nobles began replacing Catholic priests with ones who offered the cup.
When King Wenceslaus IV died of a stroke in 1419, Prague erupted; churches and monasteries were wrecked and nobles seized church land. His heir Sigismund had to fight for the crown, and Pope Martin V proclaimed a crusade. The Hussites defended at first, then from 1427 carried the war into neighbouring lands. Joan of Arc dictated a letter on March 23, 1430 threatening to lead an army against them, but she was captured two months later.
Talks at the Council of Basel produced the Compacta of Prague on 30 November 1433, granting the cup to all who wanted it. The radical Taborites refused, and the moderate Utraquists joined Catholics to crush them at Lipany on 30 May 1434. Pope Pius II voided the deal in 1462, but the Diet of Kutná Hora in 1485 gave Catholics and Utraquists legal equality, made permanent in 1512.
Martin Luther was astonished by how closely Hus's ideas matched his own, and the Hussites count among the key forerunners of the Reformation. Catholicism was forcefully restored only in the wake of the Battle of White Mountain, fought on 8 November 1620. The tradition survives in the Moravian Church and the Czechoslovak Hussite Church.
Source: Hussites
