Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City

by Peter Demetz

  The Crusaders Arrive: The Battle on Žižka’s Hill

  The announcement of the crusade and the death of the Prague merchant Jan Krása in Breslau made the situation more volatile than ever, with Catholics scurrying for protection and Hussites girding for the ultimate battle. The Catholic clergy, high and low, and well-to-do patricians, many of them German, as well as a few conservative town councillors, ran for cover to the royal castles at Hradany and the Vyšehrad, which they thought to be more secure; the Hussites, on April 3, 1420, gathered at the Old Town hall to take a solemn oath to defend the chalice against all enemies, reminded everybody of the “ancient Czech forefathers and St. Wenceslas,” and ordered that a long, deep ditch be dug to defend the New Town against royalists from the Vyšehrad. Work on the ditch lasted for five days, and even the Jews, the chroniclers remarked, participated in the common enterprise.

  On April 15, the burgrave enk of Wartenberk, who had long hoped to negotiate, returned from Breslau, where he had had a chance to watch the emperor at close range and, to the great joy of the Hussites, organized a revolt of his own: after taking command of Hradany Castle he arrested all Catholic priests who had sought refuge there, drove out the patricians and their families (keeping their possessions), and assured the town councillors that he was on their side, commanding the castle in the name of the Hussites.

  enk as a politician was good on momentary decisions but rather irresolute in being loyal to himself. Perhaps he was horrified by news from the provinces, where his new radical allies had attacked royal castles, killing and burning, or perhaps his feudal mind was disturbed by the newfangled demands made by the lower gentry, burghers, artisans, and peasants. In any case, three weeks after he had declared himself against the emperor, he abruptly reversed himself and tried to negotiate a private deal with Sigismund. enk suggested that he and his family be granted the privilege of communion “in both kinds” for life, and handed over the castle to two royalist nobles closer to Sigismund, who was to arrive soon.

  The Prague crowds were enraged by enk’s betrayal and on May 8 immediately tried to storm Hradany Castle, but they succeeded only in breaking through one of the outer gates. They were ineffectively organized, and while enk made his exit out one of the back doors (not the first or last resident of Hradany to do so), the royalist regulars repulsed the Hussites, who suffered heavy losses and withdrew to Strahov, burning the ancient monastery there and destroying its ancient art treasures. For strategic reasons, the Hussites decided to move all the inhabitants of the Minor Town elsewhere and, after the people had left, carrying with them their few belongings (the Catholics going to the castle, the Hussites to the Old and New Towns), set fire to the church of St. Mary Under the Chain (of the Knights of St. John), to the chapel, still standing, in the archbishop’s devastated palace, to the parish church of St. Nicholas, and to those Minor Town dwellings that were still intact; it was a vigorous application of scorched-earth policy. The mood of Prague was somber and adamant, and as the crusaders drew closer under the command of Sigismund, many Bohemian nobles and knights, committed more deeply to legitimacy than to the Hussite cause, formally renounced their allegiance to the defenders of Prague. These last appealed for military help to all Hussite towns and, in the south, to the well-organized army of Tábor. Allies from Hradec Králové, the so-called Horebites (because they gathered on a hill which, quoting the Bible, they called Horeb), were already in Prague, and the Táborites—men, women, and children on horses and on their wagons—reached the city by May 20, again enthusiastically welcomed by the clergy and the crowds; the Táborite women were lodged at St. Ambrose, now a regular guest barracks for visiting groups from the provinces, and the men in tents on a large island in the river near the Po Gate. Other armed Hussite groups from Žatec, Louny, and Slané followed. There was some irritation when these rough country allies, disgusted by Prague elegance, accosted some of the townspeople, pulling their mustaches, cutting off the virgins’ braids, tearing apart the ladies’ elaborate veils. Their commanders told them to relent, and fifteen hundred Táborite women began to dig yet a new defense ditch against the Vyšehrad, stretching from the river up to the Church of St. Catherine. They started, it seems, with the church itself, taking apart its roof first and then working their way down.

  To confirm the ideological unity of the defenders of Prague, a shared (minimum) platform was defined (later known as the famous Four Prague Articles); it included “the ministering of the body and blood of the Lord to the laity in both kinds,” the “free preaching of the word of God,” the demand that “all priests, from the pope on down, should give up their pomp, avarice, and improper lordship,” and the “purgation of and cessation from all public mortal sins” (an article clearly directed against the Babylonian mores of Prague). The Hussites also agreed on a number of stringent security measures that have a distinctly modern flavor, trying, as they did, to prevent the emergence of a fifth column. Hussite delegates visited all families not known to take communion sub utraque specie and offered them the choice of accepting the chalice or of leaving; the historian V. V. Tomek believes that among those who left Prague at that time were at least seven hundred well-to-do German Catholics in whose houses soldiers lodged. Wives and children of men who had left earlier were also asked to go unless they showed good reason that they were above suspicion. All people in town, except those in the Jewish district, had to affirm formally that they were ready and willing to fight the enemy, and committees were formed which investigated people of doubtful allegiance. Those who had to go were not hurt bodily, but Táborites were quick to strike back demonstratively in response to royalist terror in the provinces. When royalists killed prisoners at Slané and drowned seventeen Hussites at Litomice (Leitmeritz), the Táborites retaliated in full view of Hradany Castle: four men, two of them monks, were burned in front of the castle walls, and a few days later four more Cistercian monks who had fallen into Hussite hands. Royalists and Hussites fired at each other, the royalists from Hradany with artillery pieces, the Hussites stationed at Pohoelec mostly with catapults. The battle for Prague was near.

  In early July, the armies of the crusaders—a motley crew of Germans from Meissen, Austrians, Silesians, Hungarians, and 16,000 royalist Czechs—surrounded Prague on three sides. Both Sigismund and Jan Žižka, commander in chief of the combined Hussite forces, inevitably had to turn their attention to the long, narrow Vftkov Hill, which dominated access to Prague from the east. This access was still open, which made it possible to provide the defenders of Prague with sufficient provisions (only salt slightly rose in price during the siege). On July 13, Sigismund had a small force probe the readiness of the Hussites and sent a few detachments of cavalry to the so-called Hospital Fields (now Karlín) at the bottom of Vítkov Hill; the result showed the Hussites were ready; and he scheduled the beginning of the operation for Sunday afternoon, July 14, at 5 p.m., leaving only four or five daylight hours to fight what was to be a decisive battle. He stationed his reserves along the left bank of the river, where Bubene and Holešovice extend today, and ordered a strong army of Meissners, Austrians, Hungarians, and a battalion of Silesians to take Vítkov Hill. The tough and inventive Jan Žižka had fortified the hill as effectively as possible in a relatively short time. There were three ditches, the last of which was reinforced by a strong wall, a few bunkers of timber and stone, and an old vineyard tower, all ready to be defended by Táborites, including a few fighting women. A synchronized attack against all of their defense lines was well within the possibilities of the crusaders, and it would have created terrible difficulties, but the emperor wanted Vftkov first without engaging Hussite forces elsewhere. It was not his only blunder.

  The crusaders rode up the hill on the most easily accessible southeastern side (where Libe and Vysoany are today). At the ridge, they crossed the first and second ditches without difficulty and seized the old vineyard tower. It was more troublesome to deal with the reinforced third ditch and the blockhouses, which would have been ea
sier to take by foot soldiers; the defenders, among them two women and a girl, fought tenaciously with pitchforks and stones to the end, and one of the dying women was remembered for her last words, that a true Christian would never cede to the force of the Antichrist. It was a decisive moment: the cavalry attack lost its drive, Žižka appeared with a small group of his men, and time was gained for the defenders of Prague to send out a strong column of marksmen and people armed with deadly flails to challenge the crusaders from the left. The heavily armed knights were confused by this unexpected counterattack and could move in only one direction. Caught between the blockhouses and the Táborites on the left and the mass of following cavalry columns of their own behind them, they were pressed forward onto the hill’s narrow ridge, which did not allow for a broader unfolding of the attack. The knights tried to disengage themselves by riding to the steep, clifflike northern side of the hill. Some of them were killed in the fall, others tried to escape on the more gentle eastern slope and cross the river, but not knowing where the fords were, many drowned in the Vltava waters. The entire engagement, of about a thousand Hussites against an army of crusaders later estimated to be ten or twenty thousand strong, was over within an hour; more than three hundred of the attacking knights died in the field, among them their commander, Heinrich von Isenburg. Sigismund, who had watched the battle from the other side of the river, silently withdrew to his tent and gave no further orders that day. People spoke of Vftkov as Žižka’s Hill from that evening on.

  The Hussites believed that the emperor would immediately renew the battle, and so they quickly built fortifications, but in the Prague towns the old tensions between radicals and moderates once again intensified, and in the camp of the crusaders individual army groups accused each other of irresponsibility. Sigismund was advised to use artillery against the Prague defenders, but did not want to do so, some saying because the Catholic German patricians in his camp were not eager to see their homes totally destroyed, others believing that he did not want to devastate his own future metropolis. (A few artillery barrages were fired from Letná Hill against his will and did some harm to the Jewish district and the parts of the Old and New Towns along the river.)

  Frustration and brutality were the order of the day. Crusaders roamed around the countryside, plundering and burning Czech men, women, and children whether or not sub utraque specie, and the victorious defenders, on their part, put sixteen prisoners in barrels and burned them in full view of the emperor’s camp. At Hradany Castle, Sigismund quickly arranged for his coronation as Bohemian king, a strange and fugitive affair attended by a few of his loyalists, and down in Prague the Táborites presented a catalogue of twelve articles to the university masters, listing their traditional demands for more evangelical discipline and Christian modesty. Offended by the citizenry, they once again made preparations for a demonstrative exodus and, in doing so, they destroyed the old Church of St. Paul and St. Peter at the Po and, somewhat later, the monasteries of St. Clemens in the Old Town, of the Servites, and of St. Ambrose (mostly demolished by the Táborite women who were lodged there). When the Táborites prepared to take on the Franciscan monastery and Church of St. Jacob, the Old Town butchers mobilized, took out their long knives and axes, and prevented further destruction. In other cases, the aldermen were sufficiently ingenious to employ effective ruses; the Gothic Church of St. Francis was made an arsenal, the Dominican nunnery of St. Anne was used to house nuns exiled from other places (they each had to take the Eucharist sub utraque specie), and the church and monastery of the Holy Spirit were turned over to Prague’s German Hussites, congregating there to hear their own preacher in their own language.

  Yet there was nobody to prevent the priest Václav Koranda, by now a hard-core radical and experienced Prague hater, from gathering an excited crowd and marching to the noble old Cistercian monastery at Zbraslav, long the burial place of Pfemyslid and Luxembourg kings and queens, including Eliška, mother of Charles IV, and, more recently, Václav IV. The crowds did their usual job of plundering and destroying, but also proceeded to pry open the royal tombs and rob the graves. We are told that they put the corpse of King Václav IV, not yet entirely decomposed, on an altar with a crown of straw on his skull, and poured beer over the rotting flesh, saying, “If you had been alive, buddy, you would have been drinking with us anyway!” They left the body there, set fire to the building, and marched back to Prague, parading in monks’ habits and sporting broken paintings and fragments of altarpieces as a sign of victory. Jan Želivský, the Táborites’ most reliable ally, engineered another revolt in the Old Town, but the Táborites, sensitive as ever to theological niceties, were disappointed by the university masters and left town once again.

  Landmarks and Battlefields of Hussite Prague

  The battle for the Vyšehrad and the Death of Jan Želivský

  By September 1420 the Prague Hussites felt strong enough to take the Vyšehrad, held by a rugged garrison of Czech and German royalist knights, and they established a military camp high on a nearby hill, looking down on the castle and offering a good view of what was going on inside its walls. Hussites and royalists used artillery and catapults to harass each other; extended artillery duels, often at close range, went on for days and weeks. The Hussites placed one of their cannons in the walls of the Church of St. Mary on the Lawn (which they had destroyed and used as a kind of bunker), but royalist artillerymen responded with considerable precision. Royalists at Hradany Castle also fired into the Old Town, in support of the Vyšehrad, one missile landing at the fish market, killing five women (one of them pregnant) and a man. Once again, the Prague Hussites appealed to the provinces for help, and allies from Hradec Králové, Louny, and Žatec came by the thousands (but only forty horsemen from Tábor, saying that Tábor could not spare troops at the moment) Hynek Krušina of Lichtenburk, the military leader of the Hussite force, surrounded the Vyšehrad on all sides, cutting off all lines of communication except on the steep side of the Vyšehrad cliff facing the river; military action inevitably concentrated on that spot. The starving garrison of royalists organized a courageous sortie and sent requests to Sigismund, who was roaming the countryside north and east of Prague, for more provisions to be shipped down the river; the Hussites tried to blockade the river and keep boats from slipping through. By the end of October, the situation of the royalist garrison had turned critical; food reserves were exhausted, and Sigismund had sent only fine dispatches about the necessity of holding the fort until he arrived. Jan Šembera of Boskovice, captain of the royalist garrison, met with Hussites to work out a rather complicated agreement to hand over the Vyšehrad on October 31 at 9 a.m., provided that the dearth of provisions continued and that the imperial army did not arrive before that hour. When the agreement was signed, a wonderful rainbow was seen over the river at the Vyšehrad, and the university masters, expert in interpretation, thought that it was a good omen.

  Sigismund, who had procrastinated, waiting for his rather self-willed Moravian allies, arrived on the Prague scene on October 31 at noon—that is, three hours too late. The Vyšehrad captain, punctiliously adhering to his agreement with the Hussites, had closed the Vyšehrad gates, declared himself a noncombatant, and even kept his German knights from riding out to support the emperor. Sigismund, with his army of twenty thousand Czechs, Moravians, Germans, and Hungarians, was forced to confront the main Hussite encampment on his own, and in the action his Czech and Moravian knights had to ride across a difficult and swampy terrain while the Germans and Hungarians easily descended from above.

  The Prague Hussites first gave way to the heavily armored Germans and Hungarians, who threw them against the walls of a church, but Krušina, appealing to Hussite tenacity, personally led the counterattack. Mikeš Divšek, a royalist knight, quickly turned to flight with all his men as the Hussites attacked them with deadly flails, tearing into the flesh of horses and men. Again the encounter was short and bloody, like that on Žižka’s Hill, and when it was all over, royalist Cze
chs and Moravians had suffered most. Radical priests gave the order that corpses of the fallen enemy be left in the fields to rot for three days, but many in the Prague army disregarded it. The emperor, who had previously proclaimed that he would “shit into the faces of the Hussites” rather than cede the castle, had to accept the fact that the Vyšehrad garrison had handed over the castle to the Hussites and gone off; for three days or more, the Prague citizens vented their rage on the fallen royalist stronghold, totally disregarding its proud past. First they invaded the chapels and churches to destroy altars, adornments, pictures, and organs; on the next day the dwellings of the prelates were plundered, with people scurrying back and forth between the town and the hill with their spoils; and, lastly, the crowds turned against the palaces of the Czech dukes and kings, leaving them in sad ruins, and tore down, for military reasons, the walls that separated Vyšehrad Castle from the New Town. All the pious efforts of King Charles IV to restore the Vyšehrad to its ancient grandeur were undone. In the absence of the imperial army and on the basis of an agreement with lords and knights, the Prague Hussites occupied Hradany Castle on June 7, 1421; the invading iconoclasts began to burn paintings and to destroy other works of art, but the worst was prevented by resolute knights and burghers—if they had not intervened, the chronicler (himself a moderate Hussite) remarks, these madmen would have blasphemously destroyed the castle and the cathedral of the Czech patrons.