Calgary, September 2026
Some time ago, I wrote an article about the golden Prague of King Rudolf II. At that time (1583 – 1612), important artists and scientists like the painters Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Bartholomeus Spranger, British mathematician John Dee, and astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler made Prague the European center of art and science. But that wasn’t always the case. There were times when Prague was anything but golden, and one of those periods was the Hussite wars (1419 – 1434).
In the early 1400s, Prague reached the peak of its medieval importance. Following massive urban expansion under King Charles IV, Prague ranked as one of the largest cities north of the Alps. Its population was around 90,000 inhabitants, and architectural monuments like the Town Hall with its astronomical clock, the St Vitus Cathedral, Charles Bridge, and others made Prague unique among European cities. Charles University, the oldest in the central Europe, was a major international center of learning and had about 30,000 students, 200 professors and 500 assistants.
But Prague was also full of contrasts. While the Old Town was showing its splendour, people in the New Town lived in poverty. They were watching the riches of the corrupt Catholic Church and were asking: “Why do they live in such luxury when their own teaching says they should be poor?” Those sentiments were publicly expressed by one priest, Jan Hus. He was not only a priest but also a scholar, a professor and later a rector of Charles University and was disgusted with the corruption of catholic church. His preaching from Betlémská Kaple, in the Czech language, was based in the ideas which, a hundred years later, became the basis of the Protestant religion. Those sermons gave him a huge following and, not surprisingly, the Catholic Church didn’t like it. After various confrontations, where Jan Hus was declared a heretic, King Zikmund invited him to the Counsil of Constance to defend his view. He guaranteed him safe conduct but, as we all know, this didn’t happen, and on July 6, 1415, Jan Hus was burned to death.
At school, we were taught that Zikmund was a traitor who betrayed Jan Hus, but the history is more complicated. Zikmund was the second son of King Charles IV and a brother of the current Czech king Wenceslaus IV. Both men sympathized with the teaching of Jan Hus, and Zikmund indeed wanted him to defend his views. When the Catholic Church arrested Jan Hus, Zikmund protested vigorously, but the church was determined to silence any opposition. They convinced Zikmund that the unity of the church, and his own political ambitions were more important than keeping his promise of safe conduct for an accused heretic. However, this turned out to be a big and expensive mistake. When the people of Prague learned about the death of their favorite preached, they decided to do something about it. Under the leadership of a radical priest, Jan Želivský, in 1419 they stormed the New Town Hall and threw several of mostly German councillors out of the window. When Zikmund, who, after the death of his brother Wenceslaus IV was proclaimed the king of Bohemia, learned about that, he knew he cannot let it pass. In 1420, he came with a massive army of crusaders to occupy and punish Prague but was soundly defeated by the peasant troops of Jan Žižka, who came from the town of Tábor to help Prague. What followed was 15 years of Czech military glory, when Žižka’s, and later Prokop Holý’s, peasant army repeatedly defeated the German crusaders. We learned all about it at school.
But military glory has its price. The land of Bohemia was devastated, and life in Prague became increasingly difficult. To make things even worse, Jan Želivský demanded a strict adherence to the Hussite doctrine. His fanatics burned and looted Catholic churches and terrorized people who they considered not sufficiently indoctrinated. That led to the discontent of the moderate faction of the Prague Hussite movement, and when, in March 1422, Jan Želivsky was secretly executed by the moderates, the conflict between the two factions turned into open hostility. That hostility escalated to the point that in 1424 Žižka, a radical, arrived with his troops at the gates of Prague with the intention to occupy the city. Žižka, who only four years ago saved Prague from the occupation, now considered the city as his enemy. Fortunately, a moderate priest, Jan Rokycana, negotiated a peace treaty, and both factions of the Hussite movement decided it was better to fight Zikmund’s crusaders than to fight among themselves.
In the meantime, Zikmund, after several more defeats, realized that there was no military solution to the Czech problem and turned to diplomacy. At the Council of Basel in 1433, the Church and Hussites negotiated a compromise which the moderates accepted, but the radicals did not. This disagreement lead in 1434 to the last battle of the Hussite Wars, the battle in Lipany, where the radicals were thoroughly defeated. After that, the moderates were accepted to the catholic church, and Zikmund officially became a king of Bohemia, paving his way to the title of Holy Roman Emperor.
The question is, was it worth it? At school we learned that the Hussite’s wars is the part of Czech history we should be proud of, that Czechs were able to defeat a much stronger enemy. This is true. But it is also true that the wars devastated the land and destroyed Prague’s medieval importance. Numerous Catholic monasteries inside Prague were raided, burned, or pulled down. Many priceless medieval literary works, historical artifacts, and holy relics gathered during the reign of King Charles IV were lost or destroyed. Charles University, which before the war had thousands of students and hundreds of professors, was reduced to only one department with 6 professors and a handful of students. After the Hussite Wars, Prague definitively wasn’t golden.
What can we learn from all that? For me, this part of history confirmed what the wise king Solomon said 3000 years ago: “Nothing new under the sun.” In the 1420s, the all-powerful German crusaders couldn’t defeat the peasant army of Jan Žižka and Prokop Holý. Five hundred and fifty years later, the all-powerful US military couldn’t defeat the Vietcong of Vietnam. Later, they couldn’t defeat the Muslim resistance to their occupation of Iraq, they lost the war in Afghanistan, and now they are losing the war in Iran. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union lost the war in Afghanistan, and now they cannot defeat Ukraine. In the 1420s, the Hussite fanatics were looting and destroying Catholic cathedrals and in 2001 the Taliban fanatics blew up the 6th-century Buddha monuments. The hatred between the Shia and Sunni in the Muslim religion is just as strong as the hatred between the radicals and moderates within the Hussite movement. If King Solomon could see our world today, he wouldn’t be surprised.