Battle of Německý Brod, 1422: Žižka routs the second crusade

Německý Brod was the end of a winter campaign that showed Jan Žižka at his best. Betrayed and surrounded at Kutná Hora in the snow of December 1421, he broke out by night with his army intact, then turned and in five days chased a far larger royal army across eastern Bohemia and out of the country. Count Lützow, the English-language historian of the Hussite Wars, saw in the speed of that pursuit, through an almost roadless country in the middle of winter, a wonderful proof of Žižka's energy and of the willpower of his men.²

Background: the crusades against the Hussites

The Hussite Wars grew out of the burning of the Czech reformer Jan Hus at the Council of Constance on 6 July 1415. His teachings already had a wide following in Bohemia. When King Wenceslas IV died in August 1419, his brother Sigismund of Luxembourg, King of Hungary, claimed the Bohemian crown, but he would not accept the conditions the Czech nobles set, and many Czechs saw him as their enemy.³

The movement already had its symbol, the chalice, standing for the right of lay people to receive both the bread and the wine at communion. It also had its first act of violence. On 30 July 1419 stones were thrown at a Hussite procession from the New Town Hall in Prague, and the crowd, with Žižka at its head, threw the burgomaster and several councillors out of the windows, the First Defenestration of Prague. In 1420 the Hussites set out their demands in the Four Articles of Prague, and Sigismund rejected them.⁴

At Sigismund's request Pope Martin V proclaimed a crusade against the Hussites in March 1420. It broke down at Vítkov Hill outside Prague that summer. A second crusade came in 1421: a German army besieged Žatec in the northwest from late August and fled in early October, before Sigismund's Hungarian army was even ready. That left Sigismund to fight on alone from the southeast.⁵

The man who would face him had lost his last good eye that summer. Žižka, already blind in one eye, was wounded at the siege of Rábí castle in 1421 and left completely blind, yet he went on commanding the Hussite armies.⁶

Armies and commanders

Sigismund's army marched in from Hungary through Moravia in the autumn of 1421. Its field commander was Filippo Scolari, an Italian condottiere in Hungarian service better known as Pippo Spano. Its size is uncertain: WarHistory.org describes a Hungarian force of 60,000, including 23,000 cavalry, and some 50,000 men before Kutná Hora, while the Czech news site Novinky.cz writes that Sigismund crossed into Moravia on 16 October at the head of 20,000 crusaders. Both sources, and the Czech chronicles they quote, dwell on the cruelty of its march, with villages burned and women raped.⁷

Žižka led the united armies of Tabor and Prague. He reached Prague on 1 December, was welcomed like a sovereign, and on 8 December marched for Kutná Hora, the silver-mining town that held the kingdom's mint. Besides infantry he brought horsemen and the battle wagons that were the heart of Hussite warfare: farm carts turned into a mobile fortress, chained together in a ring and manned by crossbowmen and men with handguns and small cannon.⁸

The battle in phases

Betrayal at Kutná Hora. Žižka did not trust the town, whose mostly German, Catholic townspeople leaned toward Sigismund, so on 21 December 1421 he took his army out of the gates and fortified it behind its wagons a short way west of the walls. The royal cavalry attacked again and again until dark, and the Hussite guns threw them back. But while the fight raged outside, conspirators inside opened another gate to the royal troops. A massacre of the Hussites in the town followed, and Žižka was cut off from his food and his winter clothing, surrounded on every side.⁹

The breakout. Toward dawn on 22 December the Hussites drove their wagons, guns firing, into the royal lines and broke through. They formed a new wagon fort on the hill of Kaňk beyond the town and waited, cold and hungry, for an attack that never came, then slipped away to Kolín. Lützow has the army safe at Kolín by 23 December. Novinky.cz quotes Petr Čornej's judgment that it is hard to understand how the crusaders let the Hussites escape from under their hands, and his prosaic explanation: it was dark and freezing, Kutná Hora was taken, and Christmas was coming.¹⁰

Nebovidy, 6 January 1422. Sigismund entered Kutná Hora, kept Christmas there and believed the heretics beaten. He spread his army through the villages around the town for shelter from the cold. Žižka spent the holiday calling up reinforcements, and on the feast of the Epiphany, 6 January 1422, he marched out of Kolín and fell on the royal troops at Nebovidy, halfway to Kutná Hora. They broke and fled. WarHistory.org warns that no source describes these fights in any detail beyond that the Hussites attacked and the royal troops ran.¹¹

Habry, 8 January. Sigismund gave up Kutná Hora and ordered it set on fire, but the Hussites arrived in time to put out the flames. His retreat soon turned into flight, dragging with it the Catholic miners and their families, who feared Hussite revenge. On 8 January, near the village of Habry, Pippo Spano drew up the royal army on a line of hills to delay the pursuit. When the Hussites came on, the Hungarian cavalry turned and galloped off, the infantry followed, and the rout was complete. Wagons loaded with plunder were abandoned on the road.¹²

Turning point: the ice of the Sázava

Sigismund did not stop at Německý Brod. He crossed the Sázava by its bridge and rode on toward the Moravian border, but the bridge could not take the panicked mass behind him. Horsemen tried to cross the frozen river, and the ice gave way under them. The chronicles followed by Lützow count 458 men in armor drowned; WarHistory.org gives 548 knights. The king's baggage and the plunder of his army fell to the Hussites.¹³

What was left of the royal army shut itself inside the walls of Německý Brod. The Hussites attacked the next morning after Mass, and the defenders, with no hope left, opened talks on surrender. Here the sources part on the date: Lützow puts the assault on 9 January, while Novinky.cz and Seznam Zprávy, following current Czech historians, date the negotiations to 10 January, the date the 1911 Britannica gives for the town's fall. All agree on what happened next. While the talks went on, some Hussites climbed the walls without Žižka's knowledge, and a massacre of soldiers and townspeople began that he could not stop and condemned. Seznam Zprávy reports that about 1,500 people were killed; Novinky.cz quotes the nineteenth-century historian František Palacký speaking of several hundred.¹⁴

Aftermath

The second crusade was over. Estimates of Sigismund's losses run from at least 4,500 dead (WarHistory.org) and at least 5,000 (Novinky.cz) to about 12,000 over the whole retreat (Lützow and the 1911 Britannica). No source records Hussite losses.¹⁵

Habry was Sigismund's last campaign in person in the Hussite Wars in Bohemia; the later crusades were left to others. Within months the Hussites had turned to Grand Duke Vytautas of Lithuania, and in 1422 the prince Sigismund Korybut came to rule Bohemia for a time. Sigismund sent one more army in 1426, which was beaten at Aussig, now Ústí nad Labem. The Hussites were broken only from within, at Lipany in 1434, and in 1436 they finally accepted Sigismund as king.¹⁶

Legacy and memory

The sack of Německý Brod troubled Žižka. WarHistory.org connects it, and a similar loss of control a year later, with the military regulations he drew up, among the first written codes of conduct for soldiers in Europe. Lützow saw in those regulations the severe, almost puritan discipline that set his armies apart at a time when soldiers were allowed almost anything. Žižka died in 1424, never beaten in the field.¹⁷

The campaign still fascinates military writers. WarHistory.org calls it Žižka at his best on offense and defense: a breakout from encirclement and a pursuit across country in the dead of winter, led by a blind general, which it calls anything but typical medieval warfare. The date of the last blow, 10 January, has its place on our 10 January page.¹⁸

Visiting today

Německý Brod is now Havlíčkův Brod, a town in the Vysočina region of the Czech Republic, and the battle at Habry was fought near the present-day small town of that name, on the road along which the royal army fled. Kutná Hora, where the campaign began, lies farther back along the same line of retreat.¹⁹