Jan Zizka

Jan Zizka commanded the Hussite armies of Bohemia, was blind for the last three years of his life, and was never defeated in a battle he directed. He had been a minor nobleman, a mercenary and possibly a highwayman, and had fought at Grunwald in 1410 against the Teutonic Order; he lost one eye at some point before the wars and the second in 1421 at the siege of Rabi. The Hussite revolt began after Jan Hus was burned at Constance in 1415 despite an imperial safe-conduct, and by 1419 Bohemia was in open rebellion against Sigismund and facing crusades called by the pope. Zizka's forces were peasants and townsmen with no cavalry tradition against European heavy horse, and his answer was the war wagon: farm carts chained into a square, loaded with crossbowmen and with small cannon, forming a mobile fortress that broke charges and then opened to let infantry counter-attack. It is among the earliest effective battlefield uses of gunpowder weapons by infantry, and it beat knights repeatedly - at Sudomer, Vitkov hill, Kutna Hora and Nemecky Brod. His discipline was severe and his religion uncompromising; he burned monasteries, and he destroyed the radical Adamite sect among his own side. He died of plague in 1424 while campaigning against fellow Hussites, the moderates having by then become the enemy. His followers called themselves the Orphans afterwards. The wars continued until 1434, when the moderates defeated the radicals at Lipany and made terms. He is a Czech national symbol, claimed in turn by nineteenth-century nationalists and by the communist state.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history