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Authors: Peter Demetz

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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 Hrad
any 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
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 Hrad
any 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 Div
šek, 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 Czechs 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 Hrad
any 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.
Whenever dangers ebbed, the conflicts between the Prague moderates and the radicals, allied to Tábor, usually increased. By early 1422, negotiations between the Prague Old Town, mostly moderate if not conservative, and the New Town, mostly radical, were controlled by an administrative
group of nineteen men, consisting of many Hussite knights and also Jan Žižka himself. In early March 1422 resistance to Želivský and his faction on the part of the Prague moderates, including the university masters, noticeably stiffened; Master Jakoubek of St
bro himself presented to the Old Town magistrate an accusation making Jan Želivský responsible for much unrest and the spilling of blood. (Somewhat earlier, the radicals had arrested Jan Sádlo, a Hussite military commander of moderate persuasion, allegedly because of dereliction of duty, and put him to death without a trial.) The Old Town aldermen conspired to get rid of Želivský and his supporters once and for all, and invited him and his most important friends to the town hall on March 9 on the pretext that they wanted to hear his advice about the war. They sweetly pretended to listen to his words, but suddenly the doors swung open, the executioner and his men entered, and the radicals were arrested and put in chains. Jan Želivský behaved with great dignity, knelt down and prayed, confessed to a priest, and, at the head of his group, walked to the courtyard, where all nine men (twelve, according to other reports) were immediately beheaded. His followers had gathered at his church, and it was the blood mixed with water flowing from the town hall gutters into the Old Town Square that revealed to the people what had happened.
Slaughter was answered by slaughter. Surging crowds entered the courtyard and discovered the corpses; and Jan Želivský’s severed head was first shown by one of his men from a manure heap on the square to his raging followers and later, in an expression of savage grief, put onto a dish by a priest and carried through the streets of the towns, while church bells rang alarms. Two aldermen were killed immediately, and after a new radical town government had been established, five or six magistrates were discovered, hiding, and put to death, their dwellings ransacked. Želivský′s followers then turned against the colleges and university, destroyed the masters’ collections of books and much of the university library, and arrested the masters who had not yet escaped. In the traditional ways of the Prague
Lumpenproletariat,
the mob finally invaded the Jewish Town looking for spoils. The arrested masters were exiled to Hradec Králové, where they were supposed to repent under the guidance of radical priests. Jan Želivský was buried under the pulpit of his Church of St. Mary of the Snows; in the funeral oration, interrupted only by the weeping and the sighing of the congregation, his
adlatus
Vilém accused Jakoubek of St
bro of being fully responsible for the murder of Želivský.
BOOK: Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City
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