We know that it took a crusade to suppress the desire for freedom among the Stedinger in 1234. By 1431, this method had been applied a few more times, so there was nothing fundamentally shocking about Friedrich I, Elector of Brandenburg, and papal legate Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini laying siege to the town of Taus or Domazlice in Bohemia (today’s Czech Republic). Expecting a relief force, the seasoned campaigner Friedrich positioned troops to receive the enemy who obligingly arrayed themselves for battle, unfurled their banners, and started to sing. The combined force of crusading troops took one good lock at the enemy and legged it for Germany, leaving behind their entire baggage train including the correspondence of Cardinal Cesarini and the original papal bull that authorised their presence. The cardinal barely escaped with his life.
The story of Domazlice – which may be legendary – invites easy mockery, but what had happened to get us there was truly earth-shaking. After all, the crusading forces that had been struggling to subdue the rebellious Bohemians for over a decade were large, well-equipped, mostly ably led, and included some of the finest knights in Europe. Their opponents were mainly peasants on foot, indifferently armoured and lugging an enormous, unwieldy collection of primitive guns. Fifteen years ago, all of it had started with an angry protest, a high-handed response, and the customary recourse of the powerful to brute force, but this time, force had failed them.
The place where it happened, Bohemia, was a rich and populous country on the eastern border of the Holy Roman Empire. Its kings had been Holy Roman Emperors, residing mostly in Prague, so ties between the kingdom and the empire were close and people of different languages mingled on both sides of the border. These were not ethnic nation states, Germans here, Czechs there, and anyway, there were plenty of other tongues around. However, some of them had turned out to be more equal than others. Between the influence of the empire and the way their language afforded them access to wider networks of trade and education, German speakers were overrepresented among the rich and powerful. Many nobles spoke only German by choice or of necessity, and plenty of Czechs resented their marginalisation bitterly. Nineteenth-century historians have read what followed as a war between Germans and Slavs, a national independence movement, or a battle for economic self-determination, and it was a bit of all those things, but above all, it was a chaotic shock to an already creaking system of government.
The people who routed one crusading army after another were townspeople and farmers, mostly Czech-speaking, mainly non-noble, from Bohemia. The kingdom was noted for its wealth and there were already recipes claiming it as their origin in the fifteenth century. It would acquire a reputation for culinary excellence in later centuries. However, it was also a land of rugged mountains, ruled over in popular legend by the wild spirit lord Rübezahl and populated by poor, hardy peasants. In those high valleys, grain grew indifferently, cattle would rarely thrive, and often long winter and early storms ruined a promising harvest. Farmers on both sides of the border had developed an ingenious device to save their crops in that instance, and we learn of it from the 1485 Kuchenmaistrey:
1.xliii Item to keep ears of grain over the year such as spelt or wheat, take them while they are green when they are ready to cut (seng) and dry them in a baking oven or in the sun. Store them high, as you do cherries, and when you would have them, lay them in fresh well water and they will return to their virtue (zu ir krafft). Boil young chickens with this or cook them with small pieces of bacon and salt, or with butter. Gamebirds boiled with this are also easily digested.
Item you can also keep dried pears of all kinds this way.
This trick is not unique to Bohemia. We know it as Grünkern in Germany today, and internationally it is more familiar as the Levantine dish freekeh. Prepared this way, it is the kind of food that everybody ate, from the poorest of peasants boiling a meagre porridge from parched grains and old bacon in their mountain hut to the landed gentry and substantial burghers enjoying a fine young chicken or a few quail stewed in the richly seasoned pot. It is not exactly a national cuisine, but a shared culinary grammar that everyone understood, and it could feed the armies that the country direly needed.
If you want to learn about the Hussite revolt in detail, the best way is to listen to season 9 of Dirk Hoffmann-Becking’s excellent History of the Germans podcast. It is a long and winding story complicated by fault lines of language, politics, and religion, but its origins lie in Prague and with a popular, eloquent Czech-speaking cleric known as Jan Hus. He was a serious intellectual, important in the development of Czech as a literary language, close to the royal family, and famous for his personal rectitude. What made him a problem was that he also read the Bible, which was actually a new thing for clerics to do, and took it very seriously.
1400 was not a good time to be a serious Christian. Technically united by the Catholic church, Western Europe was in practice divided between two rival popes, one in Rome, the other in Avignon, since 1378. After an attempt to resolve the crisis in 1409, there were briefly three. None of them were particularly stellar examples of leadership or probity, and the church suffered accordingly. Hus, who felt this problem acutely, wrestled with the question of church reform in sermons and writing. His words fell on fertile soil: People were heartily sick of the venality, corruption, and arrogance they saw in the clergy. They equally resented the way the church and their new king imposed the orthodoxy of a distant power centre on them and sucked out their wealth in increasingly creative ways, not the least of them the sale of indulgences. We will get back to that point. Despite efforts by the archbishop to silence him, Hus drew a vocal following that made him effectively untouchable in his home country.
The schism, together with much other outstanding business, was eventually resolved in a great church council held at Constance from 1414 to 1418. Hus was called before this council to defend his writings and, despite promises of safe conduct, arrested, tried, and burned as a heretic. His persecution by the church had already led to unrest in Prague, but news of his death caused a massive outcry. A letter of protest was submitted by the Bohemian estates while people in the city and elsewhere attacked unpopular clerics and demonstrated. King Wenceslas initially tried to balance between the parties, but quickly came down on the papal side. His successor Sigismund took an even more pronounced stance. The result was a popular uprising, driving royal government and the higher echelons of the church from Prague. In what would become a local tradition, protesters stormed Hradcany castle and threw representatives of the church and imperial power out of an upper-story window.
The response was quick. This was no mere riot, it was a challenge to the established order where noble dynasties ruled increasingly sophisticated states with the assistance of highly educated clergy and armies of expensively trained armoured horsemen. A crusade was called to slap down the unruly mob, something nobody expected to be terribly difficult given how quickly they descended into internecine feuding. Sigismund led his army into Bohemia in 1420 and – lost.
There are a few moments like that in military history, the point where someone figures out an inexpensive solution to an expensive challenge and proceeds to wipe the floor with a formerly invincible opponent. The Bohemian rebels fielded infantry armed with halberds and pikes, crossbows and handguns, supported by artillery and improvised field fortifications built from heavy baggage wagons. The knights of the emperor had no answer to this. They went down to defeat in 1420, 1422, 1426, and 1432, with a break for several battles between internal factions.
What is now called the Hussite Wars does not really get enough coverage in the English speaking world. It is a truly revolutionary moment in several ways. Firstly, while most of the heresies the Catholic church combated in the middle ages were at most heterodox groundswells and in many cases did not actually exist, this was the real thing: a grassroots rebellion not against individual abuses, but against the church as an entity. The Hussites eventually made peace and reintegrated into the Catholic church on negotiated terms, but they are today considered a Protestant denomination. Secondly, it was a moment where rebellion was framed in terms of national identity, an oppressed ethnic group opposing a privileged one, in the pattern we see so much of in future centuries. Thirdly, this is when the lower classes, without the extensive training and expensive gear of the dominant powers, managed to turn themselves into an effective army. The medieval Empire continued for another half century or so, but there was no going back from any of these things. And, lest we forget, we owe much of this to an upstanding intellectual and a bunch of commoners whose sense of justice was offended enough to protest what they were taught was the divine order of things. Turned out it wasn’t.