The Battle of Vítkov Hill

JAN 01 1420 · 12:00

Žižka's outnumbered Hussites break Sigismund's crusader cavalry on the slopes of Vítkov, 14 July 1420. Place: Vítkov Hill, east of the New Town walls Figures: Jan Žižka of Trocnov, Hussite hejtman (one-eyed) · Sigismund of Luxembourg, King of the Romans · the Prague militia · the first anti-Hussite crusade Pope Martin V proclaims a crusade against the Hussite heretics in March 1420. Sigismund of Luxembourg, brother of the dead Wenceslas IV and the man who let Hus burn at Konstanz five years before, arrives at the head of an imperial host. Estimates run from twenty thousand to over a hundred thousand depending on the chronicler's loyalty; the modern guess is around thirty thousand mixed German, Hungarian, and Bohemian Catholic troops. By mid-July they are encamped on the heights above Prague, ready to relieve the loyalist garrison still holding the Castle and Vyšehrad. Jan Žižka, by now hejtman of the radical Tábor brotherhood, has fortified Vítkov, the long whaleback ridge east of the New Town. The position guards the road by which supplies enter Hussite Prague from the east. If Sigismund takes the hill, the city starves. Žižka has lost one eye long before, in private war; he will lose the second in 1421 at the siege of Rábí. He has perhaps nine thousand men, most of them peasants, women among them, armed with flails, pikes, hooks, and the war wagons (vozová hradba) that he has turned from a transport into a tactic.