The Taborites (1420-1452)

The Taborites cannot be understood without measuring what, in a few months, takes Bohemia from procession to war: two burnings at Constance (Jan Hus in 1415, Jerome of Prague in 1416, see the Hussitism article), then a defenestration at Prague. The radicals conclude that reform will come neither from councils nor from the king: it will come from a mountain.

The defenestration and the flight of the radicals (1419)

On 30 July 1419, the preacher Jan Želivský (John of Želiv) leads an armed chalice procession through the New Town of Prague; at the town hall, the crowd seizes seven Catholic councillors and hurls them from the windows onto the pikes waiting below^[5]. Seventeen days later, on 16 August 1419, King Wenceslas IV dies of apoplexy, and his half-brother Sigismund, King of Hungary, the man of Constance and of the burning of Hus, claims the crown of Bohemia^[6]. For the radicals, the throne stands vacant in heaven as on earth: Sigismund the heretic king will never reign, and corrupt Prague will not be the place of salvation.

From autumn 1419, itinerant preachers announce that Christ will return in 1420, that the wicked will be exterminated and that the elect must gather in places of refuge, "mountains" after the image of the biblical Tabor^[7]. Crowds of peasants sell their goods, sometimes burn their houses, and climb the hills: Mount Bzí, Mount Oreb, from which the eastern radicals take the name of Orebites, then, at the start of 1420, Sezimovo Ústí and Plzeň, which the radicals proclaim "City of the Sun"^[8].

Hradiště becomes Tábor (spring 1420)

In spring 1420, the radicals of Plzeň, driven out by the Catholics, retreat southward under the leadership of the nobleman Mikuláš z Husi (Nicholas of Hus): they seize the small town of Ústí, then occupy the abandoned fortress of Hradiště, a naturally impregnable position above the Lužnice, and rename it Tábor, from the Czech name for Mount Tabor^[9]. The choice of name is a whole programme: as Christ was transfigured on Tabor before Peter, James and John, Bohemia will be transfigured on this hill before the nations^[10].

Vavřinec z Březové, the Prague chronicler hostile to radical excesses, thus sums up the chiliastic preaching of winter 1419-1420: the faithful sold all they possessed, pooled the money and climbed the mountains, asserting that the time had come when Christ would reign visibly on earth with his elect^[11].

On 25 March 1420, at Sudoměř, a one-eyed minor nobleman in his forties, Jan Žižka of Trocnov, covers the retreat of the Plzeň exiles with some 400 peasants entrenched behind wagons: he repels 2,000 royal cavalry^[12]. The Taborite legend is born that day, and with it its war leader: Žižka, former chamberlain of Wenceslas IV, veteran of the Polish wars, who lost one eye as a child and will lose the other at the siege of Rabí in 1421, and will never lose a battle^[13].

The preachers of the millennium

Three names carry the fervour of 1420. Martin Húska, called Loquis ("the Chatterbox"), a former priest turned prophet, announces that Christ will return within weeks and that the whole old order, papacy, kingship, lordships, towns, will be consumed by fire^[14]. Václav Koranda, priest of Plzeň, theorizes the community of goods: at Tábor, he proclaims, there will be neither "mine" nor "thine"^[15]. In 1420, the third man is Mikuláš z Husi himself, who turns the hill into a republic: four elected captains (hetmané), common vats into which each pours what he owns, priests elected by the people^[16]. (As for Jan Čapek, he will enter the scene only later, at the head of the Orphans.)

Rome responds as she did to the Albigensians two centuries earlier: on 1 March 1420, Pope Martin V thunders the crusade bull against the heretics of Bohemia, and Emperor Sigismund raises an army of German, Hungarian and Silesian crusaders^[17]. The war of religion begins, and it is this war, paradoxically, that will weld the Taborites together: besieged, they will stop arguing over the exact date of the end of the world in order to learn to load cannon.

The doctrine of Tábor is not a scholar's system: it is an explosive blend of Wycliffism imported from England, Joachimism lingering across Europe for two centuries, and the Apocalypse read literally by peasants at war. The masters of Prague will judge it severely; the Church will condemn it outright. It must be presented honestly before being judged, that is the rule of this encyclopedia, including for heresies.

The chiliast articles of 1420

In early 1420, the preachers had Tábor adopt a series of articles whose substance Vavřinec z Březové, a Prague chronicler hostile to radical excesses, preserved for us: the present world, given over to sin, will end within the year; Christ will descend to reign visibly with his elect; there will be neither king, nor lord, nor serf, nor tribute; all human laws will be abolished; the wicked will be exterminated by the sword of the elect before the Judgment^[18]. The formula summing it all up, repeated in the villages, fits in one sentence: “Christ is coming, and his friends must help him with the sword”^[19].

The parallel with radical Joachimism is striking: third age, reign of the Spirit, fall of the carnal Church, but Tábor goes further than Joachim: the third age is not awaited, it is imposed, and the elect do not only pray, they strike^[20]. And the parallel with the Free Spirit heresy stops short exactly where it would seem to begin: where the Free Spirit professed the impeccability of the “perfect”, exempt from all law, the Taborites impose on their faithful an iron discipline, biblical and puritan: carnal disorder will itself be exterminated with the rest^[21].

Sacraments and a stripped worship

On worship, Tábor makes a clean sweep with implacable logic: whatever cannot be read expressly in Scripture is an invention of priests and must disappear. Purgatory is denied: no more masses for the dead, no more expiatory alms, no more indulgences^[22]. Images, relics, ornaments, stone altars, embroidered copes are idols: they are smashed, burned, and the liturgy is celebrated on a simple wooden table, in the open air if need be^[23]. The liturgy is held in Czech, priestly vestments are abolished, singing is that of a people in arms^[24].

Two sacraments remain: baptism and the Supper, distributed under both kinds to all, including, following the Utraquist practice launched by Jakoubek, to little children^[25]. The verse grounding all the piety of the chalice, in Prague as at Tábor, is this one:

“Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life in you.”, Gospel according to Saint John, 6, 53^[26] But on the Eucharist, Tábor breaks even with Prague: following their theologian Nicholas of Pelhřimov, the Taborites reject scholastic transubstantiation, refuse the adoration and the elevation of the host, and admit only a spiritual presence of Christ received by the faith of the communicants, a position which their adversaries, from the chronicler Březová to the future Pius II, will reproach them for as a denial of the real presence^[27]. The accusation is grave and it is documented; it makes the Taborites, a century before Luther, the first since Berengar of Tours to deny transubstantiation outright, with this decisive difference: Berengar had retracted in 1079, while the Taborites defended their denial sword in hand^[28].

The Church itself is redefined: as with Jan Hus and John Wyclif, see the articles Wycliffism and Jan Hus, the true Church is the assembly of the predestined, and the prelate in a state of mortal sin is no longer prelate or priest^[29]. Decisive practical consequence: in September 1420, the community of Tábor elects its own “bishop”, the priest Nicholas of Pelhřimov, called Biskupec (c. 1385, c. 1459), who in turn ordains Taborite priests without any mandate from the archbishop of Prague^[30]. There are now, in fact, two Churches in Bohemia: Prague’s, which keeps bishops consecrated in the succession, and Tábor’s, which wants none.

Holy war as sacrament

The most distinctively Taborite trait remains the theology of the sword: punishing sinners is not a political necessity, it is a religious duty hastening the Kingdom. Taborite texts cite the imprecatory Psalms, the books of the Maccabees, the Apocalypse, and Žižka has his columns preceded by a hymn that became the anthem of the movement:

“You who are God’s warriors and of his law, seek help from God and hope in him, so that with him you may always be victorious.”, Hussite war song “Ktož jsú boží bojovníci”, first stanza (Ignispedia translation)^[31]

Against this reading, the Church sets the very word of Christ at Gethsemane, and this encyclopedia unhesitatingly makes it its own:

“Put your sword back in its place: for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”, Gospel according to Saint Matthew, 26, 52^[32]

And against the claim of the impeccable elect, for the preachers went that far: the true Taborites, said the most exalted, can no longer sin, the Church sets the warning of the Beloved Apostle:

“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”, First Epistle of Saint John, 1, 8^[33]

Tábor is not only a doctrine and an army: for thirty years, it is a town, 4,000 inhabitants at its height, ramparts, armorers’ workshops, priests, women and children, attempting to live the Gospel without private property^[34]. Each newcomer pours his goods into the common vats (kádě); the community feeds, arms and clothes each according to need^[35]. Marxist historians will see in it, in the 20th century, the first communist experiment in European history, an anachronistic but revealing reading: never had a medieval heresy pushed evangelical contempt for riches as far as the legal abolition of mine and thine, even at the scale of a besieged town^[36].

Discipline there is of a rigor to make a monastery pale: games, dancing, adornment, drunkenness punished; common prayer; daily preaching; and, for grave crimes, theft, murder, treason, death, pronounced in the name of divine law^[37]. None of the laxity the inquisitors reproached in the heterodox Beguines and Beghards: Tábor is puritan, biblical, implacable, including toward itself.

The Pikarti and the purge of the extremists (1421)

Millenarian fever inevitably produces its bidding wars. In spring 1421, a few dozen exalted souls leave Tábor for the island in the Nežárka, near Veselí: the Pikarti, from the Flemish beghards distorted, a contemptuous nickname likening them to the heretics of the Low Countries, soon nicknamed Adamites because they go naked like Adam before the Fall, profess the community of women and proclaim that the elect, being impeccable, may allow themselves everything^[38]. It is, small scale and worse, the Free Spirit thesis, see the article the Free Spirit heresy, currently being drafted, transplanted to the bank of a Bohemian river.

Žižka, who does not trifle with discipline, exterminates them: in spring 1421, his troops take the island and burn some fifty Adamites, including their leader, sparing those who retract in order to reeducate them at Tábor^[39]. The episode is key to understanding Taboritism: Tábor is not mystical anarchy, it is the orthodoxy of the Revolution, and like every revolution, it devours its most advanced children. Martin Húska himself, the prophet Loquis, too compromised with the Pikarti, is arrested, tortured and burned at Prague in August 1421, not by the Catholics, but on the order of the Utraquist masters^[40].

|| Exalted groups | Numbers | Distinctive doctrine | Fate | ||---|---|---|---| || Chiliast preachers (Húska, Koranda) | Several hundred itinerant preachers | End of the world in 1420, extermination of the wicked | Integrated then disciplined; Húska burned in 1421 | || Pikarti / Adamites of Nežárka | A few dozen | Adamic nudity, community of women, impeccability | Exterminated by Žižka in spring 1421 | || Eastern Orebites | Several thousand (Mount Oreb) | Close to Tábor, more moderate politically | Rallied to Žižka, then merged into the Orphans | || “Wise” Taborites (Biskupec) | The body of the town | Written confession, negotiation possible | Will survive until 1452, then Unity of the Brethren |

Here heresy becomes epic, and we must give Žižka his due: a genuine military genius, whom staff academies would study into the 20th century. Without him, Tábor would have been a commune crushed in a single summer; with him, a handful of peasants stood up to the Empire^[41].

The Wagenburg of War Wagons

The Taborite invention comes down to three words: the wagon, the cannon, the flail. Heavy farm wagons armored with planks, chained wheel to wheel, form a mobile fortress within minutes, the vozová hradba, the "Wagenburg", bristling with houfnice, small field cannon whose Czech name (houf, the crowd) gave French the word for howitzer^[42]. Between the wheels, infantrymen armed with flails tipped with iron, the threshing tool turned weapon, shatter the charges of armored cavalry. Light Taborite cavalry finishes off the fugitives. Against this system, feudal chivalry, charging in scattered order for the glory of each banner, breaks as on a reef: the crusaders learned at their cost that a rolling fortress is not taken^[43].

In 1423, Žižka codified the whole system in his Vojenský řád, the Military Ordinance: death for individual pillaging, for flight, for drunkenness on campaign, for disobedience to captains, plus common prayer before every battle^[44]. An army of peasants kneeling in prayer before loading cannon: that is the exact image of Taboritism, piety and powder mixed.

Five Crusades Broken: the Battles

Between 1420 and 1422, Žižka strung together a series of victories that stunned Europe: never had an army of non-nobles so thoroughly defeated imperial chivalry, and never had a heresy produced such victory bulletins^[45].

Two shadows, however, fall across these triumphs. At Kutná Hora, in 1420, Catholics threw several hundred Hussite priests and faithful down mine shafts, and the town's shafts remain in Czech memory as the charnel pits of both parties^[46]. And on the Hussite side, captured Catholic towns, Chomutov, threatened Žatec, paid the price of holy war: massacres, fires, priests slaughtered at their altars^[47]. This encyclopedia says it plainly: there were Catholic martyrs of the Hussite wars, and their blood accuses the theology of the sword just as the pyres of Constance accuse the judges of Jan Hus, see How to Answer the Inquisition Objection?^[48].

Death of the One-Eyed Man (1424)

On 11 October 1424, while besieging Přibyslav castle, Jan Žižka died of plague: about sixty-four years old, totally blind for three years, and never defeated in battle^[49]. Buried at Čáslav, he immediately entered Czech national legend: it was said his tanned skin was stretched over a drum to lead his troops still, a pious legend, but one that shows the terror his name inspired^[50]. His most loyal men, refusing any other leader, took the name of Orphans (Sirotci, the "Orphans of Žižka"): the second radical army, sister and rival of Tábor^[51].

With Žižka dead, the Revolution found a second leader, and he was a priest. Prokop Holý, Procope the Bald, called Procope the Great (c. 1380-1434), a Utraquist priest rallied to Tábor, combined what Žižka had kept apart: pulpit and sword^[52]. Beside him stood a second Procope, Procope the Small (Prokůpek), and at the head of the Orphans, Captain Jan Čapek de Sány. From 1426 to 1431, this generation carried the war beyond Bohemia and made the Taborite name the terror of Central Europe.

Ústí, Tachov, Domažlice: the Crusade in Rout

On 16 June 1426, at Ústí nad Labem (Aussig), Procope crushed the army of the Saxon princes: thousands of crusaders lay dead on the field, and Saxony paid tribute^[53]. In August 1427, the fourth crusade, tens of thousands strong, dissolved before Tachov (Tachau) without even fighting a pitched battle: at the mere news of the approaching war wagons, the contingents scattered^[54]. Pope Martin V, who died in 1431, did not live to see the fifth and last attempt: in August 1431, the legate Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini, the same man who would soon preside over the Council of Basel, led a huge crusader army to Domažlice (Taus); on 14 August, to the sound of the Warriors of God hymn sung by thousands of voices, the crusaders fled before contact, abandoning artillery, baggage and even the legate's bull^[55]. Cesarini, who had wanted to crush heresy by arms, concluded it must be brought back by negotiation: he secured the invitation of the Hussites to the council, see Radical Conciliarism^[56].

The "Spanilé Jízdy": Missionary Terror

From 1428 to 1433, Taborites and Orphans launched the spanilé jízdy, the "glorious raids": raids by several thousand war wagons that ravaged Saxony, Franconia, Silesia, Austria and Hungary, and in 1433 pushed as far as the Baltic, where the Orphans, allied with the Poles against the Teutonic Order, watered their horses in the sea^[57]. Each raid brought back booty, ransoms and tributes, the war economy of Tábor, and spread through the Empire an apocalyptic image: invincible heretics who sing on their way to battle and take no prisoners when they have sworn to exterminate^[58].

Here we must say what the German chroniclers said in horror, and what the Catholic historian cannot pass over in silence: for Catholic civilian populations, these raids were a calamity, ransomed towns, pillaged churches, murdered clerics^[59]. Taborite military glory had a reverse side of innocent blood, and it was that reverse side, more than conciliar decrees, that sealed Christendom's judgment on Tábor in the eyes of Christendom: the envoys of Christ are not recognized by the smoking ruins they leave behind^[60].

From 1421, the early alliance cracked: between the masters of the University of Prague, theologians of the chalice but conservatives in everything else, and the priests of the mountain, there was soon no common measure. This was the second Taborite tragedy, after the war against the Empire: the war of Hussites against Hussites.

Disputes and Anathemas (1421-1423)

Prague's grievances were precise and, from the Catholic standpoint, largely well founded: Tábor denied transubstantiation, abolished ornaments and images beyond what the Four Articles of Prague had demanded, scorned the doctors, and shed blood in the name of prophecy^[61]. Tábor's grievances were no less real in its own eyes: Prague had kept sung Masses in Latin, priests in copes, magistrates who behead prophets, Prague had betrayed the Revolution for a cut-price Mass^[62].

In June 1423, at Konopiště castle, a solemn disputation pitted the two parties against each other: Jan Příbram for the Prague masters, Nicholas of Pelhřimov for Tábor. They debated for days over the Eucharist, images, purgatory and temporal punishments, then parted having agreed on nothing except that they would never agree^[63]. From then on, Prague excommunicated in its turn: radical preachers were driven from the capital, and when Želivský himself, the tribune of the defenestration, became inconvenient, the Old Town council had him beheaded on 9 March 1422^[64]. Žižka then marched on Prague to avenge his former ally, then reconciled: the Revolution needed all its swords against Sigismund, and settling scores could wait^[65].

Amid this chorus of violence, one voice stands apart, that of Petr Chelčický (c. 1390-c. 1460), the solitary of southern Bohemia, who condemned with a single gesture both the Catholic crusade and the Taborite holy war: the Christian, he said in his Síť víry (the Net of Faith), must neither bless swords nor take them up, not even for the chalice^[66]. The last Taborites would read Chelčický after their defeat, and from his seed, more than from their cannon, their posterity would be born.

Basel: the Rupture (1433)

After Domažlice, the Church changed method: since arms had failed, negotiation would be tried. The Council of Basel invited the Bohemians; in January 1433, a Hussite embassy, Procope the Great, Jan Rokycana, Nicholas of Pelhřimov himself, and the English exile Peter Payne, debated for weeks with the Fathers and obtained the essentials: the Compactata of Prague, accepted on 30 November 1433, conceded communion under both kinds where the practice was established^[67]. As the Hussitism article shows, this was the first concordat concluded between a council and excommunicated men, and precisely what Tábor could not accept: receiving the chalice by permission of the council meant admitting the council had the right to forbid it, and that the mountain had been wrong^[68]. The Taborites rejected the Compactata. From then on, their fate was sealed: facing them stood no longer only the distant Empire, but Prague itself, reconciled, impatient to be done with fifteen years of war.

The end comes from within, as had been written since Konopiště. The Utraquist and Catholic lords form the Bohemian League; at its head, Captain Diviš Bořek of Miletínek. On 30 May 1434, at Lipany, forty kilometers east of Prague, the two armies clash: on one side the radicals, Taborites and Orphans mixed, commanded by the two Procopes, on the other Bohemians like them, many of them of the chalice, but determined that the war should end^[69].

The battle turns on a ruse now become classic: the allies feign retreat, draw the radical wagons out from their rampart, then their fresh cavalry envelops the army of Procopius. Procopius the Great and Procopius the Lesser fall on the battlefield; the accounts put the radical army at some 18,000 men, of whom about 13,000 are said to have remained on the field or been massacred after surrender^[70]. Military Taboritism never recovers: the decisive battle is fought between Hussites, the negotiable chalice against the absolute chalice.

The aftermath unfolds over twenty years. The Compactata are ratified at Jihlava on 5 July 1436, and Sigismund, recognized as King of Bohemia, enters Prague, where he will die the following year^[71]. The last diehards, entrenched in the castle of Sion under Jan Roháč of Dubá, are taken in 1437: Roháč is hanged at Prague with some fifty companions^[72]. Tábor itself, besieged by George of Poděbrady, capitulates in 1452: the town keeps its property and customs, but its independence as an armed Church is over, and Nicholas of Pelhřimov, the old "bishop", dies a prisoner in Poděbrady castle around 1459^[73].

And yet, Tábor does not wholly die. At Kunvald, in 1457, around Gregory the Patriarch and under the posthumous influence of Chelčický, the survivors of the Taborite spirit, stripped of the sword but keeping discipline, the Czech language and the communion of the faithful, found the Bohemian Brethren (Jednota bratrská), which will carry the Bohemian Reformation down to Comenius and, through its Moravian branches, to the Protestant missions of the eighteenth century^[74]. The mountain had dreamed the Kingdom by the sword; what remains to it is a Church of patience, and that, in the eyes of God, is perhaps the part that will not be taken away.

Condemnations

The judicial record is unambiguous. Communion under both kinds imposed as necessary for salvation had been condemned by the Council of Constance as early as 15 June 1415: the custom of communicating under the single species of bread, "introduced by the Church for a reasonable cause and observed for a very long time", is a law that no one may change without the authority of the Church^[75]. Thirty propositions of Jan Hus were censured on the following 6 July, see the article Jan Hus and Council of Constance (1414-1418)^[76]. The crusade proclaimed by Martin V in 1420 placed the Taborites under the ban of Christendom; the Council of Basel, after offering them the Compactata, held them obstinate; and Pope Pius II, the former Piccolomini who had described them so well, revoked the Compactata in 1462, closing the concordat parenthesis^[77].

The testimony of the future Pope Pius II deserves quoting, for it comes from a humanist who admired Czech courage while judging their doctrine: in his Historia Bohemica, Enea Silvio Piccolomini describes the Taborites as men who recognize neither images, nor relics, nor the ornaments of churches, strip the altars, mock the ceremonies and treat as idolatry everything the Roman Church honors^[78].

What to take away

Catholics today, reading this history, must hold together three truths without sacrificing any of them; this is the constant line of this encyclopedia, from the article Hussitism to the one on the Inquisition.

First, the anger had a well-founded part. Bohemia in 1420 really was suffering: simony, the accumulation of benefices, absentee and princely prelates, indulgences sold for the pope's wars against Naples; the record is established, and the Church herself, at the Council of Trent a century later, would reform discipline on almost all these points^[79]. The humble Czech people who wanted to communicate from the chalice and hear the Gospel in their own language were asking for things that Vatican II, five centuries later, would grant to the whole Church^[80]. To despise that thirst would be unjust and false.

Second, the triple rupture constitutes formal heresy. The Taborites did not merely protest: they set up another Church (a bishop elected without succession, priests ordained without mandate), another worship (denial of transubstantiation and adoration, abolition of the visible sacrifice), and they shed blood in the name of prophecy, three ruptures that neither real abuses nor pure intentions excuse^[81]. On the Eucharist in particular, the Catholic faith has never varied: Christ is whole under each species, this is concomitance, defined at Constance in 1415 and recalled at the Council of Trent in 1562^[82], and to adore Him in the Blessed Sacrament is not idolatry, it is the homage due to the God who is present: see the article The Real Eucharistic Presence^[83].

Third, charity does not choose its dead. The pits of Kutná Hora swallowed Hussite priests; the churches burned in the raids saw Catholic priests die; Lipany set Czechs who communicated from the same chalice killing one another^[84]. And the lesson holds here in full: the Church's necessary reforms never pass through rupture or the sword, but through holiness, that of a Francis of Assisi, contemporary of the first heretics of the Midi, who reformed everything without breaking anything^[85]. A century after Tábor, Martin Luther will reread Hus and rekindle the fire: the article Martin Luther (1483-1546) shows what followed, and the Council of Trent, at last, will vindicate the anger over discipline while condemning the rupture over faith.

• First read the article Hussitism (1415-1436) for the general framework: Constance, the chalice, the Four Articles, the Compactata.
• The life and trial of the founder: Jan Hus (c. 1372-1415); the council that judged him: Council of Constance (1414-1418).
• The English matrix: Wycliffism; the following century: Martin Luther (1483-1546).
• The other medieval heresies: The Waldensians (1170-1532), Catharism (the Cathars), The Albigensians (12th-13th century), Bogomilism (10th-15th century), Paulicianism, The Fraticelles, Heterodox Beguins and Beghards, Radical Joachimism (13th-14th century), Radical conciliarism.
• The Catholic doctrine under attack: The Real Eucharistic Presence, Indulgences; the violence objection: Answering the Objection from the Inquisition.