CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Pjecha, Martin |
|---|---|
| Title | From Protecting God's Law to Spreading Faith and Vengeance: Human Agency and the Shift towards Offensive Warfare in the Hussite Discourse |
| Summary | In 1415, Jan Hus was burned as an unrepentant heretic at the Council of Constance. By the end of 1419, his followers in Prague controlled the country’s intellectual seat of Prague University, the city government, and also included many towns and a portion of the nobility. In 1420 the King of Hungary and new King of Bohemia, Sigismund, launched a papally-supported crusade against the Hussites to crush their heresy and regain his throne. Under the leadership of the infamous military commander Jan Žižka and his successor Prokop Holý, the Hussites successfully defended themselves from five such crusades launched against them, the last of which they defeated in 1431. The period of the Hussite wars has been well-researched in Hussite historiography, yet largely ignored or taken for granted is the shift in military strategy, from exclusively defensive to offensive, which took place after the ascension of Prokop Holý to military command in 1426. Starting in this year and building thereafter, the Hussite armies began to engage in “glorious rides”, attacking their enemies abroad and spreading their faith. By analyzing closely a variety of contemporary sources which include letters, military orders, speeches, and manifestos, the Hussite discourse and self-perception will be reconstructed to illustrate a drastic discontinuity between the defensive warfare under Žižka and the offensive one under Prokop. It will be argued that the discourse of defensive warfare constructed by Jan Žižka and the Prague University masters in the early 1420s emphasized the necessity of gaining the favor of God through the purgation of internal dissidents and proper behavior. By the time of Prokop Holý’s ascendance, however, God’s favor had already been expressed to the Hussites by their countless victories, and it began to be taken for granted. The consequent inflation of Hussite self-confidence created a new discourse which elevated the unique role of human agency in its participation with God, and called for the spreading of vengeance and the true faith abroad. |
| Supervisor | Riedl, Matthias, Szonyi, Gyorgy |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/pjecha_martin.pdf |
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