Battle of Německý Brod, 1422: Žižka routs the second crusade

Německý Brod was the end of a two-week winter campaign that showed Jan Žižka at his best. Trapped and betrayed at Kutná Hora just before Christmas 1421, he broke out by night, then turned and chased a far larger army out of Bohemia.²

Crusades against the Hussites

The Hussite Wars grew out of the burning of the Czech reformer Jan Hus at Constance in 1415. When King Wenceslas IV died in 1419, his brother Sigismund of Luxembourg, King of Hungary and King of the Romans, claimed the Bohemian crown, but many Czechs saw him as a traitor to Hus. At his request Pope Martin V proclaimed a crusade in March 1420. It failed at Vítkov Hill outside Prague, and a second crusade broke up before Žatec in the autumn of 1421.³

Žižka had lost his second eye to an arrow at the siege of Rabí that year, and fought on blind. Radio Prague notes that he has gone down in history as a commander who never lost a battle.⁴

Trapped at Kutná Hora

In the autumn of 1421 Sigismund marched into Moravia with a Hungarian army led by the Italian condottiere Filippo Scolari, known as Pipo Spano. WarHistory.org puts it at 60,000 men, including 23,000 cavalry. Sigismund moved slowly, and Žižka reached the silver-mining town of Kutná Hora first, on 9 December, with about 12,000 men. On 21 December the royal army, some 50,000 strong, arrived.⁵

In WarHistory.org's account, Žižka drew up his wagon fort across the western roads into the town, and his guns did heavy damage to the cavalry that attacked it all day. But the German-speaking townspeople, who favored Sigismund, opened a gate to a royal force on the far side, and the small Hussite garrison inside was overwhelmed. Žižka was surrounded.⁶

Before dawn on 22 December he formed his wagons into a column and drove straight at Sigismund's headquarters, firing as he went. In the dark the attack caused panic, a gap opened, and the Hussites escaped to a hill about a mile away and then to Kolín.⁷

The counterstroke

According to WarHistory.org, Sigismund assumed the campaign was over until spring. He settled into Kutná Hora and spread his army through the villages around it, with a covering force at Nebovidy, halfway to Kolín. Žižka spent two weeks gathering reinforcements, and on 6 January 1422 he fell on the troops at Nebovidy, who broke and fled. WarHistory.org notes that no source gives details of these fights beyond the fact that the Hussites attacked and the royal troops ran.⁸

The panic spread to Kutná Hora. Sigismund ordered the town burned rather than let it fall to the Hussites, but few fires were set before Žižka's pursuit arrived. Against Scolari's advice the king tried to make a stand at Habry, a few miles to the southwest; his demoralized army again ran, abandoning everything but its weapons.⁹

Across the ice

WarHistory.org writes that Sigismund himself fled ahead of his army toward Jihlava on the Moravian border, crossing the Sázava River at Německý Brod. Part of his army tried to hold the crossing, but the Hussite pursuit forced a rush across the frozen river. The ice gave way, and a reported 548 knights drowned. The town was defended in haste. Hussite guns breached its walls, and a surrender under negotiation collapsed when a Hussite patrol broke in through a weak section of wall without orders, and fighting and pillage followed.¹⁰

Radio Prague dates this last blow to 10 January 1422. WarHistory.org counts at least 4,500 dead in the royal army in the fighting from 6 to 9 January; Hussite losses were not recorded.¹¹

After Německý Brod

The campaign ended the second crusade. According to WarHistory.org, Sigismund was so discouraged that he did not come into Bohemia in person for years and left later crusades to the German princes. Radio Prague writes that no army dared invade Bohemia again until 1427, though EBSCO's survey of the wars records a further attack defeated at Aussig, now Ústí nad Labem, in 1426. Within six months the Hussites had allied themselves with Grand Duke Vytautas of Lithuania.¹²

WarHistory.org adds that the plundering at Německý Brod, and a similar loss of control a year later, led Žižka to draw up one of the first written codes of military conduct. He died in 1424. The movement he led was finally broken from within, at Lipany in 1434, and in 1436 the Hussites recognized Sigismund as king. Like Vaslui, fought on the same date half a century later, Německý Brod was a winter victory of a smaller army that knew its ground.¹³