When I get bored, I tend to write essays and circulate them to folks who might be interested. When I'm trying to get myself into a mental state to write a particular story I do the same, often codifying my research into some kind of text piece.

Imagine my surprise when a publisher contacted me this afternoon to see if I was interested in collecting them together in a non-fiction volume.

I've just spent the evening trawling through around 1100 e-mails to see what's in them that might be worth reprinting. I've managed to identify 39 articles filling about 48,000 words of a 60,000 word book, so I might have to generate the remainder if we decide to go for it. Still, it was a remarkable offer.

Here's an example of one I prepared earlier:

The First Defenestration of Prague

How has history come to overlook an event so gloriously named as the First Defenestration of Prague? Come on! It’s an event that set a good part of Europe ablaze. As the title implies it involved people in the capital of Bohemia being thrown out of a window. And, as the name also suggests, this was only the first time it happened in Prague.

Charles University is probably the oldest university in mainland Europe. Founded by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV at the height of his power, the Prague-based Universitas Carolina Pragensis was a seat of liberal learning and pioneering scholarship in the fourteenth century. But in 1402 it got a new rector, the fiery young reformer Jan Hus, a priest who admired the English radical Wycliff and read his works from the pulpit – and a scholar who argued for a doctrine of impanation (the theological belief that the elements of Christian sacrament are not physically mystically transmuted to the flesh and blood of Christ as Roman Catholic doctrine holds but rather underwent a symbolic and spiritual metamorphosis).

This was important and controversial stuff at the time. Hus’ teachings later inspired Luthor, Calvin, and Zwingli and played a major role in the Protestant movement. Hus was reprimanded by Pope Gregory XII, but since Gregory was currently one of two warring Popes (the other being Benedict XIII), Hus did the only logical thing and threw his support and that of his institution behind a third candidate, Alexander V, whom the Catholic church now considers an Antipope. No, honestly.

However, Alexander turned against Wycliff, ordering all his works destroyed, threatening terrible retribution on those who followed his “heretical teachings” (such as translating the Bible into anything other than Latin). Hus fell out with the new Pope in fine style, ignored the Papal Bull, was excommunicated, and carried on regardless. He crusaded against the giving of indulgences – pre-paid forgivenesses for sins yet to be committed. The Pope interdicted Prague, meaning Christians there were no longer allowed to participate in the rites of the church. They did anyway, because Hus said so.

Alexander responded by dying. The new Antipope was John XIII, who called for a crusade against the anti-indulgenists. There was civil unrest in Prague. Three common men who denied the efficacy or authority of indulgences were beheaded. Hus preached a seminal sermon arguing that “man obtains true forgiveness of sins by repentance, not money”. His followers began to argue that Hus, not the Pope, should be the authority of Christian doctrine.

The Council of Constance convened in November 1414 to try and heal the schisms that were tearing church and states apart. Hus was offered safe passage there to state his case, but once he arrived he was arrested and imprisoned. He was chained in a dungeon, starved, and isolated while he faced a series of trials at which he was not allowed to offer evidence in his defence. Refusing to recant, he was burned at the stake in 1415. His ashes were scattered in the Rhine. It was over.

Except that now, instead of being a living annoyance, Hus was a dead martyr. Does nobody learn from history? Strike him down and he became more powerful than you could ever imagine. Within months, what would become known as the Hussite Wars had begun.

There are lessons to be learned from the aftermath of Hus’ execution, such as:

1. If you are Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor, do not send follow-up letters to Bohemia, Hus’ homeland, warning that you will “shortly drown all Wycliffeites and Hussites”.

2. Do not persecute the Hussites so they spread all across Europe taking their message with them and whip up flash mobs to form a spontaneous army.

3. Do not throw stones at Hussite parades from the windows of the Prague New Town Hall. It can lead to serious defenestration.

Yes. We’re at the first defenestration at last. On 30th July 1419, Hussites protested Prague town council’s refusal to exchange their Hussite prisoners. Someone hurled a stone from the Town Hall window at the priest leading the procession. An enraged mob stormed the building and threw the judge, the burgomaster, and thirteen councilmen out of the same window. Those who survived the fall were beaten to death by the crowd. King Wenceslas (not the good one, his descendant) of Bohemia was so shocked by the news that he fell sick and died.

And then there was war. The Hussites formed militia, very effective “cart units” with unusual tactics that proved very successful against medieval military methods. Rings of upended wagons formed makeshift defences to protect against cavalry charges, while combinations of crossbowmen, hand-gunners, and flailmen targeted horses first. It was the first time knightly charges proved ineffective against infantry.

Catholics were hounded from Bohemia. Pope Martin V proclaimed a crusade “for the destruction of Wycliffites, Hussites, and all other heretics in Bohemia”. A vast crusading army, including huge numbers of fortune-hunting adventurers, descended on Prague and captured it; but as soon as the army had dispersed, the citizen of Prague themselves besieged the fortress and recaptured it. King Sigismund, who claimed the Bohemian crown, tried to break the siege and was decisively defeated by the Hussites’ carts in winter 1420.

The year after, a second crusade attacked, this time with German troops. Sigismund, whom I picture as a medieval Dick Dastardly for some reason, managed to capture a town before being chased off again by the Hussite peasant army. Drat and double drat!

Between then and the third anti-Hussite crusade (of five), the Hussites amused themselves by schisming. The moderate Utraqists wanted religious tolerance and the extremist Taborites held that there were only two sacraments, baptism and holy communion. Their weapon of choice was the Böhmischer Ohrlöffel or Knebelspiess, a triple-spiked polearm whose name translates into English as the Bohemian earspoon. No civil war fought with Bohemian earspoons can possibly be dull.

The condequences of defenstration rippled on, though. The Pope proclaimed a third crusade to interrupt the internal earspooning. Nobody came. Well, the Danish got part way but went home when nobody else turned up. The Hussites got bored waiting to be attacked and invaded Moravia instead. For the next couple of years they amused themselves by intermittently conquering Germany.

The amazing thing is, though, that this rag-tag force consistently defeated organised military resistance and managed to terrorise the crowned heads of Europe and the Catholic church. They were like that shabby new neighbour who tosses his garbage into your yard then asks what you’re going to do about it. They brought down the property values but nobody was able to object. And they continued to kill each other on the issue of how many sacraments God had authorised. Whole cities now proclaimed themselves as Utraquist or Taborite; Tabor, for example, was Taborite.

The Hussites were so powerful now that they were offering various crowned heads of Europe the monarcy of Bohemia – they had serious problems recruiting to the post. Their chavauchées (“beautiful rides”) saw them raiding through Silesia, Saxony, Hungary, Lusitania, Meissen, pretty much everywhere that had ever supported the crusaders earlier on. Their adversaries included the marvelously-named Monastic State of the Teutonic Knights (incorporating the Livonian Brotherhood of the Sword – I’m not making this up). They eventually conquered as far as the Baltic Sea near Danzig and boasted that only an ocean couild stop the march of the Hussites.

By 1431 the only chance of peace was the Council of Basel, at which the Catholic church reluctantly admitted the Hussite heretics but drew the line at Greek Orthodox clerics being present. But the Papacy decided that before the conference it was best to prepare things by throwing one last really good crusade at Bohemia. The Elector of Brandenburg lead an invading force to siege the city of Domazlice. When the Hussites arrived singing their battle hymn – of course they had a battle hymn – the Papal forces ran away again.

Basel didn’t solve anything. In the end, the Hussites were defeated by their worst enemy, the Hussites. The factions warred, then split, then warred with the sub-factions. Earspoons flew. On 30th May 1434 the leaders of the Taborite Hussites fell in battle against the Utraquists at Lipany. The storm unleashed by Jan Hus’ burning and a badly-judged rock from a town hall window finally passed into drizzle and bluster. Bohemia was a scorched wasteland. The remaining Hussites began to call themselves Protestants.

A peace settlement guaranteed religious tolerance in Bohemia and Moravia, which lasted right until 1618 and the second Defenstration of Prague that triggered the Thirty Years War. But that’s another story, and besides on that occasion the defenstrated clergymen fell into a pile of manure and were miraculously saved.

IW


Text copyright © 2013 reserved by Ian Watson. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.