As we here first meet with John Žižka of Trocnov, to whom it was undoubtedly due that the Hussite movement did not collapse at once, and that Bohemia was enabled to resist the whole of Europe in arms against her, it will be well shortly to notice the early life of the great warrior.[1]
John Žižka was born about the year 1378, probably at Trocnov, a small estate in Southern Bohemia, which was the seat of his family. Hardly anything is known of his early youth except that he was engaged in hereditary feuds with the Lords of Rosenberg, then the most powerful nobles in Southern Bohemia. About the year 1412 he became attached to the royal court, in all probability as chamberlain of Queen Sophia; he had at that time already lost the use of one eye, probably fighting for the king against the Bohemian nobles, in one of the many contests which occupied so large a part of the earlier years of the reign of King Venceslas. Žižka only followed the example of the great majority of the courtiers of Venceslas in joining the party of reform, of which he immediately became (and continued to be until his death) a thorough and disinterested supporter. His previous knowledge and experience of warfare at once designated him as the natural leader of a party which was directed by priests, and which consisted mostly of peasants, small landowners, and townsmen, entirely unused to the system of warfare that was practised in those days.
Žižka, who undoubtedly was the greatest military genius of his age,[2] immediately saw the difficulty of opposing his forces, consisting almost entirely of infantry, to the attack of heavily-armed horsemen. A flail mounted with iron, a club, or a short spear were the arms with which the peasants and citizens were in the habit of fighting, and with such men
- ↑ The standard authority regarding Žižka is now Professor Tomek, whose Jan Žižka was published (in Bohemian) in 1879. The learned professor has since published some additions to this biography in the Časopis Musea Českeho for 1892. The history of the great Bohemian warrior had formerly been completely obscured by legends and more or less absurd inventions. Palacký makes the interesting remark that, of those who wrote of Žižka before circumstances permitted serious study of the period of the Hussite wars, only George Sand, with singular intuition, grasped some of the traits of the character of Žižka in her short work entitled Jean Zyska, though her only authority was Lenfant's Guerre des Hussites.
- ↑ Palacký, with but slight exaggeration, calls him the originator of modern tactics.
