570 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE The Utraquists had gone but a little way in this direction; the more radical party became known as the "Taborites," because their first meeting was held upon a hill to which in characteristic fashion they gave the Biblical name, Moun^ Tabor. They wished to do away with much of the formality and ceremony in religious worship, and their priests offi- ciated without wearing any distinctive ecclesiastical vest- ments. They also addressed one another as brothers and sisters, and represented a democratic movement among the peasantry and lower classes in contrast to the Utraquist nobles. While the Utraquists and Taborites were the tw> chief religious parties among the Hussites, there were fur- ther divergences of belief, and from time to time factions appeared within the two main parties. King Wenzel, who had done little toward suppressing the Hussites, died in 1419. His obvious successor was his The Hussite brother, Sigismund, but the Bohemians were wars suspicious of the man who had allowed Huss to be burned to death, and it became evident that Sigismund would have to employ force to win his kingdom. The pope proclaimed a crusade against Bohemia and a great army gathered. The majority of the crusaders were Germans, just as the orthodox party in Bohemia itself was composes largely of the German settlers. Thus to religious strife was added the racial antipathy of Teuton and Czech. The cru- saders, of course, hoped to win large estates for themselves in Bohemia. But the method which the Church had found effective against the Albigensians of southern France was not to prove successful in this case. For although the Huss- ites were divided among themselves, they usually united to repel the foreign invaders, and in John Ziska, the leader of the Taborites, they possessed a great military genius. He employed the new firearms which had followed the invention of gunpowder, and also made use of ironclad wagons, which were chained together in four lines or columns and which could readily be formed into a hollow square. Even after his death from the plague in 1424, the Hussites continued their series of victories. In 1427 and 1431 the crusading
