Victor Verney

The Hussite Wars are indeed an exotic topic that deserves more attention and for which the author is to be congratulated. The best part of the book is, however, the precise and erudite foreword by a Czech-American librarian. The text itself suffers from the author's disdain for professional courtesy: Only rarely does the author provide sources for his statements (ten source footnotes in the first fifty pages; 35 total titles in the bibliography, all in English). When he does, these sources usually are (dated) English translations of Czech and German books about Bohemia where one can hint at the source of mistranslations and misunderstandings (not speaking Czech, I obviously cannot spot those). The author also quotes one Osprey title about Tannenberg (not included in the bibliography) but does not mention the more pertinent one about the Hussite Wars. A thorough treatment would have required including the mainly non-English literature (such as František Šmahel's recent three-volume history). Thus from a point of craftmanship, the value of this title is debatable.

From a narrative point of view, the book provides a good account of Jan Zizka's life and generalship. As a participant of the battle of Grunwald 1410, Zizka witnessed the declining value of the knight as a weapon system. His combination of war wagons, early mobile artillery and peasant soldiers resulted in a killer package ideally suited for the rolling and populated country of Bohemia. Farther east, he would have run into major supply problems, further south, the Alpine territory would have crushed his mobility. While Zizka proved to be a supreme tactician (never losing a battle), he squandered his chances in fruitless sieges of minor stronghold instead of conquering a territory.

The Hussites suffered from the dominant and unquestioned position of Prague which never allowed for a stable compromise between cities and peasants (as happened in Switzerland where the smaller city states entered into an alliance with the peasants). When the revolutionary fervor of Prague subsided, disunion crushed the Hussites - long after the death of Zizka who, like Robert E. Lee, could not transform battlefield successes into political victory.… (meer)