During the Hussite Crusades (1420-1434) the brilliant Czech general Jan Žižka (“the One-Eyed”, 1360-1424) introduced an innovative tactic to late medieval warfare, the Wagenburg, that witnessed horse-drawn war wagons moving on campaign in columns, then quickly forming up in a defensive wagon laager to create a mobile fortress to protect their troops. Wagenburg tactics showcased tried-and-true and new technologies side-by-side in a combined-arms synthesis, with Hussite soldiers using the gunpowder artillery, crossbows, and a variety of handheld weapons in concert to defend the wagons, while providing well-placed gaps between carriages for well-timed cavalry and infantry counterattacks against their Roman Catholic foes. Named after their martyred leader Jan Hus (1369-1415) the Hussites rebelled against their German overlords throughout Bohemia and Moravia seeking the right to worship their own version of Christianity. Led by the experienced Žižka, the Hussite army was known for using innovative tactics and martial technologies to fight the armies of the Holy Roman Empire, even launching raids against bordering countries who supported the German and Papal cause. Over the duration of the resulting conflict the Papacy declared five crusades against the Hussites (1420, 1421, 1422, 1427 and 1431), but were never able to defeat the movement in no small part due to the success of Wagenburg tactics. 

The use of wagons to carry supplies and protect stationary logistical trains was common in medieval warfare, particularly in France and Italy, and was often used as a place of refuge near battlefield camps by retreating troops. However, the Hussites made good use of this older tactic by combining it with the newest gunpowder technologies, creating the Wagenburg combined-arms formation. This signature Hussite weapon evolved quickly from sturdy peasant carts to mass-produced armored battlewagons with uniform wheel sizes and axle lengths. The Hussite carriages were built using study wooden planks on a rectangular wooden base three-and-a-half feet off the ground. Hanging planks (sometimes armor plated) were suspended from the top of the wagon on one side pierced with loopholes for gun and crossbow fire. In the center of the inward side of the wagon, a bottom-hinged door swung down to become a wooden ramp into the interior. Some battlewagons were fitted with a wooden roof to protect from indirect missile fire. When stationary, additionally hinged planking was slunk below the wagon to protect the wheels and angles, also fitted with triangular holes for firing. Additionally, wooden mantlets could be slid out and joined to adjacent wagons to present a continuous wooden defense.  Within each of the wagons was a fixed wooden box filled with a standard kit consisting of two axes, two spades (for digging), two pickaxes, two hoes, two shovels (for scooping), lances with hooks, and a chain with a hook. Most of these tools were used by crews to dig entrenchments to protect a stationary laager or assist in freeing the horse-drawn heavy wagons from mud and marsh while on the move. 

When arranged as a Wagenburg the battlewagons were joined by means of the previously mentioned wooden mantlets and a chain (wheel to wheel). Wagenburg formations could be oval, square, or rectangular. While in the oval formation the wagons were arranged aslant (their corners attached to each other) to allow, if necessary, the re-harnessing of the horses quickly. A defensive ditch was dug in front of the Wagenburg to provide extra protection. Operating and protecting the wagons were infantry soldiers, highly disciplined troops well-trained in the latest fighting methods established by Žižka. Different ordinances recommend different crew sizes and only the crossbowmen and handgunners would fight from inside the wagon. Commanded by a wagon captain, the standard crew of each armored carriage consisted of twenty soldiers: two armed drivers, two handgunners, six crossbowmen, eight infantrymen armed with long-hafted flails (the flail was the Hussite’s "national weapon") or polearms, and two shield bearers. Of the light infantry present, the handgunners were armed with rudimentary firearms call pfeifenbüchsen (“pipe guns”) in German and pistala (fife or flute) in Czech, with the latter the possible origin of the word pistol. These early hand-held firearms were essentially wooden stocks attached to smooth-bore barrels by metal bands with simple ignition systems. As the calibers increased, gunsmiths added metal hooks to the bottom of the front of the barrel to hook over the outer edge of the gun loop to steady aim and prevent backwards recoil, giving these early weapons the name “hook guns.” Also, the Hussites operated a number of small bombards, indirect fire howitzers constructed with wide barrels using hoop and stave construction fastening the short barrel to a heavy wooden mount not unlike the smaller pistala. Known as a houfnice from the Czech word for “crowd” indicating its anti-personnel application on the battlefield, it was placed in its own wooden wheeled cart as a makeshift carriage.  In addition to the soldiers manning the wagons, the Wagenburg was protected by infantry and both heavy cavalry lancers and lightly armored cavalrymen (mostly made up of Polish allies), used for reconnaissance and for counterattacks. As an insurgency, Hussite commanders made use of all willing and able-bodied people, and women served as infantry alongside their fathers, husbands, and brothers, usually armed with long-hafted flails or short polearms, while children manned the laager as slingers. 

Besides the battlewagon, the long-hafted flail is the military accoutrement most often associated with the Hussite Crusades. Originally an agricultural flail used to thresh crops, this tool was refashioned into a weapon by simply pounding iron spikes through the wooden head, or if originally built as a weapon, the wooden head was reinforced with heavy banded iron often containing iron spikes. The haft of this flail was usually four-to-five feet long with a swinging head attached to the top with a heavy two-linked metal chain. When wielded by peasants accustomed to threshing for hours at a time, the long-hafted flail could be a devastating weapon. Other close quarter weapons included improvised “morning stars” -- shafted clubs with spiked wooden heads, or short polearms like the bill, a weapon with a metal head of various proportions that always included a hook ideal for dragging mounted warriors off their horses. There is also evidence that the devastating aalspeiss or awlpike was first utilized during these wars, another shafted weapon with a long thin metal spike attached as the head. The awlpike’s wooden pole was five to six feet long, while the metal spike extended another thirty to forty inches, with a rondel guard (circular metal plate) fitted to protect the hands of the user and to stop the weapon from penetrating beyond the guard.  

Hussite commanders were capable of moving from column to Wagenburg quickly. One Catholic chronicler, the Italian Aeneas Silvianus Piccolomini, who later became Pope Pius II (p.1458-1464), describes the transition from maneuver to positional warfare and the defense of the wagon formation by men and women:

"When a battle was about to begin, the drivers, at a signal from the captain, quickly encircle and form an enclosure with their vehicles. Then their enemies, squeezed between the wagons and cut off from their comrades, fell victim either to the swords of the foot troops or the missiles of the men and women who attacked them from above from the wagons. The mounted troops fought outside the wagon stronghold but moved back into it whenever the enemy threatened to overpower them, and they then fought dismounted as if from the walls of a fortified city. In this way they fought many battles and gained as many victories as possible, because the neighboring peoples were not familiar with such methods. Bohemia, with its broader level fields, offers good opportunities to align carts and wagons, to spread them apart and to bring them together again."

Moreover, Hussite battlewagons were capable of fighting on the move in carefully coordinated attacks, shifting from positional to maneuver warfare often during a breakout from a besieged position. The early modern Czech historian Bohuslav Balbín (1621-1688) described these tactics in his history of Bohemia:

"As soon as the signal for battle was given, the drivers coordinated their movements against their enemies by a previously agreed upon system of figures or letters, and thus formed passageways that the Hussite s understood quite well, but which to the enemy appeared to be a hopeless labyrinth. There was no escape, and they were caught as if in a net. If it was possible to break the enemy up and cut them off from each other and thus isolate the troops, then the foot soldiers were capable with some ease of completely defeating them with swords or flails. Or the enemies could be utterly beaten by the marksmen standing on the wagons. The armies of Žižka were quite like a monster with numerous arms which very quickly and without warning snatches its prey, crushes it to death and devours it in pieces. If anyone was successful in escaping from the wagon labyrinth. They quickly fell into the clutches of the cavalry waiting outside the wagons and were killed there." 

Each battlewagon was assigned to a tactical group of ten wagons commanded by a line master, with the number of wagons per combat line varying from fifty to a hundred, depending on the size of the army. These combat lines were supported by infantry maneuver units made up of a hundred soldiers armed with flails and polearms. In battle, the Wagenburg became the base of operations for a two-stage operation, the first defensive in nature and the second an offensive counterattack. When possible, Žižka prepared the battlefield through the placement of the Wagenburg on higher ground with only the tops of the wagons viewable from the lower position, negating the effectiveness of high velocity weapons with flat trajectories to target the wagons while providing a clear field of fire for the defenders. Ditches were often dug in front of the wagons for added defense. After forming up in a defensive laager in an oval, square or rectangle the cavalry, baggage, horse teams for the wagons, and infantry not used to support the wagon line were placed in the middle. Hussite soldiers used their protected position to fire on enemy formations using their carriage mounted cannons provoking an enemy attack. When in range, Hussite handgunners and crossbowmen engaged as enemy cavalry and infantry negotiated the slope of the hill. If the laager itself was reached, fresh infantry from the interior would shore up any breaches in the line. Once the attackers were exhausted by their attack, the Hussite commanders would launch a combined-arms counterattack, with infantry pushing out from between the wagons and cavalry sweeping out from the flanks.  And because of the nature of missionary war, both the Hussites and their Catholic enemies usually did not offer quarter to their enemies, mirroring the brutality seen in the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) two centuries earlier.  As the Hussite wars wore on, the Bohemian rebels were organized into a half-dozen factional armies each capable of putting 5,000 to 6,000 soldiers into the field which, when united, became a formidable fighting force.

Jan Žižka first demonstrated the effectiveness of these Wagenburg tactics on 25 March 1420 in a small battle with Catholic troops near the village of Sudomĕř in southern Bohemia. Žižka was an experienced soldier who lost his right eye roughhousing in childhood. Born in this region into a minor noble family, Žižka served as the royal huntsman to Wenceslaus IV, the king of Bohemia and later Germany (r.1378-1419), where the two men of similar age became friends. As a huntsman he led hunting expeditions into woods teeming with wild game (bear, wolves, wild boar, and red deer). This position allowed Žižka to perfect his riding, hunting, and trapping skills while building relationships with the Bohemian nobility. Žižka left his position as royal huntsman in 1405, where he learned the art and science of war at a robber knight during a brief Czech civil war, and then as a mercenary fighting for the Bohemians in their border wars with Austria (1407-1409) and for King Jagiełło of Poland (r.1386-1434), where he fought against the Teutonic Order at the battle of Grunwald in 1410. Returning victorious from Prussia, Wenceslaus made Žižka a captain in his palace guard, recognizing the talents of a veteran soldier who had been huntsman, highwayman, and mercenary, and who was familiar with Polish and Lithuanian cavalry tactics and the instruments of fifteenth century war (handguns, siege guns, and field artillery, and battlewagons). Promoted to low-ranking courtier, he was sent to the royal castle of Vyšehrad, and it was there where he heard the sermons and read the writings of Jan Hus before the theologian’s execution in 1415. Over the next four years Žižka radicalized to the point where he was an officer in the successful capture of Vyšehrad, a fortress he was intimately familiar with, after the “Defenestration of Prague” in 1419. His successful withdrawal through royalist forces that December at Nekmíř raised his position as a captain in the Hussite army, while his leadership at the battle of Sudomĕř (25 March 1420) using modern battlewagon or Wagenburg tactics secured his position as the “One-Eyed General” and command of Hussite forces. 

Traveling in a small battlewagon column from Pilsen (modern Plzeň) to Tábor, Žižka’s Hussite small force of nine riders, twelve wagons and four hundred people, soldiers and dependents included, were intercepted by local Catholic royalist forces led by the “Iron Lords,” a mostly cavalry army of 2,000 knights, sergeants, and men-at-arms. Unable to secure high defensive ground for his wagons in the wide, flat Otava River Valley, the one-eyed general quickly used the local topography to his advantage, placing his infantry in a short but rather deep front flanked by the dam of an empty fishpond and marshy areas on one side and his twelve battlewagons arrayed on the other side and behind the infantry to offer crossbow and handgun fire from their raised positions in a hope to mitigate the five-to-one numerical advantage of his enemy. The battle of Sudomĕř began mid-afternoon and lasted several hours and consisted of several ineffective cavalry charges against the Hussite defensive position, followed by dismounted attacks by the royalist knights and supporting infantry (possibly because of loss of horses).  The Wagenburg itself was reached and almost breached, with three wagons severely damaged in the fighting. The tide turned quite suddenly when,

"it was still early, around vespers, the sun went down behind a hill and darkness fell so heavily that no one could tell exactly who they were fighting…. It is certain, they killed each other more than they suffered from the Hussites. When they saw this many voices cried out, my lance does not stab, my sword does not pierce, and my crossbow does not shoot. Thus, they withdrew in great shame, having suffered great damage."   

The Iron Lords retreated from the battlefield and into the darkness, sending the thirty captured Hussites to the royalist city of Kutná Hora for torture and execution. Žižka kept his forces ready on the battlefield overnight, but broke camp the next morning and traveled with their wounded to Tábor, a newly constructed walled town built by farmers and poor burghers that would serve as the headquarters for the more militant Hussites. There, he would serve as one as the military administrator of the stronghold where he formulated recruitment policies, organized the town’s defense, devised, and led military drills and local raids to give his recruits military experience, and was the leading voice in forging alliances and later armistices, effectively becoming the movements’ chief military commander and foreign minister. Many of these early raids were for limited objectives, focusing on the capture of enemy armaments (crossbows, handguns, and bombards) which the Hussites could not yet manufacture.  Over time, these policies became known as “Žižka’s Military Orders” (1423), twelve principles that defined the structure of the Hussite army, rules for marching and camping, forming Wagenburgs and infantry before battle, military discipline, the utilization of spies, and distribution of war treasure. These military ordinances are unique in medieval military history in that they focus on creating a national army, one based on merit and where rules and discipline were applied equally regardless of social position or gender.

After decade and a half of fending off Catholic incursions, the Hussites began to battle themselves as witnessed in the battle of Lipany (1434) where moderate Ultraquists defeated the more radical Taborites and reached a peace agreement with the Holy Roman Empire.  Many of the Hussite soldiers became mercenaries, serving powerful princes throughout the empire.  Moreover, the Hussite Wagenburg quickly became a tactical model for nearby states, with German acts of Parliament as early as the 1420s enacting ordinances to support the building and maintenance of armored battlewagons.  However, none of these emulators had the discipline or national motivation of Jan Žižka’s troops, and these adopted Wagenburg tactics were never as militarily successful.

Suggested Readings:

Primary sources

Fudge, Thomas A. The Crusades against Heretics in Bohemia, 1418-1437: Crusade Texts in Translation. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2002.

Hall, Bert. The Technological Illustrations of the so-called “Anonymous of the Hussite Wars.” Codex Latinus Monacensis 197. L. Reichert, 1979.

Secondary sources

Carey, Brian Todd et al. Warfare in the Age of Crusades: Europe. Pen and Sword Military, 2023.

Fudge, Thomas A. Jan Hus: Religious Reform and Social Revolution in Bohemia. I.B. Tauris, 2017.

Verney, Victor. Warrior of God: Jan Žižka and the Hussite Revolution. Frontline Books, 2009.