Hussite Wars Begin

1420

Bohemian Hussites under Jan Zizka built wagon-forts, drilled peasant infantry, and defeated successive crusader armies sent by Sigismund. Zizka, blind in one eye and then both, won every battle he fought. His tactics influenced European warfare for a century. Bohemia had become, briefly, a military laboratory for social revolution. Their wagon-fort tactics and early hand cannons anticipated the combined-arms methods that dominated European warfare a century later.