Important battles of the Hussite Wars

The Hussite Wars were initially led by Jan Žižka z Trocnova who was engaged in many victorious battles. The Hussites established the town of Tábor near the town of Sezimovo Ústí where they decided to live in harmony and without differences in the property. The Hussite movement gradually spread throughout the country and the Hussite field troops operated in various areas and waged campaigns beyond the borders. After Žižka's death, the army leadership was taken by Prokop Holý who died in the Battle of Lipany in 1434. Despite the Battle of Lipany, the 'Compacts' promulgated in the town of Jihlava in 1436 acknowledged the Chalice and the main ideas of the Hussite Movement.

Illustration of Tábor in Das jetzt-lebende Königreich Böhmen by Mauritius Vogt, 1712. Collection of the Institute of History, CAS.

References

Šmahel, F.: Husitská revoluce I−IV. Praha 1995−1996;
Semotanová, E. ‒ Cajthaml, J. a kol.: Akademický atlas českých dějin. Praha 2014, 2. akt. vydání 2016;
Čornej, P.: Jan Žižka. Život a doba husitského válečníka. Praha 2019.

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War conflicts and their consequences

The military and the maps make a significant “alliance” in particular during the wars – in preparations to their strategically long-term objectives and the overall idea of the planned military operations and in the use of tactical methods in each war. This is because the simplified map illustrations of the attacked (but also defended) ground represent navigation aids, which point at the relations between its objects. This situation often heavily affected the war logistics and thus the final outcome. From the 15th century to the 20th century, this “alliance” experienced a huge development as regards the form and contents. The outcome is the understanding that for the military “clash of the wills” presented as interaction between two or more military forces, maps of various types (i.e. military topographic maps of various types and special focus, specific maps, the so-called atypical maps such as planimetric maps, aerial maps, photo mosaics or map graphics of joint air-ground operations) are extremely important. Cooperation between historians, geographers and cartographers (and thus the history, historical geography, interdisciplinary historiography exploring transformations of geographic space in the time, historical cartography, interdisciplinary disciplines dealing with the processing of historical events and processes on the maps) has always been important for the development of military maps per se, but also for the understanding of the facts and contexts of the wars and their consequences as the permanent components of the human history, mainly in the form of reconstruction maps such as the Wars and their Consequences, which are the results collective sets of findings on wars against the Hussites, battles of the Thirty Year War and wars for the Austrian and Bavarian heritage on the Czech territory. Similarly, a complex view of the complicated 20th century burdened with the wars is presented, based on detailed analytic probes into complicated and hitherto unprocessed themes of the First World War and Second World War (e.g. the POW camps).

Zlatica Zudová-Lešková

Subchapters:

• Hussite Wars
• Thirty Years' War
• 18th c.
• 19th c.
• First World War
• First World War – POW camps
• Second World War

Contemporary plan of the Battle of Čáslav on May 17, 1742. Map collection of the Institute of History, CAS. Map display