nishatalitha

I think I like John Zizka more than I like Oliver Cromwell. And I'm rather fond of Oliver Cromwell, for all the terrible things that he did.

Not that there's much record of what he was actually like as a person (medieval chroniclers being more interested in events than people), but I have this image in my head of an old unyielding man who expects a great deal of himself and the same of everyone else. Someone who is determined to live according to the law of God and ensure that his people (and they were his people because he was their general) have the right to worship according to their common belief. Someone determined to uphold the letter and the spirit of God's Law and make sure everyone else did as well.

And for all that, someone who could go against common practice of the time. When his army sacked cities, women and children were not harmed. Jews were not considered heretics (although they were clearly wrong), and were not treated as badly as they were in a lot of other places. The one or two times that his army disobeyed him in this matter, he led them in penance.

For all that I don't think there was much bend in John Zizka as a person, he was a remarkably flexible military thinker - ordered one of the earliest recorded uses of mobile artillery as we would expect to see it used now. Previously, it was used statically in sieges. His army moved a lot faster than other medieval armies; from the first time he took command his people had to march quickly.

In the appendices of the books I'm currently reading about him - John Zizka and the Hussite Revolution by Frederick Heyman - there are some letters and reports of his, translated from Czech or Latin or whatever they were written in. I will be interested to see what he is like in writing.