Hussite Wars: Battle of Lipany: Effectively ending the war, Utraquist forces led by Diviš Bořek of Miletínek defeat and almost annihilate Taborite forces led by Prokop the Great.
The Battle of Lipany (in Czech: Bitva u Lipan), also called the Battle of esk Brod, was fought at Lipany 40 km east of Prague on 30 May 1434 and virtually ended the Hussite Wars. An army of Moderate Hussite (or Calixtine) nobility and Catholics, called the Bohemian League, defeated the radical Taborites and Orphans (or Sirotci) led by Prokop the Great, the overall commander, and by Jan apek of Sny, the cavalry commander.
The Hussite Wars, also called the Bohemian Wars or the Hussite Revolution, were a series of wars fought between the Hussites and the combined Catholic forces of Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, the Papacy, European monarchs loyal to the Catholic Church, as well as various Hussite factions. At a late stage of the conflict, the Utraquists changed sides in 1432 to fight alongside Roman Catholics and opposed the Taborites and other Hussite spinoffs. These wars lasted from 1419 to approximately 1434.
The unrest began after pre-Protestant Christian reformer Jan Hus was executed by the Catholic Church in 1415 for heresy. Because the King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia had plans to be crowned the Holy Roman Emperor (requiring Papal Coronation), he suppressed the religion of the Hussites, yet it continued to spread. When King Wenceslaus IV died of natural causes a few years later, the tension stemming from the Hussites grew stronger. In Prague and various other parts of Bohemia, the Catholic Germans living there were forced out.
Wenceslaus's brother, Sigismund, who had inherited the throne, was outraged by the spread of Hussitism. He got permission from the pope to launch a crusade against the Hussites. Large numbers of crusaders came from all over Europe to fight. Prague was attacked and then abandoned. However, the Hussites subsequently laid siege to the garrison of crusaders, and took back nearly all of the land they had previously captured, resulting in the crusade being a complete failure.
After the reins of the Hussite army were handed over to yeoman Jan Žižka, internal strife followed. Seeing that the Hussites were weakened, the Germans undertook another crusade. They were firmly defeated by Žižka at the Battle of Deutschbrod, and they were driven out once again. A third crusade was attempted by the papacy, but it resulted in complete failure as well. The Lithuanians and Poles did not wish to attack the Czechs, Germany was having internal conflicts and could not muster up a sufficient force to battle the Hussites, and the king of Denmark left the Czech border to go back to his home. The Germans eventually were forced to seek peace.
The fighting ended after 1434 when the moderate Utraquist faction of the Hussites defeated the radical Taborite faction. The Hussites agreed to submit to the authority of the king of Bohemia and the Roman Catholic Church, and were allowed to practice their somewhat variant rite.
The Hussite community included most of the Czech population of the Kingdom of Bohemia and formed a major spontaneous military power. They defeated five consecutive crusades proclaimed against them by the Pope (1420, 1421, 1422, 1427, 1431), and intervened in the wars of neighboring countries. The Hussite Wars were notable for the extensive use of early hand-held firearms such as hand cannons as well as wagon forts.