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Updated: June 10, 2025
At first they seem to have been almost Catholics, but as the Hussite Wars went on they fell, it is said, under the influence of the Taborites, and adopted many radical Taborite opinions.
The Hussite soldiers ravaged the neighboring countries. The Taborites, the more fanatical portion, were at length defeated and crushed. SWITZERLAND. Switzerland, originally a part of the kingdom of Arles, had been ceded, with this kingdom, to the German Empire in 1033. Within it, was established a lay and ecclesiastical feudalism.
Accordingly, while the Calixtines endeavoured to soothe and conciliate, the Taborites rushed to arms; and under Ziska, their renowned leader, achieved triumphs such as attend only on the exertions of men whose actuating principle is a strong religious fanaticism. The career of Ziska, his ferocity and his zeal, are well known.
Their ceremonies, more offensively superstitious than those of Rome herself, gave extreme umbrage to the Hussites, and the matter which they had been commissioned to effect, fell to the ground. It was at this juncture that the final separation between the Taborites and the Calixtines took place. The former renounced all connexion with Rome, and for awhile laid aside their very priesthood.
It was here, that in 1420, the leaders of the Taborites assembled, their followers being gathered together in the Grosse Ring, or square beneath, and at the tolling of a bell, the whole sallied forth to commit those excesses which, both in Bohemia and elsewhere, have cast such discredit on the dawn of the Reformation.
"If a man," he said, "eats a black pudding on Friday, you blame him; but if he sheds his brother's blood on the scaffold or on the field of battle you praise him." He condemned the Taborites because they made light of the Sacraments. "You have called the Holy Bread," he said, "a butterfly, a bat, an idol.
For the present all we call say is that the Waldenses in a quiet way were fast becoming a mighty force in the country. But the method of the Taborites was different. If the Kingdom of God was to come at all, it must come, they held, by force, by fire, by the sword, by pillage and by famine. What need to tell here the blood-curdling story of the Hussite Wars?
"Arnold is then dead!" cried Gottfried, without perceiving that the chevalier had finished his narrative. "Do not regret it," replied Theobald. "He was an enemy of our faith; one of those ferocious Taborites, who deny the Holy Father and demolish sacred places." "And it was you," continued Gottfried, "it was you yourself who struck him, when he refused to draw his sword against you!"
They called themselves the "people of God," and styled their Catholic opponents "Moabites," "Amalekites," etc., declaring that it was their duty to extirpate them. Their leader entitled himself "John Ziska, of the cup, captain, in the hope of God, of the Taborites." But having brought the story of the Emperor Wenceslas to an end, we must stop at this point.
The way the German of Luther's time looked at the burning questions of the hour was not essentially different from the way the English Wyclifites and Lollards, or the Bohemian Hussites and Taborites viewed them. There was obviously a difference born of the later time, but this difference was not, I repeat, essential.
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