John Zisca

This noted general of Bohemia took up arms in the year 1419 against the Emperor Sigismund of Germany, to revenge the deaths of John Huss and Jerome of Prague, who had been cruelly burned to death for their religious tenets.

His army amounted to forty thousand men, and he defeated the emperor in several pitched battles. He gave orders that after his death (which occurred in 1424) his skin should be made into drum-heads, that he might still lead his troops against his enemies.

His wish was religiously carried out; and the skin of the enthusiastic Zisca long proved fatal to the emperor, for he did not recover Bohemia during a space of sixteen years.

The Hussite war, as it was called, was for religious liberty, and was the beginning of the great Reformation, John Huss having been the first martyr. Huss and Jerome of Prague were burnt by order of the Emperor Sigismund, in 1417. It required a hundred years of darkness and doubt, and study and hope, to bring about the appearance of Luther at the Diet of Worms. Sigismund violated his own safe-conduct as given to Huss. Charles V. kept his faith with Luther, but later in life regretted that he had.