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The communities of the “five cities” are not defeated by the combined armies of the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. The story is much sadder. The Taborites are at war for more than a generation. They are defeated by their own military victories. They suffer the same fat as the Guti who ganged up against Sumerian militarists in the Fertile Crescent, as their own Moravian ancestors who formed a league against Avars and then against Franks.

The self-defeat of the Taborites is not a simple affair, and it is not predetermined. The Taborites are actually more conscious of the predicament than later resisters, and the initial Taborites are far less addicted to violence than most other Europeans.

The conservative Hussites among them, who are mainly poor priests and play a role similar to that of Lollard priests in the earlier English uprising, abhor armed confrontations, and the radical Waldensians so prominent among the Taborites are principled pacifists who consider war the main Leviathanic institution to be overcome by the newly-risen communities of sisters and brothers.

The most violent of the early Taborites are the radical Adamites, for whom the peaceful Eden of the imminent future justifies every present atrocity. In the view of the Adamites, “all the evil ones who remain outside the mountains will be swallowed up in one moment”: all the evil doers are to be killed, all the houses destroyed, every last entity of the old world to be wiped out.

But the Adamites cannot wage a war. They can at most carry out successful raids. They reject all institutions, including the institutions required by a functioning war machine. The Adamites combine traits of those we call guerrilla bands and terrorists. Militarily the Adamites are the weakest of the Taborites.

It is not Adamite violence that spreads throughout the Taborites movement. When Taborites organize their military institution, they simultaneously rid themselves of the Adamite radicals in their midst. The Taborites who organize the invincible armies that will hold Crusading Europe’s entire military machine at bay are associates of the peace-minded Hussites, not of the violent Adamites.

There seem to be two movements which pull in diametrically opposed directions. The first movement is a withdrawal from the entrails of Leviathan, the second is a self-defense agaisnt the monster’s attacks.

The withdrawal movement is a time of self-abandon, of mask and armor removal. Daring radicals and visionaries are embraced as kin, every new sect has its day, all are heard and absorbed, and everyone ventures into undiscovered realms.

All this abruptly ends when the self-defense begins. Self-abandon gives way to a new rigidity, masks and armors are put on, exotic visionaries are distrusted, then ostracized, finally eliminated.

Most of the Taborites abhor violence. Tabor is itself a refuge from the daily violence of Leviathanic constraint. In Tabor, as a radical puts it, people “cannot be commanded by anyone, or excommunicated, or forbidden anything; neither the pope nor any archbishop nor anyone alive has authority over them for they are free.”

But the Taborites abhor the prospect of a reimposition of Leviathanic constraint by the Empire’s armies even more than they abhor violence. And the Imperial Crusaders do not even promise to reimpose former constraints; they are out to exterminate the Taborites.

Pacifist Waldensians may foresee the consequences of organizing a military self-defense, but they are not likely to stop people from defending not only their human gains but their very lives.

The preparations for the first armed confrontation do not announce a reversal of Tabors direction, an end to the ever-deeper movement of liberation, a turn toward militarism. No lordly generals are invited to institute military machine among the Taborites. Peasants with revelations, wandering radicals and poor Hussite priests, namely the very militants who have tended to monopolize discourse and define priorities all along, are the people who call for and organize the defense.

Later generals like Jan Zizka, Zbynek of Buchov and others are initially nothing more than Lollards, poor preachers. Zizka, for example, is a peasant who served in the army of a Polish lord at the Battle of Tannenberg. Even pacifists hail the battle that put an end to centuries of Teutonic violence. The fact that victorious Polish and Lithuanian nobles will impose over northeastern Europe the very serfdom imposed by the defeated Teutons is not yet known.

Zizka does not seek to reimpose any of the visible trappings of a knightly military organization. He remains poor and unadorned as any Hussite priest. Furthermore he’s blind. What he gives his fellow-Taborites is not a visible military hierarchy but his inner visions.

Perhaps, if the war had ended after the first battle, the Taborites would have returned to nonmilitary activities, to the problems of living in Paradise on earth, to the problems of reconstituting free communities based on love and kinship.

But the defeat of Sigismund’s army at Vishehrad is not the end of the war; it is the beginning. The Emperor’s anachronistic army is Leviathan’s army and, like the weather of Sumer, it goes on attacking, it goes on threatening to flood and destroy the “five cities.” Leviathan is nothing but a machine for grinding out armies. And the Taborites go on defending themselves, forming an alliance of communities similar to that of their Moravian ancestors, placing their trust in military leaders.

The blind military visionary Zizka, himself a peasant, does not try to transform the peasants and former zeks of Tabor into trained legions of armored Knights. He urges people familiar with flagellants to beat down the enemy with iron-tipped flails. He urges peasants to go to battle with their farm wagons, and to mount cannons on the wagons.

Even numerically superior forces of Crusading Knights are cut to pieces by weapons that will later be called Tanks, and the combined military might of Church and Empire fails to make a single breach through a wall of armored farm wagons.

The Taborites, like the Sumerians, become a mirror image of what they’re fighting. They turn into an impregnable fortress. And they impose on themselves all the constraints the invading Leviathan fails to impose on them.

The defenders of Tabor are peasants and townspeople as well as Hussite nobles who appropriate the lands of ousted Churchmen and Catholic nobles.

Adamites fail to distinguish friendly Hussite nobles from hostile Catholic ones, and they plunder the estates of allies as often as those of enemies. Adamites as well as other radicals remain committed to freedom from forced even though the bounty that could support free communities is on the private estates of barons and burghers.

While Adamites plunder the barons and urge peasants to abandon their sinful misery, Zizka and other military men negotiate with those very barons to provision the Taborite armies with produce created by the forced labor of the peasants on the estates.

Defense remains a priority in Tabor, and the Adamites clearly disrupt Tabor’s defensive apparatus. Soon the exotic but attractive Adamites become exotic but dangerous in the eyes of many Taborites, especially in the eyes of Hussite priests who associate more readily with Hussite Barons than with anti-Christian Pikarti.

Hussite priests elect an elder to arbitrate theological disputes. In practice this elder is a bishop who is charged with judging the correctness of the views of erring Taborites. The Hussite priesthood becomes a church. The Bishop’s judgments are excommunications. Adamites, Free Spirits, Beguines, Beghards and their numerous sympathizers are condemned as heretics, and several hundred are expelled from Tabor.

The radicals go to forests and river islands to found free communities of their own, communities without bishops or forced labor or permanent armies, and some apparently without clothing. They do not leave books about themselves, and will be known only from the reports of their maligners, reports which will depict the Adamites as numerous, vivacious, and restrained by few if any inhibitions.

One of the radicals, a priest named Martin Huska, allows himself to be lured back to Tabor to defend his views. Like Jan Hus at Constance, Martin Huska remains loyal to the institution that condemns him. Like Hus, he defends his views, in Huska’s case the anti-Christian view that “Paul’s institution of gathering in the Church will not be observed.” Instead of gathering in a Church, the Adamites gather at meals or banquets which they call love feasts. Love play and sex are integral to the feast, since the Adamites reject every trace of the Christian doctrine of Sin.

Also like Jan Hus, Martin Huska disowns practices he never advocated, such as the plundering raids of the Adamites. This is all his judges want to hear. Huska is imprisoned, and General Zizka himself, allied with a baron, leads a Taborite army against a nearby settlement of Adamites.

The violent raiders resist fiercely, but the violence of the Adamites is no match for the institutionalized violence of the Taborites.

The invincible Taborites then launch a crusade, or a terror, against the remaining communities of radicals expelled from “the five cities.” Only the names of some of the Adamite victims survive, names like Maria, Rohan the blacksmith, Peter Kanish.

Radicals who survive the terror return to wandering, in couples or in small groups, as Beguines or Beghards; some join with disillusioned Waldensians. Martin Huska, like Jan Hus before him, is burned by his fellow disputants, his judges.

Disencumbered of its radicals, Tabor goes on to defeat Europe’s last armies of Crusaders, first under General Zizka, then under General Prokop.

But the victorious Tabor is not the Kingdom of Heaven, it is no longer even a league of free cities. Tabor is now an independent city-state provisioned by a dependent countryside. It has more in common with the Leviathan it opposes than with the free communities its radicals announced . It may be the first modern state with a popular army driven be patriotism instead of fealty, but it has ceased to be a beacon of freedom.

The extermination of radicals is followed by the extirpation of radicalism. The initial heterodoxy of the “five cities” is replaced by an increasingly narrow and conservative orthodoxy. Defense remains the priority, and for its sake, Taborite priests keep narrowing even their religious differences from Hussite barons, merchants and Prague theologians whose religion differs from Catholicism only in the meaning given to the rite of drinking wine and eating bread.

The final confrontation is not between Taborites and Catholic Crusaders, but between Taborites who merge with the conservative Hussites and Taborites who only now decide that the compromises have gone far enough. It is too late for such a decision. The resisters have nothing to stand on but the previous day’s compromises.

During a generation of spectacular victories, Tabor as a community of free human committed slow suicide. The Reformation of Christianity has begun.