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I accidentally bought this from Osprey in the ePub format, and confirmed my suspicion that that is a poor choice for the heavily illustrated Osprey books. If you want electronic format, for them I recommend PDF so that the formatting is intact. (Especially when they make reference to an illustration ‘on page 30’….)

The Hussite Wars are a subject I’ve wanted to get a little more depth on since running across it in Terrance Wise’s Medieval Warfare. As to be expected, this is a nice step up from that, though far from any sort of in-depth study. First published in 2004, this Men-at-Arms volume feels like a much earlier release with nearly half the text being a history of the wars, and the reproduction of a single older map to show the area of the conflict.

Now, the history is a large part of what I wanted, so that’s actually the right call here. The general nature of the “heresy” is gone into, and the general groups that got involved. There’s a lot more background that could be given there, but it’s a very fine line between interest and overburdened, but I will say that Sigismund of Luxembourg needs more fleshing out as the opportunistic figure that much of this revolved around. Also, the chronology mentions George of Poděbrady as the one Hussite King of Bohemia (after the scope of the book), but he gets a bare paragraph at the very end of the history, mentioning another war (dismissed in one sentence), and not mentioning that he had taken part in earlier battles. The weakest point of the book is that all the battles and sieges are handled very briefly, with no diagrams for them, and just that one overloaded map to refer to (and a photograph of a display at the Hussite Museum of the Battle of Sudomer).

The military section of the book starts strongly by pointing out the various contingents inevitably brought in by the declaration of five different crusades against the Hussites. After that, it gets a bit general, but there isn’t a whole lot of direct evidence for what a lot of the troops looked like. It is pointed out that on the noble end Italian armor styles still held sway, and points out that the period covers from Agincourt (1415) to Jeanne ‘d Arc (1430s), and their changes in equipment. The Hussites had largely peasant armies, and a bit is gone into with their weaponry, and the expected discipline ordered by Jan Zizka. A couple of good pages gives what common peasant dress was like at the time.

There is of course a good section on the war wagons employed to great effect by the Hussites, and the main defining feature of the war. Photographs of a reconstruction of one of these are provided (along with one of a model), and a section view, all from the Hussite Museum in Tabor. I find it a bit hard to believe, mostly because it doesn’t look anything like the stereotypical “cart” fixed in the imagination that it presumably derived from. But, I’m sure there’s been lots of arguments on the way to this reconstruction, and frankly it would have to look something like this to do the things that it had to do (also, seeing one ‘on the move’ would have been a plus). There’s also a good section on guns and artillery, as this is one of the first wars in Europe where we know they were used. This section is decidedly informative, and though similar information on early guns is elsewhere, here it is in context of a war where they were certainly used.

This is one of the later volumes featuring Angus McBride’s art, and sadly has none of his more ambitious pieces. The cover uses a cropped version of one of the betters (as art), but they are all informative, including one giving an idea of a war wagon in use, which points up disparity in what it seems one would hold, and what sources say were assigned to it (I’d be willing to believe that the latter was more what weapons they carried, for distribution when setting up for battle). As usual, there’s plenty of well reproduced black-and-white photographs, and the commentary for the color plates are very informative on the visual end.

There’s a lot more that could be said, and no hints that any of it has been (of course it has, though probably not in English). But it’s not really the place of a 48-page book to go into it anyway. Overall, it delivers pretty much what you’d expect from a Men-at-Arms book: Enough history to get you going, and enough of the military details to get a sense of the fighting, and maybe do some miniatures gaming, if that’s your inclination.