Hussite war wagon POD

[Melvin Loh]

The Hussites of what's now modern-day Bohemia-Moravia were a formidable fighting-force of the 15th C, ruling the battlefield from their heavily-armoured, well-equipped war wagons and defeating much larger armies of opposing knights thru crossbows and arquebuses fired from prepared defensive positions in their wagons, which came to be viewed as primitive ancestors of the modern-day tank. AFAIK, their influence in this proto-tank warfare declined once they ceased to be a significant force, but WI their ideas on mobile armoured warfare had been more widely utilised ? I know that Cortes' conquistadors constructed large protected covered wagons for the siege of Tenochtitlan, but could there conceivably have been anything else ?

 

[carlton_bach]

The war wagon was a successful and long-lived design (purpose-built ones continued in use in European militaries until the mid-17th century). Cortez was simply applying a lesson he knew from home. However, Hussite wagons functioned as portable fortifications, not mobile fighting platforms, and that remained the function of war wagons until they dropped out of the arsenal and that of improvised descendants well into the Boer War.

Of course European engineers came up with the idea of armored vehicles. Neither did the idea start with the Hussites - armored chariots were already part of the fantastical lore of warfare in the 5th century when the anonymous treatise 'de rebus bellicis' was penned. This being a favorite among Renaissance tinkerers, most likely hundreds of luckless engineers tried to make the tank work. At least, to judge by the drawings that survive they were thinking about it. They couldn't, lacking an efficient engine.

Now, if the concept had not droppped from the forefront of the military imagination by the time triple-expansion steam engines came about...