In fifteenth-century Europe there was a religious war of enormous scale that made the mighty Holy Roman Empire totter from within.
The Hussite Wars.
To understand the origin of that name, one cannot avoid explaining 'Jan Hus', the revered theologian of the Kingdom of Bohemia.
Europe at that time was an era in which the corruption of the Church had reached its extreme, going so far as to sell even salvation after death under the name of indulgences.
Jan Hus, unable to stomach the sight, cried out as follows, and to summarize his argument in a modern manner it went roughly like this.
'Fuck the Pope! Fuck the emperor too! Fuck the Curia and the priests, all of them! Instead of the corrupt Catholic Church, we will believe in and follow the word of scripture alone!'
...Of course there is no way a revered theologian actually used such vulgar language, but measured purely by the social shock of the ideas he argued for, it was roughly the same.
In the Europe of that time, scripture was a sacred and inviolable domain that could only be approached through a priest, God's proxy. To the masses who did not know Latin, what the priest told them was truth itself.
And Jan Hus bored into exactly that point.
'How can we trust those corrupt popes and priests? Let us skip past them and hear the Lord's word directly ourselves!'
He translated the Latin scripture monopolized by a small number of priests into Czech, and argued that everyone ought to be able to read scripture.
Put simply, it amounted to eliminating the middlemen of pope and priest and dealing with God directly through scripture alone.
What is more, Jan Hus went one step further than that and eventually arrived at an argument this extreme.
'Those Catholic clergymen are nothing but heaps of shit who pile up wealth, guzzle wine, and spawn bastards, so it is right that all of that wealth be seized and returned to society!'
At this point the Curia's patience ran out too. Clutching the backs of their necks, the Curia declared Jan Hus and all his followers heretics.
But by good fortune (?), the Church at the time was in the middle of filming an even bigger trainwreck drama. Its name was the Western Schism.
There were no fewer than three cardinals who rose up claiming they would take the papacy despite not being remotely up to it. It was, in a word, five minutes from total chaos.
Three popes who had realized a true trinity were too busy grabbing each other by the hair to spare any attention for heretics in Bohemia.
The eyes of the common people who watched that mudfight grew colder still, and as distrust of the Catholic Church deepened, Jan Hus's ideas spread as fast as a wildfire.
In the end, by the time Sigismund, King of Hungary, and Cardinal Oddone Colonna (later Pope Martin V) finally stepped in, unable to watch any longer, to unify the Church and clean up the heretics, the whole of Bohemia was already thoroughly drunk on Jan Hus's ideas.
So Sigismund sent a letter directly to Jan Hus and said this.
'You have a lot to say, don't you? As it happens we're all gathering to elect a pope, so come and give your speech proudly. I'll guarantee your safety on my own name.'
This was the invitation to the Council of Constance.
Jan Hus knew the Curia was itching to kill him, but with the thought, 'Surely nothing will happen when the king himself has vouched for me,' he ultimately set out for Constance.
That "surely" got him killed. The moment Jan Hus arrived in Constance he was arrested, and on the charge of heresy he was put on the pyre.
From of old a king's promise ought to weigh more than gold. It was a cowardly lie that would have made his great father, Charles IV, wail in his grave.
The people of Bohemia, enraged to the roots of their hair by this petty betrayal, rose up calling themselves the 'Hussites'.
This was precisely the beginning of the Hussite Wars.
To make matters worse, in the midst of all this, Wenceslas IV, the King of Bohemia and Sigismund's own elder brother, known as the 'Idle King', heard the news that a rebellion had broken out in his own land and promptly clutched the back of his neck and died, an absurd turn of events.
The bigger problem was that the Idle King had no heir.
The throne of Bohemia passed automatically to his younger brother, the very man who had driven Jan Hus to his death, Sigismund, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
Unable to accept a lying king who had burned their martyr, the Hussites' resistance grew fiercer still.
At this, Sigismund joined hands with Pope Martin V and went so far as to organize a crusade from across the whole of the empire to subjugate the Hussites.
A rabble of a peasant army that had risen up on nothing but anger, and the empire's elite knightly orders bound tightly together by faith and loyalty.
It was a fight whose outcome was obvious to anyone. It looked as though the crown of Bohemia would pass smoothly into Sigismund's possession just like that.
But it is precisely in a turbulent age that heroes appear.
A peerless strategist appeared like a comet and overturned the shape of a war everyone had thought already finished.
He was the war hero called the Yi Sun-sin of the Czech lands.
The one-eyed man, Jan Žižka.
***
"Ura!"
"Ura! Jan Žižka!"
"Žižka! Žižka!"
The Hussite camp was seething with the frenzy of victory.
Around the bonfires the soldiers beat on stolen beer casks and sang, and off to one side they tore ravenously into meat they were tasting for the first time in days.
The glorious battle at Vyšehrad not long ago, where they had smashed the crusaders' charge.
At the center of it, without fail, had been their great leader, Jan Žižka.
The soldiers sent up frenzied cheers toward the one-eyed general. But the man who ought to have been receiving those cheers was not among his soldiers.
Jan Žižka was quietly looking down at a map in his own tent, one step removed from the noisy camp.
"Hmm..."
Even in this very moment, countless variables of war were endlessly unfolding inside Žižka's head.
Just then a scout covered in dust entered the tent and knelt.
"General, news from Kutná Hora."
"Speak."
"Sigismund has finally moved. He has taken the remainder of his army, left Kutná Hora, and begun to retreat to Hungary by way of Moravia."
Žižka nodded without a word. His one remaining eye flashed with a cold light.
'So Sigismund has finally tucked his tail and run. But he will not give up at this. Before long he will surely organize a second crusade and invade this land again.'
Which meant that now, with the greatest external threat gone, was the one and only right moment to pull out the thorns lodged inside Bohemia.
Parasites still writhing here and there along the serpent's body. Those Catholic-faction bastards loyal to the king could not be left alone as they were.
He ran his eyes one by one over the pieces set on the map of Bohemia.
Plzeň. Kutná Hora. Český Krumlov...
His rough finger, running along the names of imperial-faction regions whose breath had not yet been cut off, stopped at one point.
"Šternberk..."
When Žižka murmured it quietly, the adjutant beside him reported at once.
"At present it would not be wrong to say Šternberk is empty. The head of the house fell at the Battle of Vyšehrad, and the main force of the family was wiped out with him at the time."
"Who is holding the castle now?"
"There is a young son, Ulrich by name, but... he is a greenhorn with no battle experience. Whatever forces remain in the castle can be no more than a few dozen routed men."
A cold smile rose at the corner of Žižka's mouth.
"A worn-out castle with nothing but one greenhorn, then. Just right for making an example to show those corrupt Catholic bastards."
He flicked the Šternberk piece off the map with his finger. As though driving away a bothersome insect.
"Inform the Hussite brothers. Tell them to take one thousand men and clean out this castle. Hang the young lord's head on the castle wall and make the place our forward base."
"Yes! General Žižka!"
***
For several days now, strange work had been in full swing at Šternberk Castle.
By the young lord's order the potters fired jars day and night, and the kitchen servants struggled to squeeze even one more drop of fat out of the salt-cured meat.
Everyone groaned with the unease of ruining the only emergency provisions for the siege soon to fall upon them, but the lord's will was firm.
And in one corner of the courtyard.
"Cough, cough! Hack!"
János coughed again and again at the harsh alcohol fumes rising in front of the still.
'What on earth is my lord going to use this for? All this strong drink... surely he does not mean to drink it. Is he trying to disinfect the soldiers' wounds with it? No, the amount is far too much for that.'
János's liege had become an entirely different person over the past few days.
Setting aside the fact that his memory was not whole after the riding accident, the behavior he had shown from the day he heard of his father's death could only be explained as sheer eccentricity.
To mobilize every hand in the castle only to make jars that break easily, to ruin precious meat to render out fat, and to boil perfectly good wine into strong spirits.
Because of it, all sorts of grim talk was now going around inside the castle. It ranged from the story that the new lord had gone mad to the rumor that he had made a contract with the devil and was working forbidden sorcery.
Even though the chief attendant Konrad and the knight commander Kuno had found the men spreading the rumors and punished them severely, the seed of unease, once sown, did not easily settle.
At last János finished distilling down to the final drop of wine. Then he loaded the cask of spirits onto a cart and headed for Ulrich's private workshop.
The place, once used as an old stable, had now been transformed into the lord's laboratory, filled with all manner of strange materials.
"My lord, I have brought the distilled spirits as you instructed."
"Well done. Set them down there."
Ulrich was silently stirring pine resin and animal fat in a large cauldron. Inside the cauldron a black, sticky liquid bubbled up and made an ominous sound.
The sight was far removed from the dignified figure of a lord. It was closer to that of an old alchemist or sorcerer brewing a forbidden elixir.
"......."
János was bewildered. The Ulrich he had known had never once shown any interest in such things as alchemy.
In the end János spoke up carefully.
"My lord, the fire that never goes out that you spoke of before... how exactly do you intend to make it?"
At those words, Ulrich's hand, stirring with the ladle, stopped.
"Why? Curious?"
"Honestly, I feel like I will go mad from the curiosity. Everything my lord does is beyond my common sense."
When János let out what was on his mind, a broad smile rose at the corner of Ulrich's mouth.
"You came at a good time. Seeing it with your own two eyes is faster than explaining it a hundred times in words."
"Yes? See it myself?"
Ulrich nodded. Then he pointed at the materials set out beside the cauldron.
Pine resin powder in enormous sacks, casks brimming with fat, and the cask of strong distilled spirits János had just brought.
"Watch closely. This is very precise work. If the ratio is off even slightly, it fails."
Ulrich first judged by eye the amount of melted pine resin and pig fat boiling in the cauldron.
"The pig fat is the fuel. Once it catches, it burns for a long time and holds a high temperature. But fat on its own is too thin and does not stick well to walls or armor. That is why we mix in pine resin. Mix fat and resin to raise the viscosity and it turns into a sticky jelly."
His gaze turned to the cask of spirits János had brought.
"And the spirits you brought. Those have a low flash point, so they will act as an igniter that makes it catch fire easily, and as a catalyst that explosively increases the burn rate of the whole mixture."
"Uh... what was that?"
Sadly, János did not understand a single word his liege said.
Ulrich laughed lightly.
"Well, just watch for now."
Presently Ulrich began carefully mixing pine resin, pig fat, and alcohol inside the large cauldron in a ratio of 2:2:1.
Bubble, bubble...
As the three substances mixed, the liquid in the cauldron turned an unpleasant black and thickened like jelly.
"Bleugh!"
János clamped his nose shut before he knew it. The foul smell reverberated through the entire shed.
Paying that no mind, Ulrich picked up one of the thin ceramic jars stacked beside him. Then, using a funnel, he carefully filled the jar with that black liquid.
Once the jar was about seven tenths full, he lastly stoppered its mouth tightly with a thick piece of cloth soaked through with oil.
"There, with this it is complete."
Ulrich lifted the finished jar for him to see. It looked like an ordinary jar, but its contents were anything but ordinary.
"What is that, my lord?"
"Napalm."
"Na... what?"
Ulrich grinned and said.
"The thing that will turn their carts into coffins."