TABORITE

Czech Tbori member of a militant group of Bohemian Hussite reformers who in 1420 gave the biblical name of Tabor (Czech: Tbor) to their fortified settlement south of Prague. Like their more moderate coreligionists, the Utraquists, they were strict biblicists and insisted on receiving a Eucharist of both bread and wine, though they denied transubstantiation and the Real Presence. Nicholas of Pelhrimov, first bishop of the Taborites, headed an independent church that replaced Latin with Czech in the liturgy, allowed married clergy, and rejected all the sacraments except Baptism and the Eucharist. The Taborites' military campaigns and their destruction of churches, which took place under the leadership of Jan Zizka, Prokop Hol, and Prokop the Lesser, aroused such widespread animosity that the Utraquists finally joined Roman Catholic Czech forces to defeat the Taborite army at Lipany in 1434. Despite the deaths of Zizka (1424) and Prokop (1434), the Taborites continued their struggle until a decisive battle in 1452, when Tbor itself was captured.