The Witcher Author's Hussite Trilogy Is The Elixir High Fantasy TV Desperately Needs

The Hussite Wars were rife with alternating allegiances, internal conflict, and various factions, each of which pops up in several ways in Andrzej Sapkowski's Hussite Trilogy and impact the morality, circumstance, and fate of his main characters. Crucially, all this chaos took place in the Age of Faith, when belief was truth and anyone who didn't believe what you believed about God posed a threat to both humanity and your own salvation.

When it came to "getting God right," the stakes couldn't be higher — religious conflict in Christian Europe was a fight against the devil and for your soul, and the fact that your opponent felt exactly the same way about you only further proved their heresy. In short, all parties believed that God was on their side and their side alone, a logistical impossibility that Sapkowski foregrounds in ways both subtle and humorous, violent and devastating.

It's difficult for the modern mind to grasp the all-encompassing nature of religion — in all its varied and warring forms — in the medieval world, but that doesn't mean it's not without a contemporary, analogous counterpart. Religion impacted every aspect of one's daily life, including political and cultural allegiances. And in times of crisis (e.g., following the Great Famine and the Black Death in the 14th century), a tool ostensibly meant to guide, teach, comfort, unite, and improve society quickly became a weapon — one used by those either in or seeking power to control, manipulate, and divide a vulnerable population who, in turn, used that weapon on one another. In other words, religion in the medieval world is essentially the Internet in 2023.