I’ve written plenty of articles about the effects of the Thirty Years’ war on Prague and Czechia in general. I knew bits and pieces of the story so I decided to put all my research into a larger article to put things into context.
The Thirty Years’ War was a European war fought between 1618 and 1648. It was one of the last major religious wars on the continent. At least that is how it started. It didn’t take long to be a France vs Hapsburg war for dominance in Europe1.
Art enthusiasts may want to visit Cesky Sternberk castle to view their impressive collection of more than 500 prints showing the war’s progress and information from the battlefield.
Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, is the one who started the war. (There were political reasons for other countries to wage war. Ferdinand’s actions were critical in starting the whole thing.)
He became Emperor when various religious divisions split the Empire. One of Ferdinand’s predecessors, Charles V, had signed the Peace of Augsburg in September 1555. That peace treaty had ended previous hostilities between Catholics and Protestants. It allowed each state’s Princes to choose which religion they wanted to use.
By all accounts it worked well.
Ferdinand was intolerant of other faiths. He was pro-Catholic and anti-Protestant. He imposed the Roman Catholic faith on everyone in the empire2 but this was a foolish move. People, especially Protestants, were angry because they couldn’t choose their religion. The Protestant states in the Empire banded together to form the Protestant Union3.
Religious intolerance was rife in Europe at this time in history. I’ve written about how Tycho Brahe was a victim of this intolerance and ended up in Prague because of it.
The Kingdom of Bohemia was angry with this level of interference in their daily lives. Bohemian estates were ready to defend their ways of life and their liberties.
One of these Bohemian estates contained the geographically curious town of Hranice.
The Defenestration of Prague
Karel Škreta (Charles University, Prague)
Within a year, Ferdinand ordered builders to stop working on new Protestant churches. The Bohemian nobility objected to this. He dissolved their assembly to get rid of their complaints. On 23 May 1618 four catholic Lords met Protestant members of the assembly at Prague Castle4. The Protestants wanted to know if the Catholics were behind the King’s whims.
The Catholics didn’t answer. They wanted to confer with Adam von Waldstein, their superior, before replying. Thinking they could buy some time they promised an answer by the following Friday. They’d met on the eve of Ascension day, which was an observable Holy feast, so they couldn’t answer sooner.
The Protestants insisted on an immediate reply. After arguing, they excused two of the Lords as they were too pious to have had anything to do with this matter.
One of the Protestants was Count von Thurn. His descendants owned and ran Loučeň castle in Bohemia.
He accused the Catholics of forcing their religion on Protestants. Thurn argued it was pointless keeping the Catholics alive as “no justice can be gained by or from them.” They defenestrated the other two Lord Masters from the castle.
Catholic legend has it that angels carried the two down and prevented them from dying. According to the Protestants, the two fell on to a pile of fresh dung which broke their fall5. Either way, both survived the 21-metre (70-foot) drop.
The Battle of White Mountain
After the defenestration, Catholics and Protestants started to amass forces for war. On 8 November 1620, they faced each other at White Mountain, west of Prague.
The Catholics had a battle-seasoned collection of 27 000 men. The Protestants were 15 000 strong. Their morale was low as they had started with 30 000 and had not been paid in weeks.
The Empire struck first by probing their flank. The Protestant rebels retreated, but sent their cavalry to resist this attack. The attackers responded with their cavalry which caused the rebels to retreat further. Catholic forces encircled the rebels capturing them in the middle of the battlefield. The rebels retreated even further; many companies ran without even fighting. The Empire drove the rebels back to the Star Palace outside Prague. They tried to defend their position but they were no match for the Imperial troops6.
The battle lasted an hour. The rebels lost 4 000 men; the Empire lost 700.
Local legend has it that the Catholics won only because they were helped by Mary, the Mother of God. The Church dedicated to her is now called “The Church of Our Lady Victorious” in reference to this legend.
My article about the statue of the Infant Jesus of Prague explains more about this.
Sir Iain [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], from Wikimedia Commons
Effect on Prague
The Catholic Imperial forces entered Prague. After a trial, they executed twenty-seven rebel leaders in Prague’s Old Town Square.
I wrote about this and how Czechia commemorates this in the square today in the paved design on the floor.
Five-sixths of the Bohemian nobility went into exile and Catholics confiscated their lands. Fighting continued in various parts of the land as some tried to defend themselves. The number of inhabitants in Bohemia decreased from 3 000 000 to 800 000 by the end of the Thirty Years’ war.
Many stately homes were destroyed or damaged in the war. Frydberk castle was one of them.
The recatholicisation of the Czech lands had other effects too. Czech-speaking aristocracy disappeared as did the use of the language. A German-speaking elite grew and German became the lingua franca in Bohemia. It was only in the 18th century that a revival of Czech identity began to reverse this7.
The rest of the war
The religious conflict spread across the continent.
In Transylvania, Prince Gabriel invaded Hungary supported by the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans then invaded Catholic Poland with 400 000 men8.
This W3C-unspecified vector image was created with Inkscape.
[CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Ferdinand faced enemies in western Germany and called on his nephew, Philip IV of Spain for help. The Spanish sent an army from Brussels to support the Catholic Imperial forces. The Protestant armies tried to retreat to the Netherlands. The Catholics defeated them 10 miles short of the Dutch border in 1623.
Bohemian Albert von Wallenstein boosted Ferdinand’s troops with his own soldiers. Albert used to be Protestant but calculated that converting would be wise. He confiscated plenty of land in Bohemia making him quite rich. He agreed to help Ferdinand provided he could plunder any land he won. This must have been a great incentive for him. As well as winning this battle, Wallenstein led his troops as far north as Denmark. The only reason he didn’t capture Copenhagen is because he didn’t have a proper naval fleet. The Catholics signed a truce with Christian IV of Denmark. Christian kept Denmark-Norway as long as he stopped supporting the Protestants.
Sweden invaded the Holy Roman Empire2, led by Gustavus Adolphus. France funded a large part of the Swedish army. The Swedes were ace warriors and the tables turned on the Catholics. Sweden soon occupied half of all Imperial kingdoms. They invaded the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth2 and roped in Russian help against this enemy.
France didn’t like having a strong Hapsburg neighbour. It invaded Germany and Spain. This was a disaster. Spain’s counter attack invaded France up to the suburbs of Paris. The tide of battle soon turned. The French repelled the Spanish and took Flanders on their eastern flank2. This caused rebellions in Spain in Catalonia and Portugal.
Denmark-Norway decided to join in again, but this time on the Imperial Catholic side. Swedish Marshall Lennart Torstenson pushed south from Denmark through Bohemia. They moved south and attacked Vienna and Brno in Moravia but failed to capture either of them.
I wrote about his failure to capture Brno because of a sly trick that Brno employed!
The battle of Prague in 1648 was the last part of the war. Swedish invaders captured Prague Castle but failed to capture the right-bank of Prague.
In 1635, all parties met and agreed on the Peace of Prague to stop this civil war in the Holy Roman Empire.
The Peace of Westphalia
It took all the warring parties 4 years to hammer out the conditions for peace. Between 1646 and 1648, diplomats worked behind the scenes drafting the necessary treaties. Between May and October 1648, the parties signed three peace treaties2.
This makes it sound like a routine bureaucratic exercise but it involved:
- 16 European states
- 66 imperial states from within the Holy Roman Empire
- 27 other interest groups.
How they managed to agree on anything is beyond me.
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
The main conclusions from this peace laid the groundwork for the world as we know it today:
- You can practise whatever religion you want without interference.
- Each party had exclusive sovereignty over its lands, its people and its agents abroad.
These two principles are key points in modern civilised life. We regard any country which doesn’t practise these principles as backward.
In the 19th century, these principles were severely tested by people in Austria-Hungary seeking autonomy.
I’ve written about how Praguers rebelled against their rulers during the Pentecostal uprising.
If it weren’t for the hot-headed Bohemian nobles, who knows what kind of world we would live in today?
Share this with someone who thinks religious freedom is a recent idea!
- Thirty Years’ War; Encyclopaedia Britannica; 2018-09-09[↩]
- Thirty Years’ War; Encyclopaedia Britannica; 2018-09-09[↩][↩][↩][↩][↩]
- Protestant Union; Encyclopaedia Britannica; 2008-06-09[↩]
- Bohemian revolt; Thirty Years’ war; (Retrieved 2018-11-15) [↩]
- Defenestration of Prague Window; Edward Denny; Atlas Obscura; (Retrieved 2018-11-17) [↩]
- Battles of the Thirty Years War from White Mountain to Nordlingen 1618–1635; Guthrie, William P.; 2001[↩]
- Consequences of Czech Defeat; USA Library of Congress Country Studies; (Retrieved 2018-11-17) [↩]
- An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire; Suraiya Faroqhi, Bruce McGowan, Sevket Pamuk; Cambridge University Press; 1997[↩]