Battle of White Mountain and Re-Catholicisation of Bohemia
The Bohemian revolt was destroyed in about two hours on a hillside outside Prague on 8 November 1620. Frederick V of the Palatinate had accepted the Bohemian crown from estates that had deposed Ferdinand of Habsburg the previous year, and had spent his winter as king failing to raise money, alienating Lutheran Bohemians with Calvinist iconoclasm in the cathedral, and receiving no help from his father-in-law James I of England. The Catholic side, by contrast, had Spanish money, papal subsidies, the Catholic League army under Tilly, and the Lutheran Elector of Saxony, who was bought with Lusatia. The armies were roughly equal at about 20,000 apiece. The Bohemian force was unpaid, mutinous and badly positioned on the slope, its Hungarian cavalry disinclined to close, and it broke early on the left and then generally. Perhaps 2,000 were killed. Frederick was at dinner in Prague and fled the next morning, which is where the name Winter King comes from. The consequences were disproportionate to the fighting. Twenty-seven leaders were executed in the Old Town Square in June 1621 and their heads displayed on the bridge tower for a decade; Protestant worship was outlawed; some three-quarters of the noble estates changed hands; and the Czech language was reduced to a peasant vernacular for two centuries. The war spread instead of ending, and ran another twenty-eight years. Czechs still date the loss of their independence from this battle. The twenty-seven crosses set into the pavement of the Old Town Square mark the executions, and the date 8 November was chosen deliberately for the founding of the modern Czechoslovak state's commemorations.
- Year: 1620 CE
- Category: Political
