404 years since the fateful Battle of White Mountain
November 8th is the anniversary of the Battle of White Mountain (Bitva na Bílé hoře), fought in 1620 just outside Prague, which brought disaster for the ruling Czech aristocracy and drastically altered the face of the Czech lands.
On November 8th 1620, in cold and wet autumn weather, a force of 21,000 Bohemian troops and mercenaries under the command of Christian of Anhalt took up a defensive position eight miles outside of Prague. They were all that stood between the city and an incoming Catholic army, sent by the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II to crush a rebellion in lands he saw as rightly his own. The Bohemians hoped that their opponents would not attack in such poor weather conditions, but those hopes were dashed; within an hour, the Bohemian forces were routed and Czech history was changed forever.
The Battle of White Mountain belonged to the wider context of the post-Reformation clash between Catholic and Protestant rulers across Europe. Simmering tensions erupted into violence in 1618 with the Third Defenestration of Prague and the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. Following the ejection of the Catholic representatives of Ferdinand II out of a window of Prague Castle, the Bohemian nobility elected the German elector Frederick as their new Protestant King of Bohemia in 1619. Frederick’s nickname of ‘the Winter King’ is an indication of the length of his rule – after his army’s decisive defeat on the White Mountain by the troops of the emperor and the Catholic League, Frederick V and his wife Elizabeth fled Bohemia in 1620, never to return.
As the victorious Catholic field marshal Johann Tserclaes von Tilly entered Prague later that day, he was not only bringing the full force of imperial might against the rebellious kingdom (with twenty-seven Bohemian leaders executed on Old Town Square), but also a new era of direct control by German-speaking elites. The Czech lands were to be immersed in societal waves of re-catholicisation and Germanisation, in an uncomfortable relationship with the imperial powers in Vienna that would only be broken in 1918, when the new state of Czechoslovakia declared its independence.
