The Battle of White Mountain

NOV 08 1620 · 12:00

Contemporary depiction of Bohemian and Imperial armies meeting outside Prague, November 1620. Place: Bílá hora, west of Prague Figures: Christian I of Anhalt-Bernburg, Bohemian commander · Maximilian I of Bavaria, Catholic League · Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, field commander · Frederick V of the Palatinate, the Winter King Two Hours on a Hill The Bohemian Estates have spent two years improvising a state. They elected a Calvinist king, Frederick V of the Palatinate, after deposing Ferdinand of Habsburg; they raised an army on credit; they waited for the foreign aid that Frederick's father-in-law James I of England conspicuously did not send. By autumn 1620 Christian of Anhalt has perhaps 21,000 men, unpaid for months, dug in along the chalk ridge of Bílá hora west of Prague. Tilly and Bouquoy, with a combined Catholic League and Imperial force slightly larger, attack on the morning of 8 November. The Bohemian line breaks within ninety minutes. Anhalt's cavalry scatters; the Moravian infantry are cut down where they stand. Perhaps 4,000 Bohemians and 700 Catholics die. By early afternoon Tilly's lead squadrons are at the gates of Prague. A Settlement Destroyed in One Afternoon Frederick flees the city that night with his English wife Elizabeth and the crown jewels, riding for Breslau and eventually The Hague, where he will live out his exile as the Winterkönig: the king of a single Bohemian winter. The Defenestration of Prague (see [[defenestration-of-prague-1618]]) had opened a question; White Mountain closes it, for Bohemia, for a century. Ferdinand II's reprisal is methodical. Twenty-seven Protestant leaders are executed on Prague's Old Town Square on 21 June 1621, their heads displayed for ten years on the Charles Bridge tower. The Verneuerte Landesordnung of 1627 abolishes the elective monarchy, makes Bohemia hereditary Habsburg, German co-official with Czech, Catholicism the only permitted faith. Three quarters of Bohemia's noble estates change hands; the Protestant nobility goes into exile and never returns. A confessional settlement, a constitution, and a political class are erased in one afternoon and the seven years that follow. Video: Frederick V loses Bohemia in an hour. Tilly and Bucquoy reset the war's opening phase.