NOVEMBER 8, 1620

On a cool November afternoon, a sixty-one year-old general Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, stood on a low, treeless plateau just outside the bustling imperial city of Prague. Before him, thousands of protestant dead littered the battlefield. The moans and screams called forth by the pike, sword, and musket wounds, and the smell of gunpowder from the cannon filled the air. Having lasted just over an hour, the engagement had seemed like more of a skirmish than a battle to the veteran commander, but it’s repercussions would prove to last much, much longer than any battle the general had previously commanded. Near Tilly stood an ambitious, but still unknown German-Bohemian nobleman by the name of Albrecht von Wallenstein, while in the ranks of his victorious Catholic army that was just now mopping up the fight, was a young French military observer, Rene Descartes. God had that day delivered the righteous a swift victory, and had cast the Protestant heretics into exile; the revolt of the Bohemian estates had been dealt a death-blow. Little did Tilly, Wallenstein, or Descartes know that the Battle of White Mountain would both secure Catholic Habsburg domination of Bohemia for next three hundred years, and spread the Bohemian Revolt into the myriad German states that comprised the Holy Roman Empire, beginning the most destructive war in European history.

THE CHANGING TIMES

European knowledge of the world at the beginning of the 1500s

The 1500s were a time of immense social and political change in Europe. Not only had the balance of power shifted on the continent into Spain’s favour, but gunpowder had recently revolutionized warfare, and a refocusing on the classical Greco-Roman societies had launched the Renaissance in Northern Italy. As a result of the growing European exploration and travel to the mysterious reaches of the world, there was now a huge influx of both gold and silver from the New World, and also entirely new and unheard of foods including potatoes, tomatoes, corn, and cacao. This was the age of the explorers, and their distant voyages laid the groundwork for both the spread and enrichment of European culture and religion through the world. The speed at which these enterprises were accomplished was staggering. In 1492 Columbus had spotted the new word, and yet only 29 years later, in 1521, the men of Ferdinand Magellan (although not the famous explorer himself, as he had died in a skirmish with a local tribe in the Philippines) had completed their unprecedented journey around the world. It was an age of immense optimism in the wake of the catastrophic 1300s which plunged Europe into the darkness during the Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War.

A HABSBURG EUROPE

Habsburg holdings in Europe (left), Holy Roman Empire (right)

In 1618, two years after the death of Shakespeare, and six years before the founding of the small colonial outpost of New Amsterdam on a hilly island at the mouth of the Hudson River recently named Manhattan, Central Europe was dominated by the sprawling Holy Roman Empire. Established by the successors of Charlemagne as the Eastern division of the Frankish Empire, the Empire was already at this point nearly 800 years old. The lumbering political entity was composed mostly of an array of German states, but also included the various Swiss Cantons, northern Italian city-states, parts of modern-day France, the Netherlands (owned by the Spanish Habsburgs), and Austria and Bohemia (Owned by the Austrian Habsburgs).

The various states of the Empire were represented on an imperial level by a legislative and advisory body known as the Imperial Diet, which represented the leaders of the various states. Above the members of the Diet were the Prince-Electors, the leaders of the seven realms (Cologne, Mainz, Palatinate of the Rhine, Saxony, Brandenburg, and Bohemia) who collectively elected a successor to the Holy Roman Emperor. In practice, the successor was often chosen based on heredity.

Real power in the Empire and on the continent, however, lay with the Habsburg family name. Ruling over Spain, at this point in time the most powerful nation in Europe, large portions of Southern Italy, Burgundy, the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia, the Habsburgs were at the height of their power. Across Europe, the Spanish military formations known as the tercios had cut a swath of conquest, and remained effectively undefeated in nearly a hundred years. The power of the tercios consisted from the unique manner in which they fought. While this system might seem cumbersome and alien to people today, it was extremely effective in its time.

Spanish armies dominated Europe in the 1500s and 1600s

The tercio (‘third’ in Spanish) system revolved around a defensive formation of pikemen, protecting roving formations of Musketeers and Arquebusiers armed with guns (Muskets and Arquebuses). The idea was, if the enemy cavalry attacked the lightly armoured skirmishers armed with guns, they would retreat into the safety of the pikemen. As horses were constitutionally opposed to running into a dense formation of pikes, the skirmishers would thus be defended. As a result, the battles of the era looked slow and peculiar compared to those of later centuries, and were characterized by lines of dense, square formations of about 2-3,000 men holding pikes ranging anywhere from 15-21 feet in length. This defensive mindset led to relatively low casualty rates compared to classical or medieval warfare; it was difficult to annihilate armies in single engagements as the cavalry was unable to pursue retreating armies unless the formations were broken, and a melee precipitated.

During the 1500s, the Spanish Empire pioneered these tactics, building off the earlier pike-based army revivals led by the successful Swiss mercenary armies, and later their German landsknechts imitators. It was through these methods that Spain had, by 1618, accumulated a vast empire, and established itself as the strongest military force on the continent.

Also contributing to the Spanish domination of the period was the inflow of vast riches (mainly in the form of gold and silver) from the newly-discovered Americas. While this massive influx of precious metals would eventually ruin the Spanish economy (due to ruinous inflation), at the time it allowed the Spanish government to pay for its armies to operate all across the continent.

In primary opposition to the Habsburg dominance on the continent stood France, finally recovered from the turmoil of the 14th and 15th centuries, and now one of the strongest nations in Europe. Lesser powers included Poland, and the protestant nations of England and Sweden. Economically, the Dutch had also made great strides in extending their national power and influence through an expanded trade network and major banking innovations, and were currently engaged in a seemingly endless war to overthrow their Spanish masters, a conflict known as the Eighty Years’ War. To the south and the east, the Ottomans still posed a very real threat to the mediterranean world, and had already marched on, and besieged Vienna. They would continue to fight the Poles, Hungarians, and Austrians for hundreds of years afterwards.

Thus was the state of Europe at the time of the fateful events that were soon to transpire outside Prague.

THE REFORMATION

The Religions of Central Europe in 1618. Catholics (Purple), Lutherans (Light Orange), Calvinists (Light Red), Zwinglians (Dark Orange), Hussites (Light Purple)

In the early 1400s, the Czech priest Jan Hus, master of Charles University of Prague began preaching against the teachings of the Catholic church. Disillusioned with the corruption and politics of the church, at the time the most powerful and wealthy institution on the continent, and specifically against the sale of indulgences and the crusades, he began spreading his ideas to the people of Prague and the surrounding countryside. Hus spoke against materialism, pleaded for a return to the true values of Christianity, and away from the moral and ethical failings of the church. He began to side with John Wycliffe, an early English protestant who was already receiving increasingly terse condemnation from the Pope in Rome. His cause was eventually taken up by the peoples of Bohemia.

Worried of the growing influence of the rebellious priest over the Bohemians, Hus was eventually tricked into joining the Council of Constance, originally convened to put an end to the Western Schism in which two rival Popes (the Pope in Rome, and the Antipope in Avignon, France) had split the Catholic church for over half a century. However, despite promises to the contrary, upon his arrival in Constance, Hus was detained, put on trial, declared a heretic and enemy of the Catholic cause, and subsequently burned at the stake. In Bohemia, the death of the beloved Hus sent the Bohemians into rebellion. Embattled for the batter part of twenty years and despite defeating four crusades called against them by the Pope, the Czech Hussites were finally defeated, and the rebellion ended in bloodshed.

The Czech priest Jan Hus is burned at the stake at Constance for preaching against the Catholic Church

Nearly two hundred years later, the teachings of Hus still carried weight in the minds of the Czechs. By 1618, however, the Hussites were no longer the largest protestant group in the Empire. They had been superseded in the early-mid 1500s by the Lutherans, followers of the German preacher Martin Luther who had rebelled against the Catholic church by nailing his infamous Ninety-Five Theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. Furthermore, additional Protestant theologians soon emerged in the wake of Luther’s break from the church, including the French John Calvin, and the Swiss Huldrych Zwingili. Their ideas spread quickly across Europe.

By 1618, the new religious doctrines espoused by the Protestant thinkers had caught on in the north of the Empire, primarily in northern Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, but had also spread across southern Germany, France, and Switzerland. Even in Austria, many members of both the nobility and the peasantry had already converted to either Lutheranism or Calvinism.

THE SECOND DEFENESTRATION OF PRAGUE

Bohemian nobles throw the Imperial representatives from the window

In 1618 Prague represented the largest city in the Holy Roman Empire. With a population of nearly 100,000 people, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia (modern day Czech Republic) represented one of the most important cities in the realm.

Bohemian protestants, despite losing the bloody Hussite wars, had their religious freedom protected by Imperial legislation since 1555. Bohemia’s Catholic Habsburg Kings, which ruled both the Kingdom and the Empire, had upheld the freedom of protestants to worship in an effort to appease the large population and economic centre of the Empire. In 1606, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II was replaced by his brother Emperor Matthias on the throne. Emperor Matthias, in accordance with his predecessor, had continued a policy of extension of rights to Protestants in the Empire. When it became increasingly obvious, however, that in his old age, Matthias would not last much longer on the throne, and that his fiercely Catholic son Ferdinand II would likely replace him as Holy Roman Emperor, tensions began to rise in Bohemia as the protestant nobles and population resisted what they feared to be an impending repressive regime.

On May 23rd, 1618, in the growing climate of mistrust and with the smell of rebellion in the air, two of Matthias’ representatives arrived at the Chancellory in Prague to meet with several Bohemian protestant nobles assembled there. When the talks went sour after the Imperial representatives inferred that any nobles suspected of rebellion were to be detained and severely punished (inferring execution), the nobles turned on the representatives, and threw them out of the window. This action came to be known as the second defenestration of Prague, and was likely a reference to the first defenestration that had sparked the Hussite rebellion.

Despite falling approximately 60 feet, both men miraculously survived. Naturally, given the political and religious climate of the times, two accounts exist of the event: in the Catholic account, the Imperial representatives were saved from their deaths by the appearance of angels who guided them gently to the ground, whereas in the Protestant version, the representatives’ lives were saved when they fell on a large heap of animal and human excrement. The reader may judge for one’s self which story is more likely to be true.

A contemporary depiction of the Second Defenestration of Prague

In any event, the die had been cast; the Bohemians now stood in full revolt against the Imperial government.

On March 29, 1619, nearly a full year after the Bohemian rebellion had broken out, Emperor Matthias died in Vienna. Immediately, the Prince-Electors were summoned to Frankfurt where the election for the new Emperor was to be held. The three protestant princes (Brandenburg, Saxony, and the Palatinate) attempted to delay the election, fearing that the vehemently Catholic Matthias would seek to put down the Bohemian rebellion immediately upon election. The delaying action was led by Frederick, Elector of the Palatinate, and leader of the Protestant Union (a protestant self-defence league within the Empire) who took up the mantel of Protestant leader.

As the crisis depended, the Protestant Union met to discuss matters. The Bohemians, echoing the wished of Frederick, called for the Protestant states to stand against the fiercely Catholic Ferdinand II, but to their grave disappointment no Protestant state was willing to commit a military force to the conflict. Further setbacks occurred when the mercenary general Ernst von Mansfeld, hired by the rebels to clear Bohemia of Imperial forces, was defeated at Sablat in the summer of 1619 by an Imperial army commanded by the Count of Bucquoy, and left with no choice but to end his campaign against the Emperor.

In July and August, the Bohemian estates that had rebelled against the Emperor met and agreed on forming independent Bohemian Kingdom, and subsequently announced the deposition of the Holy Roman Emperor in their territory. The estates then offered the crown to Frederick on August 26th.

The Fiercely Catholic Habsburg Ferdinand II, King of Bohemia is elected Holy Roman Emperor

Two days later, when the election for Emperor was finally held after unsuccessful delaying attempts, Frederick found that all the other Electors had cast their votes for Ferdinand. The Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, fearing the inevitable election of Ferdinand and the weakness of the protestant position in Bohemia, had cast their votes in with Imperial power. Ferdinand was accordingly crowned Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor that day, August 28th. Frederick’s gamble in sticking with the protestant caused had left him politically isolated, and, having thrown his lot in with the Bohemians, he accepted the crown of the Kingdom of Bohemia soon afterwards in September.

IMPERIAL MOVEMENTS

Johannes Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, and leader of the Imperial armies tasked with crushing the Bohemian Revolt

Johannes Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, a veteran of several wars in Hungary and the Netherlands, was camped near Munich with his reformed Bavarian Army, which he had trained under the successful Spanish tercio system. At the request of the new Emperor Ferdinand II, Duke Maximilian of Bavaria (who was also leader of the Catholic League that opposed the Protestant Union) ordered him to move his army east, both to cover Vienna from an expected Bohemian attack, and to pacify both Upper and Lower Austria whose Protestant nobility had revolted soon after the Bohemians. Already mobilized were the forces of the Count of Bucquoy, who had recently moved into a defensive position around Vienna. In November, Bucquoy’s forces repulsed an attack by an ill trained and ill organized Bohemian and Transylvanian army, lifting a brief siege of Vienna.

With the rebel army turned back at the walls of Vienna, Tilly, who had by now moved into lower Austria, combined his forces with those of the Catholic League under Bucqouy which had been advancing north-east after lifting the siege of Vienna. Tilly, taking command of the two Imperial armies, now marched his well-disciplined forces north towards Prague.

While no decisive military action had yet taken place, what might be the final nail in the coffin for the isolated Bohemians came in the spring of 1620, when French diplomats – still sympathetic to the Habsburg Emperor – mediated between representatives the Catholic League and the Protestant Union in southern Germany, and encouraged both forces to sign a treaty which precluded any military action between the two defence organizations. Frederick, already meeting resistance to his calls for support from the unenthusiastic Protestant Union, now found that his supposed religious allies had signed a pact of neutrality with the Catholics, thus abandoning him to fight out the war on his own.

Back in Bohemia, the combined Imperial army under Tilly advanced easily into enemy territory, finding general Mansfeld’s defeated forces retired in the wake of the Battle of Sablat. Adding to the desperation of the moment, Protestant Saxony turned on the Bohemian rebels and invaded from the north, leaving Frederick completed isolated around Prague.

Also important to note in this critical moment, was that Ferdinand II, in the time between his ascension to the throne and Tilly’s push into Bohemia, had managed to acquire financial backing from several of the wealthier European countries, most notably, Spain. Frederick, on the other hand, remained isolated, both geographically, and more importantly, financially. As such, morale in the rebel armies continued to drop as they had still not received pay for their services. In the seventeenth century, as most armies were composed of mercenaries that fought above all for money and plunder, a failure to pay soldiers would often spell the the demise of an army if swift victories were not achieved.

THE BATTLE

The elaborate battle formations of the rebel (top) and Imperial (bottom) armies

At the extreme of their advance, Tilly encamped just to the west of the city of Prague with his Imperial army. Upon a low plateau to the south west of the city, the Bohemian rebel army under Prince Christian von Alhalt, which had recently overtaken Tilly’s army in a headlong retreat to cover Prague, had improvised hastily-constructed fortifications in preparation for the impending battle that they now realized would decide the fate of the rebel capital.

Tilly’s army entered the battle slightly outmanned at a total strength of 27,000 to Anhalt’s 30,000, but was far superior in training, experience and armament. Furthermore, the successful defence of Austria and Vienna, and the swift advance into Bohemia bolstered his army’s morale, and spirits were high among the Imperial soldiers.

Spread across what was to become the battlefield, the rebel army of 30,000 men under Anhalt was in a different mental state. Many of the men that composed Frederick’s numerically superior army were entirely untested in combat, and had only been levied several months earlier. The rest, paid mercenaries, had in fact not yet been paid, and there were growing mumblings about mass desertion if the soldiers did not receive pay shortly. In preparation for the battle, spread over the length of the ridge of what was known to the locals of Prague as White Mountain, Christian von Anhalt had prepared a system of redoubts that were intended to defend crucial artillery batteries, with the protestant army encamped just to the rear of the defences. If Tilly wanted to assault the rebel position, he would have to engage up a hill and into artillery fire.

Tilly’s Imperial army moves into position and engages the rebel army on its left flank

Despite calls from his generals against attacking the prepared position, Tilly, at the behest of his priest, decided that the time to engage the rebels had come. All would be in the hands of God now to distribute justice. He advanced in a relatively thin formation east along the southern bank of the Scharka river, spreading out his forces upon reaching the bottom of the slope of White Mountain. While the art of using mobile artillery was not introduced until the masterful battles won by Gustavus Adolphus some years later in the Thirty Years War, and not perfected until the campaigns of Napoleon, it still represented a major factor in pitched battles, and Tilly quickly moved his artillery to the front of his battle line, where it would remain for the remainder of the battle. With his artillery in place, he was now free to engage.

Just after noon on November 8, 1620, Count Tilly ordered an advanced force forward in an attempt to test the rebel forces on their flank. The dense tercios of Tilly’s army advanced in steadfast determination under musket and artillery fire towards the protestant line. Soon, the great formations of men were engaged, their pikes overlapping like the spines of enormous and fantastical sea urchins locked in slow, tedious combat; a ghastly and frightful sight for onlookers. Amid the jousting and clattering of the twenty foot pikes, musketeers and arquebusiers crouched and ran amid the chaos, firing point blank on the enemy formations. Men were rammed through with the great pikes, slashed by swords, and ripped through by the huge balls fired from the primitive guns at the time. Blood stained colourful military garments, and splattered on silver armour.

From their command positions, the two leaders watched their rival armies clash all along the line. After the initial contact, the forward rebel forces broke in the face of superior Imperial fighting skill, and began to retreat. Tilly, sensing the timidity of the untested rebel units, poured in troops to try and break the enemy’s weakened left flank. The frightened Bohemian soldiers soon lost discipline, and the flank quickly began to collapse under increasing Imperial pressure.

Tilly’s tercios successfully repulsed Christian von Anhalt’s cavalry charge, in a manner very similar to this image of the later Battle of Nördlingen

In an attempt to rally the troops and break through a portion of Tilly’s line, Christian von Anhalt along with his son led a cavalry charge on the centre of the Imperial lines, but without effective infantry support it was quickly turned back, and eventually damaged heavily in an Imperial counterattack. At this point, the veteran mercenaries that composed the core of the rebel army, seeing the superior, albeit limited, fighting displayed by the portion of the Imperial army that had engaged, and the effect that fighting had on the first rebel troops it had encountered, decided the battle was not worth fighting. They had not yet been paid for their services, and the prospect of being defeated and killed for a war they had no stake in other than for financial gain did not bode well with them. When the Imperial tercios pushed the initial panicked rebel formations they made contact with back, they had had enough, and began to leave the battlefield.

Seeing their core formations abandoning the battle and their leader’s cavalry charge turned back, the majority of the rebel army, most of whom had not fired a shot not had even been given an order to advance, lost heart, wavered, and turned and fled the battlefield. As the rebel formations broke up, a general free-for-all, the dread of commanders and common soldiers alike, developed. Tilly’s army pursued the fleeing Czech forces, and eventually cleared the battlefield, chasing the routed rebel army east, towards the city of Prague. In the end, just short of a thousand imperial troops were killed or wounded in the battle, with approximately 4,000 lost for the rebel forces. As the rebel army disintegrated, so did Frederick’s and the Bohemian Estate’s chances of holding out against the Imperial might of Ferdinand II. Tilly had won the first great Imperial victory of the Thirty Years War.

THE GERM OF WAR SPREADS

After Tilly’s army entered Prague, twenty-seven Bohemian nobles are arrested and executed in the town square for their part in the rebellion

Tilly entered Prague soon after the battle, precipitating a mass evacuation of protestant nobles and Protestant commoners alike. Twenty-seven nobles that either refused to leave the city or were captured were put on trial and sentenced to death for their part in the rebellion. On June 21st, 1621, twenty-four were decapitated and three hanged on a podium before a large crowd assembled in front of the Old Town Hall of Prague. The Bohemian Revolt was finished.

The war that was to span 30 years, and engulf the whole of central Europe was just getting started, however. Tilly soon left Prague, and pursued Mansfeld, who had ended his pact of non-aggression with Emperor Ferdinand, and was now leading a small protestant army across Bavaria, the Palatinate, and into the Protestant Netherlands where he hoped to find shelter for himself and his men. With Mansfeld and the fleeing Protestant forces, the germ of rebellion spread across the Empire.

Soon, Mansfeld had secured backing from Frederick’s father-in-law, King James I of England (who had refused to support Frederick in his claim to the Bohemian crown), and landed again on the continent with a new mercenary army, fighting alongside King Christian IV of Denmark who entered the war to increase his influence in northern Germany and establish himself as the leader of the Protestant cause.

Back in Bohemia, Austrian Habsburg domination was quickly enforced, and the population was forced into a conversion to Catholicism. The revolt had been both figuratively and literally beheaded, and along with it’s leaders, the Hussite cause was dead. Bohemia would remain a Habsburg Austrian possession until the end of the First World War, exactly 300 years after the second defenestration of Prague. Bohemia, once the earliest and most militant Protestant nation on the continent, remains Catholic to this day.

In the wake of the battle, Frederick found his cause entirely crushed, and his allies had all either fled or had been executed. For his short reign – essentially one season – he would soon be called by the derisive nickname, the ‘Winter King’. Forced to flee after the battle, he also made for the Netherlands. He would remain in exile for the rest of his life, vainly attempting to rally the Protestant cause, and to reestablish himself as King of Bohemia.

Wallenstein, who participated in the Battle of White Mountain in Tilly’s staff, would later come to be a central figure in the Imperial war effort. In several successful campaigns in Bohemia, Saxony, and northern Germany, he managed to amass a vast personal wealth of money, land, and titles. By the 1630s, through the fortune he had plundered from the lands and peoples he conquered, Wallenstein even became a major financier of the nearly-bankrupt Ferdinand II, lending him men and money in exchange for titles and land, and further solidifying his position in the Holy Roman Empire. He was eventually dismissed from his military position by the Emperor, who grew wary of his growing financial and military power. After the initial Imperial defeats to the Protestant military genius, King Gustavus Aldolphus of Sweden, he was recalled to battle the seemingly invincible Swedish general, eventually halting his armies at Lützen (a battle Wallenstein actually lost) after Adolphus was killed in battle. After attempting to mediate a peace between the Protestants and Imperial forces without the consent of the Emperor, Ferdinand, fearing the brilliant general would switch sides, ordered Wallenstein’s assassination.

Wallenstein, a participant in the Battle of White Mountain, and the greatest general the Empire would produce, is assassinated in 1634 under orders of Emperor Ferdinand II

Tilly, victor of the Battle of White Mountain, would continue the fight against the Protestants. After crushing the Bohemian revolt, he moved towards Heidelberg and the Rhine valley, and eliminated a Protestant uprising there, pursuing Mansfeld’s mercenaries all the way to the Spanish Netherlands. In 1626, he routed the Protestant army of Christian IV of Denmark at the Battle of Lutter, destroying nearly 50% of the enemy (an incredibly high figure for warfare at the time) as it fled the battlefield. Tilly would continue to suppress Protestant uprisings in northern Germany (notably taking part in the horrible sack of Magdeburg) until he was forced to fight Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. After being defeated at the Battle of Breitenfeld by the Swedish King, he was wounded by a cannon ball in the subsequent campaign, and died from his wounds in the spring of 1632.

BELLUM SE IPSUM ALET: THE WAR FEEDS ITSELF

Marauding mercenary armies of every nationality ravaged both the land of their enemies and their allies in an attempt to sustain and enrich themselves; one third of all Germans perished over the course of the war

The Thirty Years War represented arguably the most horrendous and destructive conflict in European history. Eventually, all major powers on the continent would become embroiled in the conflict, with Germany acting as the primary battleground. The main alliances of France-Sweden, and Austria-Spain, in fighting for dominance over the continent, burned themselves out, while ransacking the Holy Roman Empire, and killing a third of all Germans. Tragically, after all the bloodshed and misery ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the status quo prevailed.

Recruits being taught to fire muskets by seasoned veterans, without a doubt a scene common of the age

In Bohemia, which had in 1620 represented the leading light of the Protestant cause, the Czechs soon found themselves under the domination of the Catholic powers as a result of the Battle of White Mountain. So effective was Habsburg rule reasserted, that nearly 400 years later, the nation still remains Catholic. Thus, with his victory at White Mountain, Tilly sealed the fate of the anti-Catholic cause in the Czech lands that had started with the preachings of Jan Hus.

The spread of the war across the Empire with the flight of the defeated Bohemian rebels would prove a decisive factor in the history of Central Europe, eventually leading to the bankruptcy and decline of Spanish military power on the continent, the upholding of the power of the German princes at the expense of the Holy Roman Emperor impeding German unification for over 200 years, and the solidification of Protestantism in northern Europe. As such, the Battle of White Mountain stands as a truly decisive moment in history.

Thank you for reading.