However, the punitive expedition against the recalcitrant Czechs suddenly became more successful when the Catholic League, a union of South-German principalities that resisted Protestantism almost with the same fervour as they detested Islam, decided to support the Emperor’s army. In the autumn of 1620, the two enemies fought brutal battles in several places in Southern and Central Bohemia. After one of these clashes, the armies of the Emperor and the Catholic League, numbering more than 30,000 men, sent some 13,000 soldiers from the Czech crown’s army on the run towards Prague.
At one o’clock in the morning on the 8th of November, the Czech army arrived at White Mountain. Aware of the fact that his men were deadly tired, Commander-in-Chief Christian von Anhalt decided to pitch camp on the hilltop and prepare for a decisive battle against the enemy. Already at this point, contemporary eyewitnesses expressed grave doubts about the state of von Anhalt’s soldiers.
Photo © Terje B. Englund
“Since the leaders of the Czech rebellion didn’t wish to give ordinary people weapons in their hands, mostly Germans were hired. Thus, alongside a handful of our own men, the fateful battle for our national freedom was entrusted into the hands of paid mercenaries,” the historian František Dvorský writes.
Widespread boozing (see: Alcoholism) was already a problem at that time. Early in the morning on the 8th of November, a huge number of the soldiers left, running off to Prague to get food, beer and women. “If Commander-in-Chief von Anhalt had not ordered all the city gates to be closed, at least every other soldier would have fled to the inns,” Dvorský concludes.
Precisely at noon, when the fog had lifted, the Catholic League and the imperial army launched their attack. Except for a few displays of great bravery, namely by the Moravian Regiment, who fought almost to the last man (and, thus, laid the foundations for the commonly acknowledged theory that the inhabitants of Moravia generally possess more guts than their brethren in Bohemia), the Czech army’s retaliation was, at best, disorganized and faint.
Less than one and a half hours after the battle started, the Czech army had been beaten into its boots. Most of the soldiers that the Catholic forces captured alive were mercilessly butchered. Historians disagree about the number of Czech army soldiers killed, but several estimates speak about 9,000 men — out of an army that originally numbered 13,000. Among the battle’s victims were also a large number of Hungarian soldiers, who drowned when they tried to escape across the Vltava River in their combat gear. The Catholic League and the imperial army probably lost no more than 2,000 men.
So, what were the consequences of the disastrous Battle of White Mountain?
Early in the morning the day after the battle, King Bedřich — previously known as Prince Friedrich of Pfalz, whom the Czech nobility had elected their king a year earlier — fled the country with 300 members of his court and all the valuables they managed to stuff into their carriages. To many Prague burghers, who were eager to put up at least a symbolic fight against the Catholic forces, this was a tremendous disappointment.
“Now,” the historian Dvorský reports, “they witnessed their king and his men, who were to defend the nation, preparing for a humiliating escape. They bid him a most bewildered farewell.”
Unfortunately, this was not the last time in history when a leader of the Czech nation had to abandon his people at a moment when they were threatened from abroad. Just like unfortunate King Bedřich, President Edvard Beneš also fled the country after the tragic Munich Agreement in September 1938 (this time without the gold and jewels). Similarly, in 1968, when the Russians and their Warsaw Pact comrades crushed the Prague Spring (see: Communism), all but one brave member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s Politburo signed the humiliating capitulation imposed by Moscow without grumbling.
Thus, the aftermath of the Battle of White Mountain was a symbolic preview of what some historians have described as the Czechs’ long-lasting misfortune in picking their leaders. It also marked the end of the independent Czech kingdom, which from that day on was politically reduced to a province within the Austrian empire. Typically, when Czech Euro-phobes in 2003 campaigned against membership in the EU, one of their slogans was “White Mountain — never again!”
The Emperor in Vienna, however, was not satisfied with only winning the battle. Half a year later, he decided to set a deterrent example by publicly executing 27 prominent Czechs in the Old Town Square. The rest of the population had to choose: either demonstrate loyalty to the Habsburg rulers by converting to Catholicism, or leave the country.
Here, too, exact figures are hard to obtain. Some estimates suggest that between 10 and 30 percent of the population, among them many of the Czech nation’s best and brightest, chose to leave their country, thus laying the foundation for the Czechs’ rich tradition as political emigrants.
The fact that the Catholic Church let itself be used by the Habsburgs in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War as a tool to curb Czech patriotism didn’t, of course, go unnoticed. So, while the Poles, for instance, regard the Catholic Church as a cornerstone of their nationhood, quite a few Czechs still perceive it as something that can’t be fully trusted as loyal to their nation — a fact that might also explain why the Czechs in general harbour a rather chilly relationship to religion.
However, it’s usually forgotten that the White Mountain battle, in a wider perspective, actually had some positive effects as well. The Catholic revival after 1648 resulted in a massive construction boom, particularly when it came to ecclesiastical buildings. Some of the most magnificent examples of baroque architecture in Central Europe, such as the St. Nicholas Cathedral at Prague’s Malá Strana or the Klementinum library in Old Town, would probably never have been erected if the Protestant Czechs hadn’t been defeated at White Mountain on that foggy November day in 1620.
And while thousands of Czechs were forced to leave the country, there were thousands of foreigners who settled in Bohemia and Moravia. Many of them were members of the imperial army and the Catholic League, who received confiscated castles and estates as a reward for participating in the crusade against the Czechs (see: Nobility), which quite understandably helped to ruin foreigners’ image in this country for many centuries to come.
On the other hand, many artists and intellectuals also arrived, especially from Italy, where competition was strong. So paradoxically, what many Czechs still see as one of the biggest tragedies in the nation’s turbulent history was simultaneously a significant contribution to this country’s impressively rich cultural tradition.
Beauty Contests
When from time to time some daredevil tries to arrange a beauty contest in a Western European country, he or she can almost take it for granted that the arrangement will provoke wild protests. That’s definitely not the case in the Czech Republic. Beauty contests are neither considered to be politically incorrect nor humiliating to women (see: Feminism). On the contrary, they seem to be an obsession not only for Czech males, but more surprisingly, for the females, too.