Kingdom of Bohemia

The ploughman and the princess

formationDrafted from Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920)

The story Bohemian chroniclers told about their own kingdom's founding is one of the most vivid in medieval legend. Krok, first ruler of the Slavic tribes settled along the Vltava, left three daughters: Kazi, skilled in medicine and poisons; Teta, who taught the people the worship of nature spirits; and Libuše, youngest but wisest, chosen by the people as their ruler and judge. Libuše is said to have founded Prague at the foot of the Vyšehrad and foretold its greatness - but when a noble she ruled against complained that no other land endured the shame of a woman's rule, she told the people to choose a man instead, promising to marry whomever they chose. She sent them to a farm at Stadice, where they found a peasant named Přemysl ploughing his field with two spotted oxen, and declared that his descendants would reign forever. The chronicler Cosmas of Prague, writing this account down centuries after the events it claims to describe, is its only real source, and later Bohemian historians who elaborated it into detailed royal biographies were, in Lützow's own judgment, writing pure invention.

Musée d'Orsay, Paris · Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Sailko · CC BY 3.0

Where the record actually begins

The first Přemyslid ruler real evidence can attest to is Bořivoj I, a duke drawn into the politics of his more powerful neighbour, Svatopluk of Moravia, in the 870s. Svatopluk had thrown off Frankish overlordship after a decisive victory in 871 and secured his gains in the 874 Treaty of Forchheim, and it was in the years that followed

• the exact date is not recorded - that Bořivoj and his wife Ludmila were baptized by followers of Methodius, the missionary who had brought Slavic-language Christian worship to Moravia. Bořivoj is credited with building Bohemia's first churches, including the earliest known church on the Hradčany hill in Prague, and Ludmila's own reputation for piety helped Christianity take root among a people the chroniclers otherwise tell us almost nothing about.

Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Unknown photographer · Public domain

A kingdom still in another's shadow

For years after Bořivoj's death, Bohemia remained a junior partner in Svatopluk's Moravian empire, which at its height claimed supremacy over territory reaching from Kraków to the outskirts of Magdeburg. It was only after Svatopluk's own death in 894, and the succession quarrels that tore Moravia apart afterward, that Bořivoj's son Spytihněv broke free of Moravian overlordship and reestablished Přemyslid rule over the whole of Bohemia on its own account - a independence that proved durable in a way Svatopluk's own empire, destroyed by Magyar invasion within a generation, never would.

Early mass at Stará Boleslav

formationDrafted from Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920)

Bořivoj's line held Bohemia after Spytihněv's break from Moravia, but it did not hold it peacefully. When Duke Vratislav I died around 920, he left two young sons, Wenceslas and Boleslav, under the guardianship of their mother Drahomira - a proud, ambitious woman from a still-pagan Slavic tribe who grew jealous of the influence Wenceslas's own grandmother, Ludmila, held over the boy she had raised in the Christian faith. Drahomira had Ludmila murdered rather than share power with her: assassins found the older woman at prayer in the castle of Tetín and strangled her with her own veil in 921. The Catholic Church later canonized her as a saint, one of Bohemia's earliest.

Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A prince who reaped his own church's wheat

Wenceslas took up the government not long after, and the record that survives him describes a strikingly pious ruler - a man who spent long stretches of the night in prayer and who, by tradition, cut the wheat and pressed the grapes for the sacramental bread and wine at his own churches with his own hands. His reign coincided with the rise of Henry the Fowler's German kingdom, whose armies had already subdued several neighboring Slavic tribes; when Henry marched on Prague in 928, Wenceslas judged outright resistance hopeless and accepted a peace bought with an annual tribute of silver and cattle rather than risk his kingdom on a battle he expected to lose.

Murdered on the way to early mass

That same caution, paired with a generosity toward the church that some of his own nobles resented, gave his younger brother Boleslav an opening. Boleslav invited Wenceslas to a church dedication at Stará Boleslav, where he himself held residence, and on 28 September 935, as Wenceslas walked to early morning mass, Boleslav and a band of fellow conspirators fell on him and killed him after he fought back alone. The Church canonized Wenceslas as well, and the anniversary of his death remains, to this day, one of Bohemia's great religious feasts - a murdered duke whose own cult of sainthood would give the Přemyslid dynasty a martyr-patron no rival house could claim to share.

A cruel brother's competent reign

Boleslav, who took the throne as "the Cruel," proved a far more formidable ruler than the brother he had killed. Henry the Fowler treated the murder of his own tribute-paying ally as grounds to renew the war, and Henry's successor Otto I sent two armies into Bohemia in 938; the fighting dragged on with mixed results for over a decade before Boleslav, unable to withstand Otto's full strength, resumed the tribute payments his brother had first agreed to. Boleslav turned his own ambitions eastward instead, joining Otto's coalition against a renewed Magyar invasion in 955 and personally destroying the retreating Hungarian army when it tried to force a passage home through Bohemia - a victory that let him absorb Moravia and push Bohemian influence deep into the lands beyond the Carpathians. He sealed an alliance with Poland's own pagan duke, Mieszko I, by giving him a daughter, Dobrawa, in marriage - a match that led directly to Mieszko's own conversion to Christianity and, through him, to Poland's.

A bishopric independent of Regensburg

expansionDrafted from Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920)

Boleslav II, "the Pious," inherited his father's strength in 967 and used it to pry Bohemia's own church loose from German oversight. In 973, with the emperor Otto's consent, Bohemia was separated from the diocese of Regensburg and Prague made the seat of its own bishopric - a genuine concession, though the pope insisted the new see not be read as any continuation of the old Moravian archbishopric, and that it use the Latin liturgy rather than the Slavonic rite Cyril and Methodius's own mission had once planted in the region. Thietmar, a German long resident in Bohemia and fluent in its language, became the first bishop; his successor, the Bohemian noble Adalbert, worked to root Christianity more deeply among a people German priests before him had never fully reached, before dying a martyr in 997 while preaching to the pagan Prussians - killed not long after Boleslav himself had ordered the execution of Adalbert's own brothers in a feud between rival noble houses.

Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Ștefan Jurcă · CC BY 2.0

From feuding voyvodes to a single prince

That feud, and Boleslav's ruthless resolution of it, marked the end of an older arrangement entirely. Early Přemyslid princes had directly governed only the country immediately around Prague, leaving local voyvodes to rule the rest of Bohemia under a loose and often-contested supremacy - an arrangement that produced, by Lützow's own account, "innumerable feuds" not worth individually retelling. Boleslav I and II broke that pattern for good: once the last independent voyvode house fell, Bohemia was reorganized into districts run by burgraves the prince himself appointed, a new service nobility replacing the old territorial one, and the assemblies that had once voiced the will of independent lords narrowed into gatherings that simply heard the prince's own decisions announced.

Two centuries the record barely bothers to individualize

Boleslav II's death in 999 ended that centralized strength as suddenly as it had arrived. The following two centuries saw the throne pass through a long and frequently violent succession of dukes - rival brothers, Polish intervention, and repeatedly renewed dependency on whichever German king could back one claimant over another - a period Lützow's own account groups under a single chapter heading spanning nearly two hundred years rather than following duke by duke. What finally changed the terms of the relationship was not any Bohemian victory but a German civil war: when the German throne itself fell into disputed succession in 1197, Přemysl Ottokar I found himself courted rather than commanded. Backing Philip of Swabia's claim in exchange for concrete concessions, Ottokar secured Philip's renunciation of any future say in choosing Bohemia's own dukes, renounced imperial claims over the appointment of Prague's bishops, and won something no Přemyslid had held outright before: a hereditary royal title, conferred on the Bohemian sovereigns "for all time," that made Ottokar's own 1198 coronation at Mainz the foundation every later king of Bohemia's own legitimacy would trace back to.

Dürnkrut

expansionDrafted from Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920)

Přemysl Ottokar II inherited a hereditary kingdom - Bohemia's kings had secured that title, and imperial recognition of it, since Ottokar I's coronation at Mainz alongside the German king in 1198 - and built it, for a time, into one of the great powers of Europe. Elected Duke of Austria in 1251 and later ruling Styria and Carinthia as well, Ottokar commanded, at his height, territory stretching from the Elbe to the Adriatic, making him by far the most powerful prince within the German Empire even though he never held its crown himself.

Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Unknown engraver · Public domain

A king accused of forgetting his own people

Ottokar's expansion came at a cost that would matter more than he seems to have anticipated. He actively recruited German colonists into Bohemia's towns, granting them extensive self-government under German town law, in what Bohemian historians have generally read as a deliberate strategy to build a merchant and artisan class able to counterbalance an unruly native nobility. The effect, whatever the intent, was to make Bohemia's towns overwhelmingly German-speaking during his reign and to leave Ottokar open to the charge - fair or not, and even Palacký, no friend to German influence, doubted it - that he favoured his new German subjects over the Czechs who had made him king.

The day of Saint Rufus

That resentment proved fatal when it mattered most. Rudolph of Habsburg, elected King of the Germans in 1273 partly through Ottokar's own miscalculation in not contesting a rival he judged too weak to matter, moved against Bohemia's territorial gains in Austria and the south. Ottokar was forced to submit and do homage in 1276, but renewed the war two years later. On 26 August 1278, near Dürnkrut on the Marchfeld, Rudolph's army met Ottokar's in a decisive battle - and Bohemian nobles who felt no loyalty to a king they considered half a German himself, chief among them Milota of Dedice, deserted or turned against him at the critical moment. When the battle was plainly lost, Ottokar rode into the thickest of the enemy ranks rather than flee, and died fighting. The empire he had spent two decades building did not outlive him by an afternoon: his seven-year-old son Wenceslas II inherited a kingdom plunged immediately into factional anarchy, while Moravia passed under Rudolph's own occupation.

Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Josef Mathauser · Public domain

Praha

peakDrafted from Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920)

John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia since 1310, had gone blind years before he rode out with the French army against the English at Crécy in August 1346 - a battle his own advisors had counselled against and one he watched, in effect, only through the reports of the men around him. When the French line began to break, Bohemian nobles at his side urged him to retreat with the rest. John refused: "So will it God, it shall not be that a King of Bohemia flies from the battlefield." He had two of his knights lash their horses to his own to guide him, gave the watchword "Praha," and charged into the thick of the English ranks. He and fifty of his chief nobles died there, cut down almost to a man. Edward III, on being shown the blind king's body that evening, wept and said, "The crown of chivalry has fallen today; never was any one equal to this King of Bohemia."

National Gallery, Prague · Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Dobroš · CC BY-SA 4.0

An heir already tested

Charles, John's own son and already his regent and diplomatic proxy across a kingdom his father's own attention had often drifted from, had fought at his father's side that same day and was himself severely wounded before the few Bohemian knights still standing forced him off the field, unwilling to risk losing both their kings at once. Elected King of the Germans the same year as his father's death and crowned King of Bohemia in 1347, Charles IV set about rebuilding the kingdom's institutions with a thoroughness his predecessors had rarely matched. In 1348 he summoned the Estates to Prague, confirmed the privileges earlier kings had granted but let lapse since Ottokar II's fall, fixed Moravia's status under his brother John Henry, and formally attached Silesia and Upper Lusatia to the Bohemian crown. Succession was to run by primogeniture, with the Estates' old right of election preserved only against the day the royal line itself might fail.

Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A capital built to match an empire

At that same Diet, Charles announced his intention to found a university at Prague - securing the Pope's consent before he had even returned from campaign, and personally overseeing its organization once the doors opened. It was the first university anywhere in Central Europe, and Charles, already effectively ruling as the Empire's strongest prince, meant Prague to be worthy of the role: a capital that could draw scholars the way Paris did, in a kingdom that a single defeat at Crécy had shown could not survive on the old nobility's loyalty alone.

A vicar-general thrown in the Vltava

contractionDrafted from Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920)

Charles IV's son Wenceslas inherited Bohemia in 1378 and, within a year, the German crown as well - the German princes recognized him as king of the Romans in 1379, extending his father's own dominance over the Empire into a second generation. He did not extend his father's judgment along with it. Where Charles had built alliances patiently, Wenceslas ruled by sudden, ungovernable temper, and the clearest evidence of it came in a quarrel with Prague's own archbishop over a vacant abbey Wenceslas meant to suppress and fold into a new bishopric of his own creation. When the archbishop's vicar-general, John of Pomuk, quietly frustrated the plan by confirming a rival abbot's election, Wenceslas had him and three other clerics seized and tortured. Three gave in and promised obedience; John refused, and was tortured until his death was certain, then thrown into the Vltava in 1393 - a killing the Church would eventually recognize with its own sainthood, John of Nepomuk becoming one of Bohemia's most venerated martyrs.

Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Yair Haklai · CC BY-SA 4.0

A crown lost in Germany, kept at home

Wenceslas's temper cost him more than a vicar-general's life. His prolonged absences and growing unpopularity encouraged rivals within the Empire, and in 1400, with Pope Boniface IX's active support, the Empire's ecclesiastical electors deposed him as German king outright, choosing Rupert of the Palatinate in his place. Bohemia itself he kept

• but only after years of struggle against a league of his own nobles who had, at one point, imprisoned him directly and forced him to govern through officials of their own choosing rather than his.

Austrian National Library, Vienna · Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Betrayed by the brother he trusted to free him

The bitterest of those betrayals came from inside his own family. When Wenceslas's younger brother Sigismund, King of Hungary, was himself seized and imprisoned by his own nobles, Wenceslas spent heavily to win his release - and was repaid by having Sigismund seize him in turn during a journey meant to lead to an imperial coronation in Rome, installing a bishop as Bohemia's governor and trying to strip Wenceslas of his own throne. Wenceslas escaped custody in 1403 and returned to a kingdom that, disgusted by Sigismund's extortions in his absence, received its erratic king back more warmly than it had ever treated him before. It was the same Sigismund - a man who had already broken one promise of safety to his own brother - whose word Jan Hus would trust a decade later, on a much more consequential journey to Constance.

The fire at Constance

contractionDrafted from Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920)

Jan Hus, rector of Prague's university and the most forceful preacher of a Bohemian reform movement that had spent years attacking clerical corruption and insisting that Scripture alone, not papal authority, was the true ground of Christian belief, was summoned in 1414 to answer for his teaching before a General Council of the Church at Constance. King Sigismund, hoping the Council could settle the religious turmoil dividing his brother Wenceslas's kingdom, gave Hus a promise of safe conduct: he was to come to Constance unmolested, receive a free hearing, and return unharmed even if he refused to submit to the Council's judgment. Hus set out that October trusting the promise.

A safe-conduct that did not hold

He was imprisoned almost as soon as he arrived, chiefly through the influence of John "the Iron," Bishop of Litomyšl, one of reform's most determined enemies. Sigismund, arriving at Constance weeks later, did nothing effective to free him - his private advice to the cardinals, by his own later admission, was to have Hus burned if he would not recant and to distrust him even if he did. Hus's actual trial did not open until June 1415, and even then he was refused any real chance to defend his positions point by point; the Council demanded a blanket retraction of every heretical opinion attributed to him, including several he had never held. He refused, preferring, as he put it, to die rather than deny with his lips what he held true in his heart. Condemned as a recusant heretic on 6 July 1415, he was led directly from the cathedral to a meadow outside the city walls and burned that same day; his ashes were thrown into the Rhine specifically so that no relic of him could be carried back to Bohemia. His friend and fellow reformer Jerome of Prague, arrested on his own way home from visiting Hus at Constance, was burned by the same Council the following spring.

Burgerbibliothek, Bern · Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Diebold Schilling · Public domain

What Bohemia made of it

News of the execution reached a kingdom that had already come to see Hus as its own greatest living son, and the reaction was not theological restraint but open revolt against the Church that had killed him. Within Bohemia, reformers and their Roman Catholic opponents alike agreed on one thing: whatever else Hus had been, no impartial account of his sincerity, his personal purity of life, or his willingness to die for what he actually believed could honestly be denied him. The Council of Constance had meant to close a theological dispute by fire. It opened, instead, the Hussite Wars.

Žižka's Hill

contractionDrafted from Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920)

On 30 July 1419, a procession of Hus's followers carrying the sacrament through Prague's New Town was met with a stone thrown from a window of the town hall. The enraged crowd, led by a royal courtier named Jan Žižka, stormed the building; the burgomaster and several councillors were thrown from its windows, and those who survived the fall were killed by the crowd waiting below. It was Bohemia's first defenestration, and it marked the moment reform stopped being a matter of preaching and became open insurrection against the crown itself.

Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Adolf Liebscher · Public domain

A one-eyed courtier becomes a general

Žižka, already in his forties and blind in one eye from earlier fighting, had no formal claim to military command beyond years of hard experience and an evident genius for it. What he built out of peasants, small farmers, and townsmen armed with little more than iron flails and short spears was a style of war Europe's mounted nobility had no real answer for: the wagon-fort, chains of armoured carts formed into a mobile fortress, its best marksmen posted beside each driver, able to close into a defensive square in retreat or wheel outward to outflank an enemy in attack. On Bohemia's open plains, largely free of the ditches and hedges that would have broken up such a formation elsewhere, it let an army with almost no cavalry of its own fight cavalry-heavy armies to a standstill and, again and again, to defeat.

Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Unknown artist · Public domain

The hill that took his name

Sigismund answered the growing revolt by proclaiming a crusade, and by the end of June 1420 an army drawn from across Latin Christendom - contemporary chroniclers counted contingents from as far as Aragon and England alongside the German princes who made up its core, with estimates of its total strength running as high as 150,000 - had gathered around Prague. Žižka had already fortified a steep hill east of the city, hastily entrenched with what defences his men could raise in the time available. When Sigismund's forces attacked on 14 July, the fighting at the hill was desperate enough that when Taborite defenders briefly gave ground, one woman among them refused to retreat, declaring that a true Christian should never yield to Antichrist, and was killed where she stood. Žižka fought in the front rank himself, and the crusaders were eventually driven back down the slope in disorder, many killed or drowned trying to cross the Vltava in flight. The hill has been called Žižka's Hill ever since. Dissent within the crusading army's own ranks - German nobles openly distrustful of the Bohemian Catholics fighting alongside them - did the rest of the work: Sigismund's siege of Prague collapsed within weeks, and a peasant army that all of Europe had expected to scatter at the first real battle had instead broken a crusade.

National Museum Library, Prague · Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Bohemians conquered by Bohemians

contractionDrafted from Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920)

By the early 1430s the Hussite movement Žižka had once led as a single fighting force had split into rival camps. Moderate Utraquist nobles and the burghers of Prague, willing to negotiate a settlement with the Church that stopped short of the radical Taborites' full programme, faced off against Tábor and its allied "Orphan" brotherhoods, who held out for a more complete break with Rome. Both sides had learned Žižka's own wagon-fort tactics, and both fielded armies that had, within living memory, beaten every force sent against Bohemia from outside it. In May 1434 they met each other instead.

The plain of Lipány

Near the village of Lipany, an army of Bohemian nobles roughly 25,000 strong, led by Bořek of Miletínek - who had once served under Žižka himself - faced some 18,000 Taborites and townsmen under the two Prokops. Miletínek won by a feigned retreat: his vanguard pretended to break and flee, the Taborites left their wagon-entrenchment to pursue what they took for a real rout, and Miletínek's cavalry cut them off from their own fortified lager before they could return to it. What followed was less a battle than, in the judgment of Bohemian historians since, an extermination: some 13,000 Taborites died, several hundred prisoners were burned alive in the huts where they had been penned, and both Prokops were killed. A movement no German army had managed to break in fifteen years of open war had been broken by other Bohemians.

Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Josef Mathauser · Public domain

Peace at Jihlava

The military defeat of Tábor cleared the way for a settlement long under negotiation with the Council of Basel. Talks dragged on for two more years over the Bohemians' insistence that their own elected Archbishop, John of Rokycany, be recognized by Rome - a demand the Council never fully granted - but on 5 July 1436, Bohemian delegates at Jihlava formally accepted the Compacts of Basel, permitting communion in both bread and wine for those who wished it and ending two decades of excommunication and open war between Bohemia and the rest of Latin Christendom. Sigismund, the same king whose broken safe-conduct had sent Jan Hus to the stake at Constance twenty-one years earlier, made his triumphal entry into Prague on 23 August 1436 as Bohemia's undisputed, Estate-recognized king. He was sixty-eight years old, and would reign over the kingdom he had spent two decades trying to subdue for only a few more months before his death.

A Bible for a new king

contractionDrafted from Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920)

George of Poděbrad, the Hussite nobleman the Estates had elected king in 1458, died in March 1471 still cherished by Bohemians, in Lützow's own account, second only to Charles IV in their historical affection - even though his larger ambitions, a leading role in the Empire and a lasting native dynasty of his own, had both failed by the time dropsy killed him. The Estates had already recognized a Polish prince, Vladislav, as his heir, but Matthias Corvinus of Hungary pressed a rival claim of his own, already holding towns in Moravia and much of Silesia and Lusatia through years of war against Poděbrad. Rather than simply honor their earlier promise, the Estates convened at Kutná Hora to choose freely between the candidates - a decision that mattered less for its outcome, Lützow suggests, than for what it established: that the Bohemian crown remained genuinely elective rather than hereditary by custom. They chose Vladislav, who entered Prague to a citizens' welcome that August and was handed, by the university's own doctors, a finely bound Bible to guide his rule.

Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Johann Conrad Klüpfel · Public domain

A king who reigned from somewhere else

Vladislav's own authority never matched the warmth of his welcome. Matthias Corvinus kept fighting for years before the two rivals settled on an uneasy division of the crown's own territories, and once Matthias died in 1490 and Vladislav added Hungary's own crown to Bohemia's, he spent most of his remaining reign governing from Buda rather than Prague. The Bohemian nobility used his prolonged absence to entrench their own power at the crown's expense, pushing through regulations - which a reluctant, largely powerless Vladislav simply ratified rather than contest - that let disputes between the noble estates and the towns overshadow even the kingdom's long-running religious divisions for the rest of his reign.

Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Richard Mortel · CC BY 2.0

A ten-year-old inherits two crowns and a losing war

Vladislav died in Hungary in March 1516, leaving both his crowns to a ten-year-old son, Louis, already crowned King of Bohemia at the age of three. Louis grew up fighting the same battle his father had mostly avoided: an Ottoman advance into Hungary that Bohemia's own nobility, divided by internal feuds between rival noble factions, proved reluctant to fund or reinforce with any urgency. When Louis's urgent appeal for troops finally reached Prague, only a fraction of the promised Bohemian force had actually arrived in Hungary by the time Louis, badly outnumbered, gave battle at Mohács on 29 August 1526 and drowned fleeing the rout - a defeat that cost Hungary two centuries of Ottoman occupation and left Bohemia's own throne vacant for the second time in fifty-five years, with no native candidate left to fill it.

The White Mountain

endDrafted from Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920)

The Bohemian crown passed out of any native dynasty's hands in 1526, when the Diet elected the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand king after a contested vote decided as much by bribery as by conviction - the start of a rule that would last, with one violent interruption, into the twentieth century. Religious tension between the kingdom's Protestant majority and its Catholic rulers built for decades until Emperor Rudolph II, cornered by an Estates revolt he had no means to suppress, signed the Letter of Majesty on 9 July 1609: it recognized the Bohemian Confession, gave Protestants supervision of the university, and let them appoint "Defenders" charged with guarding the rights the Letter granted. Two royal councillors, Martinič and Slavata, alone among the Bohemian nobility refused to sign it - a refusal that marked them as the two most hated men in the kingdom when the crisis finally broke.

National Archives, Prague · Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Unknown scribe · Public domain

Out the window again

On 23 May 1618, Protestant nobles under Count Thurn marched in full armour to Prague Castle to confront the royal governors over reports that the Letter of Majesty's protections were about to be violated. After a furious exchange in which the two councillors were accused of poisoning royal policy against their own countrymen, the assembly seized Martinič and Slavata and threw them from the castle's windows into the moat some forty feet below - along with a secretary who had tried to intervene. All three survived, astonishingly close to unhurt; Catholic writers afterward called it a miracle, while the Protestants who watched them stagger away simply fired shots after them and missed. It was Bohemia's second defenestration, and all of Europe would come to know it as the opening act of the Thirty Years' War.

Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920) · Johann Philipp Abelinus · Public domain

A battle of a few hours

The Bohemian Estates deposed their Habsburg king and elected the Calvinist Frederick of the Palatinate in his place, but Frederick's reign - later remembered as barely lasting a winter - collapsed almost as soon as it was tested. On 8 November 1620, a combined Catholic League and Imperial army met the Bohemian forces on a low ridge outside Prague called the White Mountain. The Bohemian army, unpaid for months and on the edge of mutiny, broke within hours; Hungarian cavalry sent to support it fled toward the Vltava and drowned trying to cross by the hundreds, and only a handful of isolated units - Moravian troops making a last stand in a nearby park, the Palatinate guard dying near to a man around their king's own colours - fought with anything like the discipline that had once broken a crusade at Žižka's Hill two centuries before. Frederick himself was hosting English ambassadors at a banquet in the castle when news of the rout reached him; by the next morning he and his queen had fled the city, and within days the whole of the Bohemian crown's lands had submitted. Lützow's own explanation for the contrast is stark: the free peasant armies that had fought under Žižka no longer existed by 1620, worn down over two centuries into a serfdom that had nothing left in it to defend. The battle lasted a few hours. It ended Bohemia's existence as an independent kingdom.