In 1618, in what is known as the Bohemian Revolt, Protestant Bohemians attempted to rid their kingdom of Catholic rule by the Habsburgs.
The Bohemian Revolt against the Holy Roman Empire began successfully. The revolt was not a popular uprising, but an aristocratic coup led by a minority of desperate militant Protestants.
In May 1618 in Prague, a group of noblemen marched to the royal palace, found two king’s chief advisers and hurled them out of an upper story window. The official’s lives, if not their dignity, were preserved by the pile of manure in which they landed. This incident came to be known as The Defenestration of Prague.
This initiate a Protestant counter offensive throughout the Habsburg lands. Fear of Ferdinand’s policies led to Protestant uprisings in Hungary, as well as Bohemia. Those who seized control of government declared Ferdinand deposed and the throne vacant.
When Emperor Mathias died in 1619, the stalemate broken, Ferdinand succeeded to Imperial title as Ferdinand II (1619 – 1637) and Ferdinand V, one of the Protestant electors, accepted the Bohemian crown.
The Bohemian crisis led the Hapsburgs straight into the Thirty Years’ War. This means that the major international conflict of the seventeenth century and perhaps altogether the major conflict in European history between the Crusades and the Napoleonic wars, started as a domestic affair within one of the Hapsburg domains. The Battle of White Mountain was the first major battle of the Thirty Years’ War. It ended the Protestant Bohemian Revolt and led to the subjugation of Bohemia until the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918.
The Bohemian Revolt
