{
 "slug": "white-mountain",
 "title": "Battle of White Mountain",
 "status": "draft",
 "era": "1600–1760",
 "date_text": "8 November 1620",
 "start": "1620-11-08",
 "end": "1620-11-08",
 "war": "Thirty Years' War",
 "cdb90_war": "THIRTY YEAR'S WAR",
 "place": {
  "name": "Bílá hora (White Mountain), west of Prague, Kingdom of Bohemia (now Prague 6, Czech Republic)",
  "lat": 50.0783,
  "lon": 14.3194,
  "wikidata": "Q4373"
 },
 "lede": "On 8 November 1620, on a low plateau west of Prague, Bucquoy's Imperial and Tilly's Catholic League armies broke Christian of Anhalt's Bohemian army in one to two hours. The Bohemian Revolt collapsed, and the estates lost their power to the Habsburgs.",
 "result": "Decisive Imperial and Catholic League victory",
 "result_cdb90": "attacker win",
 "belligerents": [
  {
   "role": "attacker",
   "name": "Imperial and Catholic League armies (with Spanish, Walloon, Neapolitan and Polish contingents)",
   "commanders": [
    "Charles Bonaventure de Longueval, Count of Bucquoy",
    "Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly",
    "Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria",
    "Maximilian von Liechtenstein",
    "Guillermo Verdugo",
    "Carlo Spinelli"
   ],
   "strength": {
    "value": 25000,
    "low": 23000,
    "high": 33000,
    "source": "s3"
   },
   "casualties": {
    "value": 650,
    "low": 650,
    "high": 2000,
    "source": "s1"
   }
  },
  {
   "role": "defender",
   "name": "Army of the Bohemian estates and their allies (Moravian, Silesian, Austrian and Hungarian contingents)",
   "commanders": [
    "Christian I of Anhalt-Bernburg",
    "Georg Friedrich of Hohenlohe",
    "Heinrich Matthias von Thurn",
    "Heinrich Schlick",
    "Christian II of Anhalt-Bernburg",
    "Johann Ernst I of Saxe-Weimar"
   ],
   "strength": {
    "value": 21000,
    "low": 15000,
    "high": 23000,
    "source": "s1"
   },
   "casualties": {
    "value": 4000,
    "low": 2800,
    "high": 5000,
    "source": "s3"
   }
  }
 ],
 "sections": {
  "background": "The Bohemian Revolt began in May 1618, when Protestant lords threw two of Ferdinand's regents and a secretary from a window of Prague Castle. Protestant Bohemia feared for the rights granted in Rudolf II's Letter of Majesty of 1609, and for its estates' semi-autonomy, once the Catholic Ferdinand was named heir to the Bohemian crown. In 1619 Ferdinand was elected emperor, but in November the Bohemian estates chose the Calvinist Elector Palatine, Frederick V, as their king.\n\nFerdinand found allies: Maximilian of Bavaria brought in the Catholic League's army under Tilly, reportedly in return for the promise of Frederick's electoral title. Spain sent troops from Flanders into the Lower Palatinate, and Lutheran Saxony overran most of Lusatia for the emperor. Within Bohemia, Thurn and Mansfeld had lost Frederick's favour, and Christian of Anhalt and Georg Friedrich of Hohenlohe now led an army that was short of pay and shrinking.\n\nIn 1620 Tilly and Bucquoy, having pacified Upper and Lower Austria respectively, joined forces and moved into Bohemia. Disease and cold hit their camp and food ran short. In late October Anhalt blocked the road at Rakovník, a road junction west of Prague, and the armies faced each other for more than a week; Bucquoy took a musket ball in the groin while skirmishing. On 5 November Tilly slipped away in the mist and made for Prague. Anhalt force-marched to get ahead of him and reached the White Mountain, a low plateau just west of the city, around midnight on 7–8 November, with little time to dig in.",
  "forces": "Both armies were mercenary forces drawn from across Europe. Bucquoy's Imperial army included German regiments, Spanish tercios, Walloon regiments under Verdugo, Spinelli's Neapolitans and Polish light cavalry, the Lisowczycy, called 'Cossacks' in many accounts. Tilly's League army was mostly Bavarian. Maximilian of Bavaria joined the councils of war, and Bucquoy, still disabled by his wound, was nominally senior. One account has nearly 25,000 Catholic troops, 6,000 of them horse and about 40 per cent of those heavy cuirassiers. The infantry stood in deep tercios, several ranks of foot with cavalry on their wings.\n\nThe estates' army was a coalition: Bohemian regiments with Moravian, Silesian, Upper and Lower Austrian contingents, half a regiment from Saxe-Weimar and Hungarian light horse. Anhalt had reorganised it on the Dutch model into smaller battalions and drew it up in two lines in a chequerboard, the gaps letting the second line move up through the first, with the Hungarians in a third line. It was roughly equal in numbers to the Catholics, split evenly between foot and horse, but unpaid for months and depleted by desertion. Its commanders disagreed among themselves. Each side had about ten to twelve guns.",
  "course": "**The night (before dawn, 8 November).** Before dawn an Imperial raiding force of 800–1,000 men under Nicolo de Gauchier, including League horse and two banners of Polish Cossacks, fell on the Hungarian outposts near Ruzyně and drove off at least 1,000 horses. The League army began deploying at the foot of the slope around 05:00; the Imperial army came up later, perhaps around 10:00. A morning fog covered the crossing of the marshy Šárka stream at the foot of the plateau.\n\n**The position.** The Bohemians stood on the plateau, about 380 metres high, which falls some 50 metres to the north and west. Their right rested on the high wall of the Hvězda (Star) game park and its hunting lodge; their artillery was on the left. The Catholics formed with the Imperial army on their right, facing the Bohemian left, and the League army on their left. In council Bucquoy wanted to bypass the position and Tilly overruled him. On the other side the Moravian colonel Stubenvoll wanted to charge the Catholics while they were still crossing, but Hohenlohe and Anhalt refused. Maximilian's confessor, the Carmelite Dominic of Jesus and Mary, raised the Catholics' spirits with an image of the Virgin that Protestants were said to have defaced.\n\n**The Bohemian left breaks (about 11:30–12:15).** Accounts start the battle from about 11:30 to 12:15; one says the Catholic guns fired together as the signal to advance. The Imperial right advanced up the slope, Tiefenbach's and Breuner's German regiments leading with Verdugo's Walloons on the flank. Thurn's cavalry, about 1,000 horse, threw back the first Imperial horse, but neighbouring units did not support them. Thurn's infantry, about 1,300, broke when the Walloons were still some 300–400 paces off. Imperial cavalry, reinforced by Meggau's and Walloon horse, struck again; Baron Hofkirch, leading the Lower Austrian cavalry, was killed and his men fell back. The first line of the Bohemian left gave way in about a quarter of an hour, and the Hungarians in the third line fled; one account says the Cossacks routed them.\n\n**Young Anhalt's charge.** The one Bohemian success came from the second line. Anhalt's son, Christian II, with some 700 horse (nine cornets in the Czech account), charged the exposed German tercio, broke into it, took several standards and captured its colonel, Breuner, then pushed into the seam between the Imperial and League armies. Without infantry support he was caught by Imperial and League cavalry returning from the pursuit, wounded and taken prisoner.\n\n**The right and the Hvězda wall (early afternoon).** The last Catholic attack fell on the Bohemian right. Schlick's Moravian regiment and part of Thurn's infantry under his son did most of the fighting there; Spinelli's Neapolitans, Liechtenstein's troops and Imperial cavalry pressed them, and the Neapolitans took the Bohemian guns. The Moravians made a stand at the game-park wall and suffered heavier losses than any other contingent; later Catholic accounts made it a fight to the last man. The reserve inside the game park, Anhalt's own infantry and the Saxe-Weimar half-regiment, surrendered or fled without fighting.\n\n**The rout.** The whole action took one to two hours. Most Bohemian losses came in the flight: Hungarians drowned in the Vltava and Cossacks rode down fugitives in the vineyards.",
  "aftermath": "Frederick met his beaten commanders at the city gate and fled on 9 November, leaving his crown behind; history remembers him as the 'Winter King'. The Imperial army entered Prague without a fight that morning, and the estates' confederation surrendered on 12–13 November. Catholic losses were a few hundred to perhaps 2,000; Bohemian losses were several thousand, most in the pursuit.\n\nOn 21 June 1621, 27 leaders of the revolt were executed in Prague's Old Town Square; 27 crosses in the paving mark the place. Rebel estates were confiscated and redistributed to Catholics, Wallenstein among the gainers. Protestant worship was banned in stages, many nobles and burghers went into exile, and the elective monarchy gave way to hereditary Habsburg succession; the Renewed Land Ordinance followed in 1627.\n\nIn Czech national memory the battle became a trauma. Nineteenth-century writers, Alois Jirásek in particular, called the following period the *doba temna*, the 'dark age', of forced re-Catholicisation and the loss of the Czech elite. Historians have since argued with that picture: Josef Pekař's study for the 300th anniversary began to revise it, and Czech historians still treat 1620 as a dividing line in their history. Catholics remembered it as a Marian victory. A church of Our Lady of Victory went up near the field, and the Sokol built a memorial mound there in 1920. Since 2014 Catholics and Protestants have held joint commemorations, and a cross of reconciliation was unveiled for the 400th anniversary.",
  "wargaming": "White Mountain is a compact, one-day battle on a small field, with two roughly equal armies of about 20,000–25,000 and a quick result. It suits regiment-and-tercio scale, with a base or unit for each cavalry squadron or half-tercio and a few guns a side, and a table that takes in the slope, the Šárka valley and the Hvězda wall.\n\nThe terrain shapes the game. The Bohemians have a slope of only about 50 metres, but the Catholics must cross a marshy stream in fog to reach it, and the game-park wall anchors one Bohemian flank and invites a last stand.\n\nThe interesting decisions are mostly Bohemian. Stubenvoll's proposal to attack the Catholics while they were crossing is the obvious 'what if': give the Bohemian player the chance at the cost of leaving the high ground. Anhalt's chequerboard and his strong second line give him a counter-attack, as young Anhalt's charge showed; the question is whether the Bohemian infantry can follow it up. The Catholic player must decide whether to attack at all, as Tilly did, or to bypass, as Bucquoy wanted.\n\nMorale and pay matter. Rules should make the Bohemian foot, the Hungarian horse and the game-park reserve brittle, and the Moravians stubborn. Gauchier's night raid on the Hungarians can open a scenario. A campaign game could begin at Rakovník and make the march to Prague a race between the two armies."
 },
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   "file": "File:White Mountain - Plan of battle.jpg",
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   "caption": "Plan of the battle from Matthäus Merian's Theatrum Europaeum (1635): the Bohemian army on the plateau at the top, the Imperial and Bavarian armies below.",
   "url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/White_Mountain_-_Plan_of_battle.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original",
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   "artist": "Matthäus Merian",
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   "caption": "Modern map of the battle (Dutch labels): the Bohemian line on the plateau, the Hvězda game park on its right, the Catholic armies advancing from the Šárka valley.",
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   "artist": "Sir Iain",
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   "caption": "The Battle of White Mountain, by Pieter Snayers, 1630s.",
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   "artist": "Circle of Michiel van Miereveld",
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   "caption": "Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, commander of the Catholic League army; engraving by Pieter de Jode after Anthony van Dyck.",
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   "artist": "Pieter de Jode I / After Anthony van Dyck",
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   "file": "File:Poslední odpor Moravanů na Bílé hoře (J. Scheiwl, Česko-moravská kronika, 1881).png",
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   "caption": "'The last resistance of the Moravians at White Mountain', by Josef Scheiwl, from the Česko-moravská kronika (1881).",
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   "id": "s3",
   "title": "Don Hollway, 'Bohemian Catastrophe', HistoryNet (2017)",
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   "id": "s4",
   "title": "Stephan Gruber, 'The Czech trauma of Bílá Hora', Die Welt der Habsburger",
   "url": "https://habsburger.net/en/chapter/czech-trauma-bila-hora",
   "kind": "web"
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   "id": "s5",
   "title": "Ondřej Lee Stolička, 'Las diferentes percepciones de la batalla de Praga y la revuelta bohemia', Ibero-Americana Pragensia 48/1 (2020), pp. 17–37",
   "url": "https://doi.org/10.14712/24647063.2021.3",
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   "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_Revolt",
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   "id": "s7",
   "title": "National Museum, Prague, '1620: Road to the Mountain' (exhibition, 2020)",
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   "kind": "web"
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   "id": "s8",
   "title": "Peter H. Wilson, Europe's Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War (Allen Lane, 2009)",
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   "title": "Jaroslav Čechura, Zimní král aneb české dobrodružství Fridricha Falckého (2004)",
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