Renaissance · Europe · War

1620

Battle of White Mountain

November 8, 1620

Outside Prague, Catholic imperial and Spanish forces smashed the hastily assembled Protestant army of Frederick V, the Winter King, in under two hours. Bohemia was reconquered and forcibly re-Catholicized, its Protestant nobility executed or exiled. The Thirty Years' War had produced its first catastrophe, and the Bohemian national identity was suppressed for nearly three centuries.