Chapter VII: Five More Years
After the Five Years War ended in 1572, the Holy Roman Empire enjoyed twenty-nine years of relative peace. Some historians remark at the briefness of this interim, but it is worth noting that the century-long rise of Bohemia and that kingdom’s adherence to Evangelist doctrine likely set the internal machinations of the confederation on a course for ultimate destruction. The fact that the Empire survived the sixteenth century, and indeed managed to struggle through the seventeenth, says much about the inherent cohesion of the European polity. Few other assemblies of nations have tolerated such tremendous ruptures and imbalances of power without giving up their existence or essential structure. Certainly, throughout these two centuries, successive Bohemian rulers conducted themselves with a certain conservatism, unable to conceive of a Europe without the empire, or a Bohemia outside that union.
With conditions stabilised in the west for the time being, Fridrich III Falcky turned once more east, and upon his old foe, Lithuania. War was declared in June of 1573, just one year after the end of the imperial wars. The impetus for the conflict may well have been the earlier claim of the historic Kievan crown. Since that proclamation, the city of Kiev had taken on a mythic place in the Bohemian imagination. To secure the steppe, but not its old capital, would be a hollow victory. So, the armies were reassembled and sent once more across the frontier. Less than a year later, Kiev and Kharkov were secured. The state was still reeling from the convulsions of the previous decade, and any joy felt amongst the populace was difficult to translate into a state of internal harmony and security. There were still too many unanswered questions within the nebulous infancy of the Reformation.
Fridrich quickly asserted one Evangelical prerogative, when the crown seized the lands of the Catholic Church, principally held in the west, in Inner Bohemia. Rather than keep the lands, he then redistributed them among the barons, firming the compact between lord and noble which had already formed one of the central features of early modern Bohemia.
In February 1576, the first sign of a new generation eager to rule in Praha made itself heard. Jan Liberec, the old man of the First and Second Regency, the hero of the Polish wars, and the longest-serving minister of court, officially handed over his duties to his grandson, Vladislav. The aging minister’s son would have taken over, but he was already too old himself, and it was decided to give the land, and the court, some much needed stability. The young man proved an able Minister for War, but also an able diplomat, and urged Praha to begin the sort of estate gifts which had in decades past led to the union of the Silesian and Bohemian crowns. Magnanimous as the policy may have been, Fridrich was neither a man of tact nor ambassadorial wisdom, and the Polish crown held firm in its calls for its own continued independence.
Throughout the decade, the Anabaptists had sought some sense of resolution, to find a niche within the Reformation. But the young Evangelical church was already entrenching itself against future threats, and the more extreme tenets of Anabaptism could find no refuge in the doctrines of Waterford. Fridrich, eager to show himself a tolerant monarch in the vein of his predecessors, established a haven for them in Plock (another based on the same model would be established in Grodno twenty years later).
A brief war that winter established the much anticipated vassalage of Lithuania, with Bohemia claiming Orel in the process. That same year, an old dream of Bohemian princes came true, and a navy was inaugurated in the Baltic, putting its first ships to sea in the spring of 1580 (Shakespeare would allude to Bohemia’s new-found grandeur a few decades later in ‘The Winter’s Tale’, where the infant Perdita is abandoned on ‘the Bohemian shore’).
Ordering the house of state continued apace, with a series of customs houses created to better control the intake of border tax revenue. Immediate yields were small, but over many decades, the customs houses would further reinforce Pardubice’s unity of peoples throughout Greater Bohemia. It was a softer approach to tax governance than the constabulary, which was proving unpopular on the eastern fringes.
Fridrich died in November 1586, having taken Bohemia on a course into new and uncharted waters. He had succeeded in both maintaining a degree of old-fashioned Bohemian tolerance, while establishing his nation as the world’s pre-eminent Protestant state.
His son, Ludvik I, would endure a reign which was tragically as eventful as that of his father, and would see the Holy Roman Empire once more cast to the brink of destruction. And like his father, Ludvik would see Bohemia emerge triumphant, more in control than ever before of the destiny of both Central and Eastern Europe.
Fridrich had started a war against the Order of Teutonic Knights shortly before his death, hoping to claim additional Baltic coastline. Ludvik’s first task was the relatively simple execution of that war. Livland, Memel and Estland were all claimed, a peace treaty which created more burden than opportunity for the navy, as none of the newly acquired territories adjoined any Bohemian domains.
Ludvik endured a storm of condemnation from his council, and turned like all Lords of Bohemia east, always east. For Ludvik, uniquely, this meant facing an Islamic kingdom, Kazan, or possibly Persia. Persia was having enormous difficulty with an insurrection, and the king opted for the more stable of two evils. Leos Zatec was brought in as deputy Minister for War under Liberec. War was declared against Kazan, as well as her allies in Sibir and the Crimea. In eighteen short months, the Protestant troops marched deep into the Asian heartland. Finally, peace was made, due as much as anything to the incomprehensibility of the expanse. Ludvik himself led an army east to the known edge of the Asian interior, where still an infinite plain stretched out to the horizon. In the end, a peace was made which granted Bohemia Tver, Tula, Kholm, Valdimir, Tambow and Ryazan, a safe conquest, well within the geographic limits of the European imagination.
Ludvik argued for further campaigns in a few years time to exploit the gains, but ministers hedged, confronted as it were by their own ignorance. It was agreed instead that the king would consolidate earlier gains made in the north, bringing both Muscowy and Novgorod into submission. Ludvik established a standing army of fifty-three thousand, the largest known in Europe since antiquity.
When a few years later, the Swedish king proclaimed his land saved in the name of Evangelism, the plans north took on new significance, and new urgency. Meanwhile to the west, imperial electors began to feel the claustrophobic encroachment of Reformed ideas, with England to the west, Sweden to the north, and Bohemia to the east. France was starting to look like an unlikely ally in the struggle for faith.
The declining stability of the Russian kingdoms was to first create an environment seemingly ideally suited to conquest, and second, would lead to an international crisis culminating in the Second Five Years War.
In February 1600, a meteor was sighted over Moravia. Taken by some as a celebration of the birthplace of Mark the Silent, it was taken by most as a sign of some unknowable impending doom. Former members of the court episcopacy implored Ludvik to rethink his invasion plans. But the young king felt all was in place. He had gone so far as to bring in yet another minister, Marek Pardubice (no relation to his famous long-dead namesake). The new minister’s portfolio was Court Envoy, and he spent much of the rest of his life flitting from one capital to another, trying to smooth the very rough waters of Ludvik’s reign.
With the war in Muscowy carried to a successful completion, the conquest of Novgorod was undertaken with characteristic efficiency. Then came the collapse. The northern, Slavic princes fled their lands. The nobles squabbled for power. The Orthodox hierarchy took to the streets to rally the masses. The Archbishop was killed by a bewildered mob. Ludvik’s original plan had been to establish Novgorod as a protectorate, but the nation was completely destabilised. In July, 1601, peace was made with Muscowy and the Novgorodian lands absorbed. In all, eight provinces joined Greater Bohemia. The map of northeast Europe was blanketed in Bohemian gold.
That same month, most of the Holy Roman Empire declared war. Austria and the other allies of Praha stuck by her, while the imperial free cities, along with the small states of the west, joined Brandenburg and Saxony in the invasion. Praha’s armies sped west, scarcely slowing down for much needed reinforcements.
By winter, Marek Pardubice was in the courts of the western imperial states, trying to negotiate a sensible solution to the crisis. Novgorod, after all, had simply required care. It would be ignoble to leave a shattered nation to wither, particularly one bordering Muslim lands to the east. Ludvik had done the only practicable thing under the circumstances, to protect both Christendom and Europe. The argument fell on tired, war-weary ears. No one actually wanted war with Bohemia. She was too powerful to be contained. Some remembered the lesson of earlier emperors, that Bohemia should be directed rather than confronted. A similar pact was agreed that led to the end of the First Five Years War. Again, conditions of peace were negotiated, to which Bohemia would agree following a settlement of current conflicts.
The war dragged on for four and a half more years. Peace was made with belligerents by dint of their micro-alliances. Oldenburg, Cleves and Holland; then Gelre and Crete. Saxony, where most of the fighting took place in the first years of the war, was forced to surrender Dresden and Leipzig, though Dresden was returned as a gesture of goodwill. Brandenburg was the second battlefield, and Polish and Bohemian troops spent two years subduing the Hohenzollerns. The proud nation was made a vassal, and a launching point for the next invasion, into Lubeck and Hamburg. Here, Ludvik met his match. In an epic battle just outside Lubeck, eight Bohemian regiments were annihilated by the combined imperial forces. Each side exhausted, peace was finally made in July 1606.
Two months later, Karl III Theodor of the Palatinate became the new emperor, replacing the Bavarian king, who was without an heir. Luneburg and Salzburg, who had both sat out the Second Five Years War, launched into the War of Bavarian Succession. The empire had received two months of peace for its efforts.
After the Five Years War ended in 1572, the Holy Roman Empire enjoyed twenty-nine years of relative peace. Some historians remark at the briefness of this interim, but it is worth noting that the century-long rise of Bohemia and that kingdom’s adherence to Evangelist doctrine likely set the internal machinations of the confederation on a course for ultimate destruction. The fact that the Empire survived the sixteenth century, and indeed managed to struggle through the seventeenth, says much about the inherent cohesion of the European polity. Few other assemblies of nations have tolerated such tremendous ruptures and imbalances of power without giving up their existence or essential structure. Certainly, throughout these two centuries, successive Bohemian rulers conducted themselves with a certain conservatism, unable to conceive of a Europe without the empire, or a Bohemia outside that union.
With conditions stabilised in the west for the time being, Fridrich III Falcky turned once more east, and upon his old foe, Lithuania. War was declared in June of 1573, just one year after the end of the imperial wars. The impetus for the conflict may well have been the earlier claim of the historic Kievan crown. Since that proclamation, the city of Kiev had taken on a mythic place in the Bohemian imagination. To secure the steppe, but not its old capital, would be a hollow victory. So, the armies were reassembled and sent once more across the frontier. Less than a year later, Kiev and Kharkov were secured. The state was still reeling from the convulsions of the previous decade, and any joy felt amongst the populace was difficult to translate into a state of internal harmony and security. There were still too many unanswered questions within the nebulous infancy of the Reformation.
Fridrich quickly asserted one Evangelical prerogative, when the crown seized the lands of the Catholic Church, principally held in the west, in Inner Bohemia. Rather than keep the lands, he then redistributed them among the barons, firming the compact between lord and noble which had already formed one of the central features of early modern Bohemia.
In February 1576, the first sign of a new generation eager to rule in Praha made itself heard. Jan Liberec, the old man of the First and Second Regency, the hero of the Polish wars, and the longest-serving minister of court, officially handed over his duties to his grandson, Vladislav. The aging minister’s son would have taken over, but he was already too old himself, and it was decided to give the land, and the court, some much needed stability. The young man proved an able Minister for War, but also an able diplomat, and urged Praha to begin the sort of estate gifts which had in decades past led to the union of the Silesian and Bohemian crowns. Magnanimous as the policy may have been, Fridrich was neither a man of tact nor ambassadorial wisdom, and the Polish crown held firm in its calls for its own continued independence.
Throughout the decade, the Anabaptists had sought some sense of resolution, to find a niche within the Reformation. But the young Evangelical church was already entrenching itself against future threats, and the more extreme tenets of Anabaptism could find no refuge in the doctrines of Waterford. Fridrich, eager to show himself a tolerant monarch in the vein of his predecessors, established a haven for them in Plock (another based on the same model would be established in Grodno twenty years later).
A brief war that winter established the much anticipated vassalage of Lithuania, with Bohemia claiming Orel in the process. That same year, an old dream of Bohemian princes came true, and a navy was inaugurated in the Baltic, putting its first ships to sea in the spring of 1580 (Shakespeare would allude to Bohemia’s new-found grandeur a few decades later in ‘The Winter’s Tale’, where the infant Perdita is abandoned on ‘the Bohemian shore’).
Ordering the house of state continued apace, with a series of customs houses created to better control the intake of border tax revenue. Immediate yields were small, but over many decades, the customs houses would further reinforce Pardubice’s unity of peoples throughout Greater Bohemia. It was a softer approach to tax governance than the constabulary, which was proving unpopular on the eastern fringes.
Fridrich died in November 1586, having taken Bohemia on a course into new and uncharted waters. He had succeeded in both maintaining a degree of old-fashioned Bohemian tolerance, while establishing his nation as the world’s pre-eminent Protestant state.
His son, Ludvik I, would endure a reign which was tragically as eventful as that of his father, and would see the Holy Roman Empire once more cast to the brink of destruction. And like his father, Ludvik would see Bohemia emerge triumphant, more in control than ever before of the destiny of both Central and Eastern Europe.
Fridrich had started a war against the Order of Teutonic Knights shortly before his death, hoping to claim additional Baltic coastline. Ludvik’s first task was the relatively simple execution of that war. Livland, Memel and Estland were all claimed, a peace treaty which created more burden than opportunity for the navy, as none of the newly acquired territories adjoined any Bohemian domains.
Ludvik endured a storm of condemnation from his council, and turned like all Lords of Bohemia east, always east. For Ludvik, uniquely, this meant facing an Islamic kingdom, Kazan, or possibly Persia. Persia was having enormous difficulty with an insurrection, and the king opted for the more stable of two evils. Leos Zatec was brought in as deputy Minister for War under Liberec. War was declared against Kazan, as well as her allies in Sibir and the Crimea. In eighteen short months, the Protestant troops marched deep into the Asian heartland. Finally, peace was made, due as much as anything to the incomprehensibility of the expanse. Ludvik himself led an army east to the known edge of the Asian interior, where still an infinite plain stretched out to the horizon. In the end, a peace was made which granted Bohemia Tver, Tula, Kholm, Valdimir, Tambow and Ryazan, a safe conquest, well within the geographic limits of the European imagination.
Ludvik argued for further campaigns in a few years time to exploit the gains, but ministers hedged, confronted as it were by their own ignorance. It was agreed instead that the king would consolidate earlier gains made in the north, bringing both Muscowy and Novgorod into submission. Ludvik established a standing army of fifty-three thousand, the largest known in Europe since antiquity.
When a few years later, the Swedish king proclaimed his land saved in the name of Evangelism, the plans north took on new significance, and new urgency. Meanwhile to the west, imperial electors began to feel the claustrophobic encroachment of Reformed ideas, with England to the west, Sweden to the north, and Bohemia to the east. France was starting to look like an unlikely ally in the struggle for faith.
The declining stability of the Russian kingdoms was to first create an environment seemingly ideally suited to conquest, and second, would lead to an international crisis culminating in the Second Five Years War.
In February 1600, a meteor was sighted over Moravia. Taken by some as a celebration of the birthplace of Mark the Silent, it was taken by most as a sign of some unknowable impending doom. Former members of the court episcopacy implored Ludvik to rethink his invasion plans. But the young king felt all was in place. He had gone so far as to bring in yet another minister, Marek Pardubice (no relation to his famous long-dead namesake). The new minister’s portfolio was Court Envoy, and he spent much of the rest of his life flitting from one capital to another, trying to smooth the very rough waters of Ludvik’s reign.
With the war in Muscowy carried to a successful completion, the conquest of Novgorod was undertaken with characteristic efficiency. Then came the collapse. The northern, Slavic princes fled their lands. The nobles squabbled for power. The Orthodox hierarchy took to the streets to rally the masses. The Archbishop was killed by a bewildered mob. Ludvik’s original plan had been to establish Novgorod as a protectorate, but the nation was completely destabilised. In July, 1601, peace was made with Muscowy and the Novgorodian lands absorbed. In all, eight provinces joined Greater Bohemia. The map of northeast Europe was blanketed in Bohemian gold.
That same month, most of the Holy Roman Empire declared war. Austria and the other allies of Praha stuck by her, while the imperial free cities, along with the small states of the west, joined Brandenburg and Saxony in the invasion. Praha’s armies sped west, scarcely slowing down for much needed reinforcements.
By winter, Marek Pardubice was in the courts of the western imperial states, trying to negotiate a sensible solution to the crisis. Novgorod, after all, had simply required care. It would be ignoble to leave a shattered nation to wither, particularly one bordering Muslim lands to the east. Ludvik had done the only practicable thing under the circumstances, to protect both Christendom and Europe. The argument fell on tired, war-weary ears. No one actually wanted war with Bohemia. She was too powerful to be contained. Some remembered the lesson of earlier emperors, that Bohemia should be directed rather than confronted. A similar pact was agreed that led to the end of the First Five Years War. Again, conditions of peace were negotiated, to which Bohemia would agree following a settlement of current conflicts.
The war dragged on for four and a half more years. Peace was made with belligerents by dint of their micro-alliances. Oldenburg, Cleves and Holland; then Gelre and Crete. Saxony, where most of the fighting took place in the first years of the war, was forced to surrender Dresden and Leipzig, though Dresden was returned as a gesture of goodwill. Brandenburg was the second battlefield, and Polish and Bohemian troops spent two years subduing the Hohenzollerns. The proud nation was made a vassal, and a launching point for the next invasion, into Lubeck and Hamburg. Here, Ludvik met his match. In an epic battle just outside Lubeck, eight Bohemian regiments were annihilated by the combined imperial forces. Each side exhausted, peace was finally made in July 1606.
Two months later, Karl III Theodor of the Palatinate became the new emperor, replacing the Bavarian king, who was without an heir. Luneburg and Salzburg, who had both sat out the Second Five Years War, launched into the War of Bavarian Succession. The empire had received two months of peace for its efforts.
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