Between clemency and justice. The reign of Ferdinand II in Bohemia in the first years after the Battle of White Mountain

Abstract

After the victory of the Imperial-Catholic League army in the Battle of White Mountain, the Emperor and King of Bohemia Ferdinand II opened up an unusually large space in which he could realize his ideas about governance in Bohemia. His priority was to ensure that the Habsburgs inherited the throne of Bohemia, to support the Catholic faith to become the only denomination in the Bohemian Lands, and to ensure equality between the old (faithful, Catholic) nobles and the new nobility. However, the path to these goals, which were realized at a legal level with the issuing of the Renewed Land Ordinance (Obnovené zřízení zemské/ Verneuerte Landesordnung; 1627, 1628), was not easy and went through a number of tense moments, such as the execution of 27 rep-resentatives of the Bohemian Revolt and state bankruptcy caused by the systematic devaluation of silver coins. The present article attempts to answer the question of what was the role of Ferdinand II himself in these complicated processes, especially in the years immediately following his victory at the Battle of White Mountain (1620–1623), and in the context of political thought in the early 17 th century.