92 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
The stage seemed to be set for a confrontation, which did indeed take
place, but upon this occasion in Hungary rather than in Austria.^16
Discord in Bohemia, revolt in Hungary
While there were religious conflicts in Austria for much of the first three
decades of Rudolf’s reign there was relatively little trouble in this respect
in Bohemia and Hungary.^17 The position of the Estates was particularly
strong in both, which together with the Turkish threat in the latter had
made princes traditionally wary of provoking problems. Hence attempts
at counter-Reformation were initially more restrained, but around the
turn of the century the increasingly erratic Rudolf brought the issue to
the fore in both territories, beginning by appointing Catholic protag-
onists step by step to key positions in the governments, particularly
in Bohemia, where Zden ̆ek Lobkowitz, a Jesuit-educated nobleman,
became head of the chancellery in 1599.
The long-standing rights and privileges of the Estates in Bohemia
were codified under King Vladislav II in 1500, giving them a position
of much greater power than in most other European countries, and in
1508 the same king issued a religious edict confirming the position of
the Catholics and the Hussite Utraquists as the only two approved con-
fessions, while proscribing sects which diverged from them. Its main
target was the Bohemian Brethren, which had developed over the pre-
vious fifty years, but at the time the measure affected only a small
minority, and most of a century later it had long since lapsed. Con-
sequently there were major implications when Rudolf, encouraged by
the Catholics holding Bohemian offices of state, as well as by the papal
nuncio, proposed to renew this Vladislav edict and to apply it firmly
to everyone, nobility, citizens and peasantry alike, in the quite different
circumstances then existing.
In August 1602 he signed a patent ordering its observance, and this
was proclaimed publicly in Prague by heralds with trumpets and drums,
to the amazement and consternation of large crowds. Taken literally,
the edict placed outside the law all who were neither Catholics nor neo-
Catholic Utraquists, meaning that debts due to them were not legally
enforceable, their testimony would not be accepted in the courts, and
their legal contracts such as marriages and wills were invalid. By 1602
most of the Bohemian population were Protestants, mainly Lutherans,
and hence the measure was not realistically enforceable, but in practice
it was directed principally at the smaller but more militant Protes-
tant groups, once again particularly the Bohemian Brethren. Even here,