The Bohemian Context 77appointments. Other sub-divisions and fringe groups further compli-
cated the picture, so that in the 1580s a noted local pastor and writer
complained that ‘in Bohemia and Moravia there are some thirty separate
sects, each with its own slant and standpoint’.^11
Numbers quoted for most things are generally suspect in this period,
and religion is no exception. Thus although it is widely agreed that
the great majority of the population of Bohemia, including most of the
nobility, were Protestants of one form or another by the latter part of the
sixteenth century, the figure of 90 per cent sometimes claimed cannot
be relied upon. There was also a linguistic divide among the Protes-
tants, in that the German-speakers tended to be Lutherans, while the
Czech-speaking majority mostly belonged to one or other of the sev-
eral variants of Hussite Utraquism or to the Bohemian Brethren. At that
time there were also Protestant majorities in the Estates of the other
Bohemian and Habsburg lands, although larger in some than in oth-
ers, while Protestant strength was generally greater among the nobility
than among the ordinary people. Thus some modern work suggests that
in the core regions of Upper and Lower Austria only a little more than
half of the active parishes were in Protestant hands, and many of these
were associated with noble estates.^12 Reformed or Calvinist influences
were widespread but mainly confined to a small elite, although they
had made considerable progress in Hungary and Transylvania.
In contrast to the Empire, there was no conflict over secularisation
of church land, as the church had already lost most of this during the
Hussite period more than a hundred years earlier. Instead both landed
wealth and political control of the Estates in Bohemia were firmly in the
hands of the upper classes. According to one estimate about a tenth of
the land belonged to the king, and most of the rest to the nobility, apart
from a little owned by some forty towns and cities which were direct
fiefs of the crown, and an even smaller proportion belonging to free
peasants. The nobility itself was stratified into a clear hierarchy, within
which there were two main divisions with membership in 1605 assessed
as 254 lords and 1128 knights, although a modern estimate suggests
that there were relatively fewer lords and more of the lesser ranks, while
noble families made up around 1 per cent of the total population.^13
The other Habsburg lands
Bohemia was only one of the Austrian Habsburgs’ large but unwieldy
collection of territories, and to understand the revolt of 1618 it will also
be necessary to look at events which occurred both beforehand and in