Battle of Sablat, 1619: Buquoy's trap in South Bohemia

Sablat was a small battle with a long shadow. It was fought near two villages few people outside South Bohemia had heard of, Malé and Velké Záblatí, yet news of it ran through the printed broadsheets of the Empire. For the rebel Estates of Bohemia it was the first great defeat of a war they had started a year earlier, and it decided who would hold the south of the kingdom.²

Background: a revolt and a loyal town

The Bohemian Revolt began on 23 May 1618, when Protestant noblemen threw two royal governors, William Slavata and Jaroslav Martinic, from a window of Prague Castle. The Estates set up a government of directors and raised an army under Count Heinrich Matthias Thurn, who had himself taken part in the Defenestration. Britannica calls it the act that opened the Thirty Years' War.³

Thurn marched south at once. České Budějovice, a royal town loyal to the emperor, refused to open its gates to him and held out for the Habsburgs through the whole revolt. In the autumn the new imperial commander, Count Charles Bonaventure de Buquoy, advanced into Bohemia but was stopped at Čáslav, short of Prague, and fell back. In November 1618 Thurn caught his army on the march at Lomnice nad Lužnicí, and after the battle Buquoy withdrew behind the walls of České Budějovice for the winter.⁴

The Estates then besieged the town from Rudolfov, a Protestant mining town four kilometers to the northeast. They raised five large forts in front of the walls, and the imperials answered with two of their own. It was a siege of skirmishes rather than assaults, and the town was never cut off from the south.⁵

That was the Estates' great mistake. Through the winter of 1618 to 1619 fresh troops reached Buquoy from Passau along the Golden Path, the old trade route over the Bohemian Forest, and nobody stopped them. By the spring he had the stronger army in the south.⁶

Politics moved faster than the siege. Emperor Matthias died in March 1619, and the directors refused to accept his heir, Ferdinand II, as king of Bohemia. Thurn took part of the army into Austria to win over the Austrian estates and marched on Vienna itself. The siege of Budějovice was left to Count Georg Friedrich von Hohenlohe, who had too few men to surround the town. Alarmed, he begged Prague for help.⁷

Armies and commanders

Buquoy, a nobleman from the Spanish Netherlands, had learned war in the long Spanish struggle against the Dutch rebels. After the Defenestration he was called to Bohemia and given command of the imperial army with the rank of field marshal. The historian Friedrich Hermann Schubert judged him a cautious, theoretical general who preferred maneuver and fortified positions to pitched battle, yet who saved the Habsburg monarchy at its most dangerous moment by holding Budějovice and covering Vienna. His second, Count Henri Duval de Dampierre, brought fresh reinforcements into South Bohemia in June 1619.⁸

Ernst von Mansfeld was a soldier for hire. He had learned his trade in the Habsburgs' own service, in the Netherlands and against the Turks in Hungary, and came to Bohemia in 1618 at the head of troops paid by the Protestant side. His first success was the capture of Catholic Pilsen (Plzeň) that autumn. In June 1619, when Hohenlohe called for help against Buquoy's growing garrison, Mansfeld set out toward Budějovice.⁹

The two forces were not evenly matched. Josef Čížek describes Buquoy's army as the larger and Mansfeld's as the weaker corps, and the National Heritage Institute calls the fight an unequal one. Buquoy also knew where his enemy was going.¹⁰

The battle in phases

The bait at Netolice

On the evening of 9 June Buquoy marched west and fell on Netolice, a small town held by about 50 musketeers, only some 30 of them fit to fight. The defenders shut themselves in the churchyard and were killed there; the town was burned and plundered.¹¹

Mansfeld came on by way of Protivín and Vodňany and on 10 June halted at Velké Záblatí. There a messenger brought word that Netolice had been attacked and that survivors were still holding out in the churchyard. They were not. The National Heritage Institute thinks the messenger was probably planted by the imperials, and Čížek writes that Mansfeld walked straight into the trap. He rode off with his cavalry to relieve the town, and the imperial army came up while the Bohemian forces were split.¹²

The cavalry fight

The imperial horse fell on Mansfeld's cavalry, Hungarian light riders first and then cuirassiers, the heavy horse in breastplates. Mansfeld pulled his men back toward Záblatí and counterattacked, driving the Hungarians off, but then met the main weight of the imperial cavalry. His tired horsemen could not stand against the cuirassiers and were overwhelmed and scattered.¹³

Confusion did the rest. Musketeers in the village, seeing horsemen ride toward them out of the fighting, took their own returning cavalry for another imperial charge and opened fire on it. With the horse gone, the infantry had no cover.¹⁴

The last stand in the gardens

What was left of the infantry, under Major Joachim Carpezon, fell back into the village gardens and fought on behind fences, hedges and supply wagons. They held out through the afternoon. Then the infantry's powder store caught fire and blew up, and the defenders had nothing left to shoot with. Toward evening Carpezon surrendered.¹⁵

Turning point

The battle turned on Mansfeld's ride toward Netolice. An army halted in a village, its general gone with the cavalry to answer a false report, gave Buquoy the chance to fight the Estates' field force piece by piece. Once the Bohemian cavalry broke, the infantry in the gardens could only choose when to give in.¹⁶

The cost was disputed from the start. The National Heritage Institute puts the dead at about 400, with most of Mansfeld's men wounded or scattered across the countryside and 900 men surrendering with Carpezon. A Catholic pamphlet printed at Straubing claimed that imperial scouts had counted 1,100 bodies on the field and that 1,337 men were taken prisoner, most of whom then changed sides; other reports spoke of tens of thousands of dead.¹⁷

Aftermath

The siege of České Budějovice collapsed. With Mansfeld's army gone, Hohenlohe's camp at Rudolfov could not be held, and on 15 June he abandoned it and retreated toward Třeboň. In the weeks that followed Buquoy and Dampierre took Hluboká, Vimperk, Prachatice and the town of Rožmberk.¹⁸

Thurn's march on Vienna came to nothing, and he hurried back to Bohemia to win back what had been lost. Mansfeld recovered fast. He raised a new army of much the same strength, took over the Estates' command in the south that autumn and won back several South Bohemian towns before the year was out.¹⁹

The rebels pressed on in politics too. They deposed Ferdinand and offered the crown to Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, who was crowned in Prague early in November 1619. But the Catholic stronghold of Budějovice, secured at Sablat, was never taken. In November 1620 Buquoy and the Catholic League army of Maximilian of Bavaria won the Battle of White Mountain outside Prague, and the revolt collapsed. The sources differ on Mansfeld's part there: the National Heritage Institute says he was defending western Bohemia and missed the battle, while Britannica counts White Mountain among his defeats.²⁰

Legacy and memory

Sablat showed early what the rest of the revolt would confirm: the Estates' armies could be beaten in the field. After White Mountain the rebel nobility lost its estates to confiscation. Buquoy did not long outlive his victories. In 1621 he took command against the rebels in Hungary and was killed before Nové Zámky (Neuhäusel) the same year.²¹

Mansfeld turned defeat into a career. He kept armies together through loss after loss, fought on for the Palatine cause in Germany and the Low Countries, and in 1626, after failing to cross the Elbe at Dessau against Wallenstein, marched toward Hungary and died on the road, near Sarajevo, on his way to Venetian territory.²² › Battle of Fleurus, 1622

In print the battle lived on as propaganda. News of Záblatí spread in broadsheets, some of them claiming tens of thousands of dead. In Josef Čížek's reading of the Protestant pamphlet, the blame was shifted from Mansfeld onto Carpezon, accused of not fighting to the last man, to cover the general's own tactical mistakes. The hand-colored etching at the top of this page, from Abraham Hogenberg's series of news prints, shows the battle the way such prints showed it to readers of the time: cavalry charging across open fields, with the village and its church on the horizon.²³ › 10 June in military history