I've been working my way through Edmund Alexander de Schweinitz's The History of the Church Known as the Unitas Fratrum; or, The Unity of the Brethren, Founded by the Followers of John Hus (1885), and I was once again particularly struck by the episode leading up to the Thirty Years War and the Counter or Anti-Reformation that was the result.
After the 1618 Defenestration of Prague, the Protestant uprising against the Habsburg Ferdinand II, the various Protestant leaders of Bohemia (Utraquists and Lutherans) decided to reject Ferdinand's claims and instead appealed to the Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate to come and be their king.
Crowned in 1619, his reign ended a year later with the catastrophic defeat at the Battle of White Mountain in November of 1620. The so-called Winter King fled and died a poor exile - losing not only Bohemia, but his holdings in the German Palatinate as well. The Thirty Years War would soon expand and devastate Germany and portions of Central Europe until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
It is disheartening to read of Frederick's 1619 coronation as several Bohemian Brethren (or Unitas Fratrum) participated in these events, preachings sermons, issuing charges and the like. In other words they supported this act that was most certainly viewed by Vienna as treasonous. Their participation in these events identified them with the political machinations of the Magisterial Protestant lords seeking to install the son-in-law of England's King James I on their throne.
After the defeat at White Mountain, Ferdinand unleashed the forces of Counter-Reformation in Bohemia turning the country into a desert. First, anyone who participated in the scheme was executed and by 1621 Prague was the site of executions and rebel heads on display.
But this backlash would extend well beyond the political plotters. The Utraquists and Lutherans would suffer as would the Bohemian Brethren. Over the next several years, there were summary executions, murders, tortures, and pastors banished - with many living an underground existence in wood and mountain. Children were taken, schools closed, and books were burned. Bodies were exhumed and desecrated. Buildings were seized and often torn down. All Protestant worship was made illegal and by the 1630's the population of the country was reduced by at least one-third, but according to some reckonings by almost three-quarters - an event more devastating than what was typically seen in World War II. Not all died to be sure, but many fled to neighbouring countries and Bohemia (long a centre of the First Reformation) would never be identified as 'Protestant' ever again. The Bohemian Brethren would live a hand-to-mouth exile-existence until the 1720's when they found refuge in Saxony on the lands of Count Zinzendorf. The remnant would re-emerge as the Moravians, deeply affected by the ideals of German Pietism.
The machinations of Brethren leaders led to their own deaths - which in some cases were not martyrdom but political punishments, but they also led to a destructive and unprecedented cycle of persecution for their people - to the point that they were almost eliminated.
Sadly, Brethren leaders such as Jan Amos Comenius (who fled in 1628 never to return) learned little from these episodes and he would continue to place his hopes in a Habsburg defeat - even cheering on the Swedish armies of Gustavus Adolphus which would enter the war in 1630 to roll back Ferdinand's widening programme of Protestant extermination - but also to further Sweden's own territorial and dynastic aspirations.
One would think that Comenius would have learned not to trust in Protestant warlords and generals. As a young man he had endured the Hungarian invasion of Moravia when the Calvinist Stephen Bocskai's hajduks invaded in 1605. An alliance with the Ottomans led the Transylvanian prince to make war on the Habsburgs but it was the common people who suffered including many Bohemian Brethren.
While some historians (especially Protestant) laud the discipline of the Swedish troops, the truth is they plundered their way across Germany, it was the way such armies were sustained. They destroyed not only castles, but thousands of villages along the way. And they left famine in their wake. Armies are armies and soldiers are soldiers. There are degrees of discipline and wanton violence but they're all thieves and murderers in the end and the Protestant armies were no different.
And as far as moral standing - it's not present. Gustavus had schemed with Cardinal Richelieu and later French armies would pick up where Sweden left off during the final phases of war. By then the war had lost any true religious character, devolving into a struggle for the mastery of Central Europe.
While I do not believe those executed in 1621 were being martyred, the bulk of the Christians who suffered as a result of Ferdinand's policies were. Ferdinand was a creature of the Jesuits and in 1629 attempted to undo the 1555 Peace of Augsburg - restoring Protestant lands to Catholic control, effectively rolling back the Reformation. It was a complicated mess to say the least and while this aspect of Ferdinand's agenda was abandoned by 1635, the Thirty Years War as a whole led to a widespread sense of despair and discontent with Christianity in general. The religious, cultural, and epistemological crisis would help birth not only a frenzy of witch burnings, but the Age of Reason and Enlightenment in subsequent generations.
Their scheming led to the Brethren being viewed through the lens of politics and in the eyes of the Habsburg monarchy they had to be destroyed. They survived only by the grace of God and yet did not emerge unscathed and unchanged. Their schemes also set off a chain reaction. The war which began in Bohemia was all but over there by 1620. Prague would see action in the 1630's and 1640's but at that point it was not in Bohemian interests, but a strategic prize in the contest between Germans, Swedes, and the Habsburgs. The Bohemians were out of play but the events of 1618-1620 which they initiated would unleash a wider unforeseen war that would devastate Europe and leave millions dead.
Would that these historical lessons would be learned by the blind and corrupt fools leading today's Church - even as they lead Christ's flock into the paths of death and destruction.