What happened at the Battle of Sablat?
On 10 June 1619 the imperial army of Count Buquoy caught the Bohemian Estates' army of Ernst von Mansfeld at the village of Záblatí (Sablat) in South Bohemia. Buquoy lured Mansfeld away from his camp with an attack on nearby Netolice, then fell on his divided forces. Mansfeld's cavalry was routed and his infantry, trapped in the village gardens, surrendered that evening. The defeat forced the Estates to give up the siege of České Budějovice and handed the initiative in South Bohemia to the Habsburgs.1
The Bohemian Revolt began in May 1618 with the Defenestration of Prague. In South Bohemia the war centered on České Budějovice, a Catholic royal town that stayed loyal to the emperor. After the Battle of Lomnice on 9 November 1618 the imperial commander, Count Charles Bonaventure de Buquoy, shut himself up in the town, and the Estates' troops besieged it from Rudolfov, a Protestant mining town four kilometers away. Both sides dug forts so close together, the National Heritage Institute notes, that it was said they could shoot at each other with pistols.2
The tide turns toward Buquoy
Through the winter, reinforcements reached Buquoy from Passau along the Golden Path, the old trade route over the Bohemian Forest, and nobody stopped them. In the spring the Estates' commander, Count Heinrich Matthias Thurn, marched to Austria to win over the Austrian estates and by 6 June 1619 stood in the suburbs of Vienna. The siege of Budějovice was left to the passive Count Georg Friedrich von Hohenlohe, who begged for help. Count Ernst von Mansfeld, ordered to cut Buquoy's link with Passau, set out to reinforce him.3
The bait at Netolice
Buquoy learned of Mansfeld's approach from his scouts. On the evening of 9 June he marched west and attacked the small town of Netolice, which had a garrison of about 50 men, some 30 of them fit to fight in Josef Čížek's count. They barricaded themselves in the churchyard and were killed; the town was burned and plundered. The Protestant chronicler Pavel Skála wrote of a great massacre of its inhabitants.4
Mansfeld had camped at Protivín since 8 June. On the morning of 10 June he marched on and halted at Velké Záblatí, near Vodňany. There a messenger brought word that Netolice had been attacked and that survivors were still holding out in the churchyard. The National Heritage Institute considers it likely that the messenger was planted by the imperials. Mansfeld rode off toward Netolice with part of his force, and when he was far enough from the rest, Buquoy appeared with his whole army.5
The fight at Záblatí
Mansfeld hurried back and drew up his men in front of the village, and his guns fired six shots at the imperial cuirassiers. Buquoy first sent small groups of Hungarian light horse to tie down the Bohemian cavalry, then threw in a fresh regiment of Walloon cuirassiers, which the National Heritage Institute identifies as Wallenstein's. Mansfeld's two cornets of horse were overwhelmed. His infantry, now without cover, broke on the right wing when the imperials set fire to the village behind them. In the confusion Bohemian musketeers fired on their own horsemen returning from the pursuit, mistaking them for the enemy.6
The rest of the infantry, under Major Carpezon, retreated into village gardens and held out behind hedges and supply wagons. Buquoy, Čížek writes, did not want to waste men on a direct assault against a trapped enemy with no supplies. Mansfeld, with 50 horsemen, saved the war chest and part of the baggage and rode through the night to Týn nad Vltavou. In the evening the infantry's powder store caught fire and exploded, leaving them nothing to shoot with, and around 8 p.m. Carpezon surrendered with 900 men. In a letter written afterward, Mansfeld said the fighting had lasted eight hours and blamed Hohenlohe's slowness for his defeat.7
How many died?
News of Záblatí spread across the Empire in printed broadsheets. Čížek found many of them, Catholic and Protestant, in German archives. Some reports spoke of tens of thousands killed. The National Heritage Institute puts the dead at about 400, with most of Mansfeld's men wounded or scattered across the countryside.8
Consequences
The siege of České Budějovice ended. The Estates' troops at Rudolfov, unpaid for months and trading their weapons for food, could no longer hold their lines. On 15 June Hohenlohe abandoned the camp and retreated in disorder toward Třeboň. Buquoy and Dampierre took Hluboká, Vimperk, Prachatice and other towns in the weeks that followed, and on 25 August stormed and sacked Písek.9
Mansfeld recovered quickly. He raised a new army of similar size, took command of the Estates' forces that autumn and won back several South Bohemian towns. But Záblatí had shown how vulnerable the Bohemian armies were. In November 1620 Buquoy led the combined imperial and Catholic League army to victory at White Mountain, which ended the revolt; Mansfeld, defending western Bohemia, was not there.10 › Battle of Fleurus, 1622
Notes
A number in the text points to a note; each note names the works that paragraph draws on, listed in full under Sources.
- National Heritage Institute, “Třicetiletá válka v jižních Čechách (The Thirty Years' War in South Bohemia), 2019”; Josef Čížek, “Komunikativní obraz vojenských střetů za českého stavovského povstání”. ↩
- National Heritage Institute, “Třicetiletá válka v jižních Čechách (The Thirty Years' War in South Bohemia), 2019”. ↩
- National Heritage Institute, “Třicetiletá válka v jižních Čechách (The Thirty Years' War in South Bohemia), 2019”; Josef Čížek, “Komunikativní obraz vojenských střetů za českého stavovského povstání”. ↩
- National Heritage Institute, “Třicetiletá válka v jižních Čechách (The Thirty Years' War in South Bohemia), 2019”; Josef Čížek, “Komunikativní obraz vojenských střetů za českého stavovského povstání”. ↩
- National Heritage Institute, “Třicetiletá válka v jižních Čechách (The Thirty Years' War in South Bohemia), 2019”; Josef Čížek, “Komunikativní obraz vojenských střetů za českého stavovského povstání”. ↩
- National Heritage Institute, “Třicetiletá válka v jižních Čechách (The Thirty Years' War in South Bohemia), 2019”; Josef Čížek, “Komunikativní obraz vojenských střetů za českého stavovského povstání”. ↩
- Josef Čížek, “Komunikativní obraz vojenských střetů za českého stavovského povstání”; National Heritage Institute, “Třicetiletá válka v jižních Čechách (The Thirty Years' War in South Bohemia), 2019”. ↩
- Josef Čížek, “Komunikativní obraz vojenských střetů za českého stavovského povstání”; National Heritage Institute, “Třicetiletá válka v jižních Čechách (The Thirty Years' War in South Bohemia), 2019”. ↩
- National Heritage Institute, “Třicetiletá válka v jižních Čechách (The Thirty Years' War in South Bohemia), 2019”; Josef Čížek, “Komunikativní obraz vojenských střetů za českého stavovského povstání”. ↩
- National Heritage Institute, “Třicetiletá válka v jižních Čechách (The Thirty Years' War in South Bohemia), 2019”; Josef Čížek, “Komunikativní obraz vojenských střetů za českého stavovského povstání”. ↩
Sources
- National Heritage Institute (Národní památkový ústav), České Budějovice, exhibition panels, “Třicetiletá válka v jižních Čechách (The Thirty Years' War in South Bohemia), 2019”
- Josef Čížek, master's thesis, University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice, 2017, “Komunikativní obraz vojenských střetů za českého stavovského povstání”
