The Battle of White Mountain: The History and Legacy of the First Major Battle of the Thirty Years' War

It has been famously pointed out that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, but it was also not an empire in the sense people expect when hearing the term. In theory, the emperor was the highest prince in Christendom, and his dominion extended the length and breadth of Western Europe. The tensions between the Holy Roman Empire and Church over the power to invest bishops with authority led to decades of civil war in Germany on the way to establishing the relationship between Chu...