Abstract
The royal town of Nymburk, lying on the middle course of the Labe (Elbe) northeast of Prague, was occupied by the army many times during the Thirty Years' War. Twice it became a witness and the object of heavy fighting between the imperial and Saxon troops.During the first Saxon invasion of Bohemia, on 5 December 1631, the supreme Saxon commander Hans Georg von Arnim marched from Prague at the head of his troops and clashed with the imperial forces commanded by Friedrich von Tiefenbach in the suburbs on the left bank of the Elbe. When the imperial troops retreated to the right bank behind the walls, the city was shelled and set on fire. The subsequent fire had wholly devastating consequences, which negatively affected economic, social, and demographic developments for many decades.
During the Saxon-Swedish invasion of Bohemia three years later, Nymburk was besieged for three days by Saxon troops under the leadership of Friedrich Wilhelm von Sachsen-Altenburg. Roughly two thousand imperial soldiers defended themselves in the city, and the population of Nymburk also joined in the fighting. On 16 August 1634, Saxon troops broke into the city and during the subsequent slaughter did not spare even a part of the civilian population, including those seeking refuge in the church. A total of 200 civilians were killed at the time, whose memory was always commemorated with a procession and church service on the anniversary of the event from the following year.
The book reconstructs the course of both encounters based on printed and archival sources, which are not always unambiguous and are at times contradictory. It also provides a reflection on the comparison of the conquest of Nymburk in 1634 with the tragedy of Magdeburg, which appeared abundantly in the period sources. The comparison had its symbolic weight, but it did not reflect the real situation: in this large imperial city, the number of civilian victims during its conquest by the troops of the Catholic League in 1631 was up to a hundred times greater than in Nymburk. The efforts of Nymburk burghers to restore the city and the transformations that the commemoration of the events of the Thirty Years' War went through in the city are also described. The image of both sieges of Nymburk has gradually been influenced over the centuries by the view of the victors and the vanquished, Baroque piety, the Romanticism of the early 19th century as well as the critical approaches of modern historiography.