Description
On May 23, 1618, when Bohemian nobles threw three imperial councils out of a window in Prague Castle, none of the parties involved realized that they were paving the way for a Thirty Years' War.
This was mainly due to an experience that Austrian Habsburg subjects had had for about a hundred years: political advances in the west, in the Holy Roman Empire, were only possible when there was calm in the east.
But that was rarely the case. Since the devastating defeat of the Hungarians against Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in 1526, Austria has been almost continuously in a state of war, declared or not, with the Ottoman Empire, the superpower of the 16th century.
The war that broke out in 1593 went down in history as the Long Turkish War. It lasted 13 years and turned into a fiasco for both sides. Because it created the framework in which the Thirty Years' War was fought shortly after. Like a catalyst, developments in both empires accelerated between 1593 and 1606, shortly after erupting into the catastrophe that would ruin Central Europe.