3. The Thirty Years' War: the holy text of pike and gun
The Thirty Years' War: the holy text of pike and gun 25 The Thirty Years' War (1618–48) ranks as one of the most devastating conflicts ever to ravage the soil of Europe. Unfortunately for Germany, the Holy Roman Empire provided the theatre of war. Virtually all the major
European powers became involved in the clash at one time or another, so that Germany became an international battleground where marauding armies inflicted destruction on each other, on the civilian population, and on the land. Some have called it the "European Civil War".
The war was religious in origin. We could regard it in many ways as part two of the religious civil war between Protestant and Roman Catholic that had flared across Germany from 1547 to 1552. That war had culminated in the Peace of Augsburg, ratified by the German imperial diet in 1555. The Peace generally accomplished its objective; it really did bring peace to most of Germany, most of the time, for the following 60 years. Its fatal defect was that it gave legal recognition to only two forms of Christianity: Roman
Catholicism and Lutheranism. The Reformed faith, which at that point had almost no presence in Germany, was not covered by the Peace. Calvinism, however, enjoyed major growth in Germany after the Peace was signed.
The Palatinate, Nassau, Bremen, Wesel, Julich, Cleves, Berg, Anhalt, Hesse, and Brandenburg (among other German territories) all embraced or extended toleration to the Reformed faith after 1555. Yet technically they were violating imperial law, since the Peace of Augsburg had outlawed any faith but Catholicism and Lutheranism.
The sort of tensions that Calvinism created in Germany can be gauged from the "Cologne War" of 1583–8. Cologne was ruled by a prince-bishop; and in 1583, the reigning prince-bishop, Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg
(born 1547; reigned 1577–88; died 1601), defected from Catholicism to the Reformed faith. This was a disaster for the Catholic Habsburg family that had controlled the Holy Roman Empire since 1438, because Cologne's prince-bishop was one of the seven "electors" among the German princes who chose each new emperor. With Cologne's defection to Calvinism,
Protestants now had a four to three majority among the electors. A
Protestant emperor was not a prospect the Habsburgs were prepared to tolerate. Invoking the Peace of Augsburg, they declared von Waldburg's position illegal, since the Peace did not recognize Calvinism; Spanish troops (Spain too was governed by the Habsburgs) invaded Cologne, financed by Pope Gregory XIII, and defeated the would-be Reformed elector, replacing him with a Bavarian Catholic. Von Waldburg died in exile in the Calvinist Dutch Republic in 1601.
It was not Calvinism alone, however, that provoked friction in Germany.
Lutherans and Catholics, although legally protected by the Peace of Augsburg, did not necessarily live at peace with each other. Violence erupted between them in the free imperial city of Donauworth in Swabia.
Lutherans here were in the majority, and their attempt in 1606 to prevent Catholics from holding a religious procession led to a riot. To aid his coreligionists, the Catholic Duke of Bavaria, Maximilian I (1597–1651), sent in his troops. They occupied the city and forcibly imposed Catholicism as its official religion. This emboldened the Catholic rulers, and the following year at the German imperial diet they demanded that all lands and properties taken over by Protestants since 1552 be returned to Catholic ownership. The Protestant delegates, in a minority, stormed out of the diet in outrage, and would not come back until the Thirty Years' War was over.
Clearly Germany's system of imperial government was disintegrating under the impact of religious strife.
These events thoroughly alarmed the Calvinists of Germany: if Catholic rulers could act like this toward Lutherans, whose faith was legal, what might they not do to Calvinists, whose faith was not? In response,
Calvinists and Lutherans set aside their differences, and banded together as the Protestant Union in 1608, led by the Calvinist prince of the Palatinate,
Frederick IV (1592–1610). Catholics reacted by forming the Catholic League in 1609, led by Maximilian of Bavaria. Two hostile religious powerblocs now faced each other within Germany. They began searching for allies; the Protestant Union forged bonds with the Dutch Republic,
Denmark, and England, while the Catholic League recruited Archduke Leopold of Upper Austria.
The spark that finally ignited Germany's religious civil war came in 1618 in Bohemia. Ironically, Bohemia was not part of Germany, but a Slavic nation with its own monarchy; it had, however, been intimately connected with the Holy Roman Empire since the 11th century, and in 1198 the
Emperor Frederick Barbarossa made it an independent kingdom within the Empire. Religiously, the Bohemian population were mainly Hussites; inspired originally by the 15th century Reformer John Huss, they had now enthusiastically put themselves in the Protestant camp.26 There were also
Lutherans and Calvinists in Bohemia, and indeed in 1575 they and the Hussites had signed a joint Protestant confession of faith, the Bohemian
Confession, as a way of acting together politically to secure freedom of worship. Their king was none other than the Holy Roman Emperor, the Catholic Habsburg Rudolf II (1576–1612); the Habsburgs had added
Bohemia to their Europe-wide dynastic empire in 1526, and since 1555 the Holy Roman Emperors had also worn the Bohemian crown. Despite
Rudolf's animosity toward the Reformation, the Bohemian Protestant nobility forced him in 1609 to recognize their liberty in a document known as the "Letter of Majesty".
The next emperor, Matthias (1612–19), who was childless, had his cousin, Archduke Ferdinand of Styria or Lower Austria (born 1578; Holy
Roman Emperor as Ferdinand II 1619–37), presented to the Bohemian nobility in 1617 as their crown prince and future king. A shiver of dread ran through the country. Ferdinand was an aggressive Counter-Reformation
Catholic; having received a brilliant Jesuit training, he had brutally suppressed Protestantism in his land of Styria. Already the 1609 Letter of Majesty was proving ineffective at stopping Emperor Matthias' agents in Bohemia from harassing its Protestants. The fear of what so intolerant a Catholic as Ferdinand might do as their new king drove the Bohemian nobility to outright rebellion. A band of nobles bribed their way into Prague castle, where four of Ferdinand's representatives were meeting, and the nobles threw two of the unfortunate men (well-known inflexible Catholics) out of the third floor window—they landed unharmed in a pile of horse dung. It was May 18th 1618, and it was known as the Defenestration of Prague. (Defenestration is the act of throwing someone out of a window: a bizarre word, but throwing unpopular politicians out of windows was a Bohemian tradition, almost a sport!) From this melodramatic event we can date the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War.
By November 1618, the Bohemian rebels had quelled internal resistance to their revolution and were in full military control of the country. This initial success of the Bohemian revolt led to serious Protestant uprisings against Catholic rulers throughout the entire region: Moravia, Silesia, Upper
Austria, Transylvania, even Archduke Ferdinand's Styria. In August 1619, the Bohemians elected a new king—the Calvinist Prince Frederick V of the Palatinate (1610–23), leader of the Protestant Union. The Union would not support him in what they perceived was a dangerous gamble, but he received strong backing and finance from the Dutch Republic. Two days later, Archduke Ferdinand was elected as the new Holy Roman Emperor
(Matthias had died in March). Ferdinand was, however, kept busy as emperor for the next year reconquering Styria and Upper Austria with the help of the Catholic League. Having crushed the Protestant rebels there, he was finally able in 1620 to turn his attention to Bohemia. The emperor appealed to the Spanish Habsburg branch of the family for assistance; his young nephew, King Philip IV of Spain (1621–65), who ascended the Spanish throne in March 1621, sent an army from the Spanish Netherlands to help vanquish the heretical and mutinous Bohemians and their Calvinist monarch.
The imperial and Spanish armies joined forces, commanded by the fearsome imperial Catholic General, Count Johann Tserclaes of Tilly
(1559–1632), and wiped out the Bohemian Protestant army at the battle of the White Mountain on November 8th 1621. Frederick V, the Calvinist exking, had to flee into exile in the Dutch Republic—even his original
German homeland of the Palatinate was now overrun by Spanish Catholic troops. Ferdinand gave the Palatinate to Maximilian of Bavaria. The Protestant Union protested at this Catholic seizure of a Protestant land, but a triumphant Ferdinand, secure amid his menacing army, merely ordered the Union to disband. Fearing that disobedience would plunge them into a ruinous war, the Union meekly disbanded. Two Protestant princes, however
—Christian the Younger (1616–26), who was the Lutheran duke of Brunswick, together with George Frederick, the margrave of BadenDurlach—refused to give up the fight. Meanwhile, Bohemia was forcibly
Catholicized, its 200 year old Hussite heritage effectively destroyed. A long, dark night of the soul began for the shattered disciples of John Huss. What was left of the Protestant Union's army was now commanded by Christian the Younger of Brunswick; an intense devotee of all things military, he had gained battlefield experience in fighting Spanish Catholics in the Netherlands after Spain had renewed its long war with the Dutch Republic in 1621. Christian's army, however, was decisively defeated by Count Tilly at the battle of Stadtljohn in August 1623.
That might have been the end of the war—a catastrophic defeat for the Protestants, a resounding triumph for the Catholic emperor—had it not been for the international dimensions of the German conflict. Bordering on Germany lay Lutheran Denmark, whose king, Christian IV (1588–1648), also controlled the German duchy of Holstein. Fearing that Ferdinand's victory was creating a new, powerful Catholic Habsburg empire in Germany which would threaten Lutheran Denmark, in 1625 Christian IV led a full-scale Danish invasion of Germany to strike down Ferdinand and restore the fortunes of Protestantism. So began a long series of foreign interventions which kept the flames of war burning across Germany for three decades. What could have been the Five Years' War (1618–23) became the Thirty Years' War (1618–48). By the time the carnage was over, historians estimate that Germany had lost almost a third of its population to battle, disease, starvation, and all the other brutal accompaniments of war.
One of the worst atrocities was the destruction of the historic and prosperous Lutheran city of Magdeburg; the army of the Catholic general
Tilly stormed the city in May 1631, massacring its inhabitants. Out of an original population of 30,000, only 5,000 survived the onslaught. The city itself was burnt to the ground, and for days afterwards, there was a non-stop carrying of corpses to be dumped in the Elbe river. The whole of Europe was shocked to the core; yet still the war dragged on.
It is beyond the scope of this book to tell the full story of the Thirty Years' War. The most important things for us to observe now are the way its religious and political aspects developed almost out of recognition, and its ultimate outcomes for Europe. We can summarize these as follows.
First, the war fundamentally altered in character as it progressed. It began as a religious conflict between Protestant and Catholic. By the time it ended, it had become a secular power-struggle between the Habsburgs and all their foes (whether those foes were Protestant or Catholic). The single greatest factor that made this change possible was the intervention of France. Led by Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642), who in effect controlled
French affairs as the all-powerful chief minister of King Louis XIII (1610– 43), Catholic France threw its weight behind the Protestant forces in the war.27
Cardinal Richelieu feared that a strong Holy Roman Empire, no matter how Catholic it was, would be a serious threat to France on the stage of international diplomacy and war. After all, the Empire was controlled by the
Habsburg family, who also occupied the throne of Spain. To prevent France being encircled by Habsburg power, Richelieu decided to help the antiHabsburg forces in the Thirty Years' War, who happened to be Protestants.
He financed the Danish invasion of Germany by Christian IV in 1625.
When Christian's intervention ultimately failed to check Habsburg power, Richelieu encouraged Protestant Sweden in 1629 to invade Germany (with much greater success), under the great Lutheran warrior-king Gustavus
Adolphus (1611–32). Gustavus inflicted a series of devastating defeats on the Habsburg armies, vanquishing their great commander Tilly twice (the second time Tilly died of his injuries). Even after Gustavus' own death in battle in 1632, his brilliant chancellor Axel Oxenstierna (1583–1654) kept his forces fighting in Germany; Richelieu massively subsidized the Swedish troops for many years. In 1635, Richelieu finally decided to take direct action, and declared war on Spain, which was the Holy Roman Emperor's greatest ally. French Catholic troops—under the command of a French
Protestant general!—were soon fighting Catholic Habsburg forces in Germany.
Richelieu's policy transformed the Thirty Years War into a more purely political struggle, between the Habsburgs and their many enemies (whether
Catholic or Protestant) who—for nationalistic reasons—did not wish to see the creation of an over-mighty Habsburg empire that embraced both
Germany and Spain. Many Catholics condemned Richelieu for betraying his religion in favour of French nationalism. But there can be no doubting his success. By the time the war ended in 1648, the Habsburg GermanSpanish axis was financially bankrupt, and France was ready to assume dominance in Europe.
Because of these developments in the Thirty Years' War, it was the last great religious war in Europe. The way its nature had been secularized by Richelieu, with Catholic France fighting alongside Protestants against the Catholic Habsburgs, meant that a new, more pragmatic era had dawned in European history. Nations would now be much more ready to fight frankly for their own interests and glory, without a convincing religious motive.
The war finally concluded with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
Involving several treaties, the signatories were the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, France, Sweden, the Dutch Republic, and the princes and free imperial cities of Germany. The real winner was France: by supporting the Protestants, it had dealt a crippling blow to Habsburg power in Germany
and Spain, draining their resources, and causing them to lose territory.
France's great rival for national greatness had been effectively neutered.
Spain was also finally forced to recognize officially the sovereign independence of the Calvinist Dutch Republic, ending some 80 years of conflict. The Holy Roman Emperor lost all authority over the German princes: if Germany was ever to be unified into a single nation, it could now never be under the Catholic Habsburg emperors (in fact, it would be unified under Protestant Brandenburg-Prussia in the 19th century).
As for religion, the initial cause of the conflagration, the Peace of Westphalia gave legal recognition to the Reformed faith in Germany for the first time. Part of the Palatinate was also restored to Calvinists after its
Catholic conquest in 1622. The land of Luther would now be just as much the land of Calvin, especially through the increasingly mighty state of Brandenburg-Prussia, with its Reformed ruling house of Hohenzollern. The old principle that the ruler determined the religion of his subjects was modified in two ways: (i) if more than one faith existed in a territory in 1624, both could continue; (ii) Lutherans and Calvinists agreed that if a Lutheran ruler became Calvinist (or vice versa), this would not affect his subjects—they were free to choose.