The Thirty Years War

by C. V. Wedgwood

  With the northern kingdoms thus divided, with Sigismund of Poland to check the action of any one of them, with the Dutch at odds among themselves and suspicious of their ruler, the King of Spain had every prospect of subduing the provinces once the truce had expired. Should this take place, France would be shut in between the re-united dominions of the Hapsburg on the north-east, the east and the south. Her government had therefore more interest than any other in Europe to prevent the reduction of the Dutch.

  By 1618, France had recovered from the devastations of the religious wars and had a rich export trade in wine and corn to England, Germany, Italy and Spain; the southern ports competed with Venice and Genoa in the Levantine trade and the country was becoming the European mart for sugar, silks and spices. As the royal revenues on import and export duties rose, the power of the Crown increased. On the other hand, the trading and farming population grew less tractable with prosperity and the landed nobility were critical and restive. Meanwhile the large and privileged Protestant minority resented the Catholicism of the royal government and encouraged the interference of foreign powers. To this ever-present internal danger was added the further external danger, that Spanish and Austrian agents tampered perpetually with the rulers of the border states of Savoy and Lorraine, both vantage points whence an attack could be made on France.

  The French government had one important potential ally. As head of Catholic Christendom the Pope should have rejoiced at the Crusading policy of the Hapsburg dynasty, but as an Italian prince he feared the growth of their power both in the peninsula and throughout Europe. It was therefore natural that he should favour their rivals. The jealousy of the two leading Catholic powers cut clean across the religious alignment of Europe and the highest mission of the Pope should have been to reconcile their quarrel and unite the Catholic world within itself. He lacked both the spiritual authority and the political means; the Vatican moved steadily away from the Hapsburg and towards the Bourbon.

  Intermittently, too, the French government commanded the alliance of the Duke of Savoy and the republic of Venice. Both were important. The Duke of Savoy commanded the Alpine passes from France into Italy and was for this reason assiduously wooed by both Hapsburg and Bourbon. His inclination bound him to the latter whenever his timidity did not force him to yield to the former. On the other hand, the territories of the republic of Venice bordered the Val Telline for thirty miles; this valley was the essential pivot of the whole Hapsburg Empire. It was the passage through which convoys of men and money from northern Italy reached the upper waters of the Rhine and Inn, thence to descend either to Austria or the Netherlands. The structure of the Hapsburg Empire was cemented by Spanish money and supported by Spanish troops. Block the Val Telline and the house would fall. Small wonder therefore that the republic of Venice could assert herself with effect against the dynasty; small wonder that the Archduke of Styria and the King of Spain both sought means to overthrow her before she could overthrow them.

  The Spaniards aimed to control the Val Telline single-handed but could not afford to offend the Swiss Confederation, one of whose cantons, the Grisons or Grey Leagues, bounded the valley on the northern side. They contented themselves therefore with forming a party in the Grisons, an example instantly followed by the French. The weakest point in the Hapsburg defences was this one valley, and its possession was to play a part in the politics of the next twenty years out of all proportion to any intrinsic merit which it boasted.

  From Spain to Poland, from France to the eastern confines of Swedish Finland and the ice-bound ports of the Baltic, the arch of European politics rested on the keystone of Germany. That immense conglomerate of interdependent states which went by the name of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation formed both the geographical and the political centre of Europe. In the contest between Hapsburg and Bourbon, between the King of Spain and the Dutch, between Catholics and Protestants, the part that Germany played would be decisive. Every government had realized this and each had tried to establish an interest in that much-divided country.

  The Spanish King wanted the Rhine so that his troops and money could be easily transported from north Italy to the Netherlands. The King of France, and the Dutch no less, wanted allies on the Rhine to stop this. The Kings of Sweden and Denmark each sought allies against the other on the Baltic coast, against the King of Poland or against the Dutch. The Pope attempted to form a Catholic party in Germany opposed to the Hapsburg Emperor, the Duke of Savoy intrigued to be elected to the imperial throne.

  From Rome, Milan, Warsaw, Madrid, Brussels and The Hague, Paris, London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Turin, Venice, Bern, Zurich and Chur, attention was focused on the Empire. The larger issue was that between the dynasties of Hapsburg and Bourbon: the conflict immediately expected was that between the King of Spain and the Dutch republicans. But it was a revolt in Prague and the action of a prince on the Rhine which precipitated the war. The geography and politics of Germany alone give the key to the problem.

  5.

  Germany’s disaster was in the first place one of geography, in the second place one of tradition. From remote times she had been a highway rather than an enclosure, the marching ground of tribes and armies, and when at last the tides of movement ceased, the traders of Europe continued the ancient custom.

  Germany was a network of roads knotted together at the intersections by the great clearing-houses at Frankfort on the Main, Frankfort on the Oder, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Augsburg. West Indian sugar reached Europe from the refineries of Hamburg, Russian furs from Leipzig, salt fish from Lübeck, oriental silk and spices from Venice through Augsburg, copper, salt, iron, sandstone, corn were carried down the Elbe and Oder, Spanish and English wool woven in Germany competed with Spanish and English cloth in the European market, and the wood that built the Armada was shipped from Danzig. The continual passage of merchants, the going and coming of strangers had more powerfully affected German development than any other single cause. Commerce was her existence, and her cities were more thickly spread than those of any country in Europe. German civilization centred in the small town, but the activities of her traders, the concourse of foreigners to the fairs at Leipzig and Frankfort, drew the interests of the Germans outwards and away from their own country.

  The political traditions of Germany emphasized the development which had originated in a geographical chance. The revival of the Roman Empire by Charlemagne was not wholly fantastic, since he held lands on both sides of the Rhine and the Alps, but when the title passed in time to a line of Saxon kings holding relatively little land in France and Italy the term ‘Roman Empire’ exerted a distorting influence. Classical and medieval ideas, theories and facts in conflict, gave birth about the fifteenth century to the almost apologetic modification of the term ‘Holy Roman Empire’ by the additional phrase ‘of the German Nation’. It was already too late; classical tradition and lust for power attracted the German rulers to campaigns of conquest in Italy, and the German nation was from the outset fatally submerged in the Holy Roman Empire.

  Pursuing the shadow of a universal power the German rulers forfeited the chance of a national one. German feudalism, instead of becoming absorbed in the centralized state, disintegrated utterly. Custom and the weakness of the central government increased the self-reliance of each small unit at the expense of the whole until one Emperor declared with blasphemous humour that he was indeed a ‘King of Kings’.[23] Foreign rulers held fiefs within the Empire—the King of Denmark was Duke of Holstein, and the great and scattered estates which made up that whole section of the Empire known as the Burgundian Circle were virtually independent under the King of Spain. Direct vassals of the Emperor, such as the Elector of Brandenburg, held lands outside the Empire and independent of imperial authority. The system had long ceased to conform to any known definition of the state.

  The long succession of the Hapsburg to the imperial throne had gravely intensified the danger. Powerful in their hereditary lands they intimidated, but did n
ot control, the lesser princes, who in return opposed all efforts at centralization because they came from a dynasty already too strong. The connexion between the Spanish and imperial families was the final disaster, for the Emperor appealed to the King of Spain for help against those who defied his authority, and the princes retaliated by appealing to the enemies of Spain, above all to the King of France. Little by little the German princes laid their country open as a battlefield for foreign rivals.

  Meanwhile internal divisions grew more complicated. As late as the turn of the century—in Hesse-Cassel as late as 1628 —primogeniture was not an established principle in the Empire, and princes divided their lands between their sons, giving to each independent or almost independent rights.[24] In a single province as many as half a dozen smaller states might arise, each independent, each having for centre some little township, sometimes no more than a village with a royal hunting lodge, which was its prince’s capital and palace. These segments each bore the name of the parent state together with that of its own nucleus town, thus complicating imperial geography with terms like Hesse-Cassel, Hesse-Darmstadt, Baden-Baden, Baden-Durlach; apart from the Electoral or Rhenish Palatinate there were the related principalities of Zweibrücken, Neuberg, Zimmern and Sulzbach, and in the little state of Anhalt, itself scarcely larger than Essex, there were in 1618 the four principalities of Zerbst, Dessau, Bernburg and Cöthen.

  Scattered among these princely lands were the free cities, smaller and larger divisions of land independent of anyone save the Emperor. Some, like Nuremberg and Ulm, owned whole provinces; others, like Nordhausen or Wetzlar, no more than the tidy orchards and gardens about their walls. There were even free imperial villages. Again, among all this confusion of boundaries were the Church lands, abbeys, and prince-bishoprics with independent rights, varying from the compact province of Münster to the scattered estates of Freising separated from each other by stretches of more than a hundred miles.

  These were only the more important members of this federation of individual governments; the free knights and counts who could declare themselves, like Götz von Berlichingen, ‘dependent only on God, the Emperor and himself’, were innumerable. There were perhaps two hundred whose wealth and lands gave them some claim to consideration, and nearly two thousand whose economic position was the equivalent of that of an English country gentleman. Thus a population of twenty-one millions[25] depended for its government on more than two thousand separate authorities. The lesser nobility, the knights and free tenants of the Emperor formed confederations among themselves where they were thickest on the ground, or came to an understanding with the chief administrator of the surrounding province where they were few. Yet even making allowances for such arrangements there were over three hundred potentially conflicting authorities in Germany.

  The mechanism of imperial government could not control the situation. Theoretically the Emperor could call a Reichstag or Diet of all the independent rulers, lay his schemes before them and seek their consent to make them law. No general laws or taxes were valid unless they had been passed at such a meeting. Unhappily the Diet never met without fruitless wrangling over precedence and the right to vote. Among the various princes between whom a single province had been divided it was often doubtful how many could vote in the Diet; the four divisions of Brunswick having dwindled to two, each prince exercised a double vote, but when Anhalt split into four, its representatives had to share one vote between them.[26] Again, had there been some dispute over the division of land, the rivals would inevitably claim equal rights, cause ill-feeling within the assembly and bloodshed outside it.

  By origin the Diet had been an advisory body and the right of individual voting was confined to the higher princes and prelates alone. Thus a relatively small number of princes could gain a majority vote and ride roughshod over their fellows and inferiors. Certain princes had therefore recently asserted a right not to be bound by any decision to which they had not personally consented. Their action made the Diet as a legislative body for the whole Empire wholly useless. If the Emperor wished to govern Germany in anything but name he must evolve some other means of legislating. He fell back on government by proclamation, enforced where possible by the prestige of the dynasty. It was hardly fair, although it was usual, to charge the Emperor with tyranny for thus governing without the Diet: governing with it had become impossible.

  The Emperor might free himself of the Diet. He could not evade the control of the Electoral College. Although the result was usually a foregone conclusion, the ceremony of an election was always scrupulously performed on the death of an Emperor. Thus the seven Electors were the true controllers of the Empire, since no Emperor could be chosen without them; the Diet could not meet without their consent; they could be convened by their president without the knowledge of the Emperor, and their decrees were binding with or without imperial confirmation. One further peculiarity of the Electoral College removed it entirely from Hapsburg control: there were seven Electors but only six of them had the right to sit at ordinary meetings. The King of Bohemia, who was in fact not a prince of the Empire but a neighbouring and independent monarch, might vote at an imperial election, but was allowed on no other occasion to meddle in the affairs of the Empire. This kingship had belonged for many years to the Hapsburg dynasty; thus while their candidate could always be certain of one favourable voice at an election, he could not after he became Emperor exert any further control over the deliberations of the College. As the Emperor was bound to consult them before he called a Diet, imposed a new tax or altered an old one, disposed of escheated land, made an imperial alliance or declared war, he was left without any right of independent action.

  Fiscal and military organization were as little in imperial control as legislation. For these purposes the Empire had been divided into ten circles, each with its local Diet and elected president. Should a circle be attacked the president could appeal to the two neighbouring circles to assist him, and if the three together were still unable to defend themselves a further two might be called in. If this did not ease the situation the five circles might then ask the Elector of Mainz to call the leading members of the Diet to Frankfort, a form of meeting without the imperial consent which was called a Deputationstag. If this meeting agreed that the attacked district needed further help, they in turn appealed to the Emperor for a general Diet. By this amazing procedure it was possible for one half of the Empire to be fully engaged in civil or external war before anyone was bound so much as to inform the Emperor.

  The division into circles in fact weakened the central power without solving any problem of organization. Endless confusions arose from the anomalous relations between the circle and its individual members, endless quarrels over their relative responsibility for defence, currency, the peace and management of the district. Moreover, the president of each circle, while in theory an official of the Empire, was in fact always the most powerful of the local princes, and his policy would thus depend on his personal opinions. He might carry out imperial edicts but nobody could force him to do so against his will. The presidency merely added another power to those already enjoyed by a ruling prince.

  The administration of justice alone left some scope for imperial intervention, although even here it was limited. A body called the Reichskammergericht dealt with all appeals from local justice except in those cases, and they were many, where the prince had the right of ultimate justice himself. If justice was, however, refused or delayed even by a privileged ruler, the Reichskammergericht could take the case out of his hands, but this right could only be exercised if the prince were weak and the central authority had strong local support. The other cases brought before the Reichskammergericht were disputes between direct vassals of the Emperor and breaches of peace by arms. In this last case the Emperor had also the right to levy imperial troops against the rebels.

  The Reichskammergericht consisted of twenty-four members and a president. The Hapsburg family, as Emperors, Archdukes of Austria an
d Dukes of Burgundy, controlled six nominations, the remaining eighteen being in the hands of the princes and presidents of circles. A commission consisting of one of the electors, two princes, a free count, a ruling prelate, the representative of a free city, and plenipotentiaries of the Elector of Mainz and the Emperor met yearly to consider the findings of this Court and embody them in the written law of Germany. In 1608 the election of a Protestant president caused the Catholic members to refuse to allow his jurisdiction; since that date all proceedings had been discontinued pending the solution of an insoluble problem.

  The suspension made way for the increase of imperial power. There had always existed one other Court through which, in cases affecting the succession or possession of a ruling prince, the Emperor could take the cause out of the hands of the Reichskammergericht. This was the Reichshofrat, a body composed entirely of imperial councillors, which dealt with problems of succession and privileges, and judged crimes committed by the direct vassals of the Emperor; only in cases of actual revolt or breach of the imperial peace when the safety of the whole Empire was endangered, the Reichskammergericht had the right to deal with the culprit. The collapse of the Reichskammergericht thus automatically increased the power of the Reichshofrat.

  The imperial constitution defied codification. At every election therefore an oath was administered to the Emperor in which the privileges of his subjects were tediously recapitulated. He had to undertake to rule only with the consent of the Diet, to appoint no foreigners to imperial offices, to declare no war and to outlaw none of his subjects by pronouncing the imperial ban against him without the general agreement. This oath or Capitulation varied slightly at every fresh election, and precedent could be found for breaking many if not all of its provisions. Imperial power rested ultimately not on the constitution but on force.

  The imperial army was raised by demanding contingents from the separate states and paying for them with money voted in the Diet. The subsidies were confusingly styled ‘Roman months’—an amount of a hundred and twenty-eight thousand gulden or the sum which the army was supposed to cost for a month. But in the clash of arms which invariably formed the last act of a dispute about imperial authority the Emperor would probably be unable to raise an army at all except through his own private resources. The resources of the Hapsburg dynasty being greater than those of any of their predecessors they had maintained their position comparatively well.