In collecting the comparatively few reliable facts, in sifting the mass of exaggerated legends and statements, an acute contrast between the general and the particular makes itself bewilderingly apparent. The individual peasant suffered atrociously during the war; defenceless, he was exposed to heavy taxation, plunder, violence and exile. Yet the peasantry in general emerged from the war in a stronger position with regard to the rest of society than any they had yet held. The gentry depended on their labour to restore the land to prosperity, a task for which their numbers were relatively small. This gave them for once a chance to assert themselves effectively.[20] In the sphere of ordinary household economics there is the same contradiction. From about the year 1622, and for the next fifty years, prices were steadily falling.[21] This movement was accompanied by a general rise in the level of wages, so that the cost of living fell and the standard rose throughout the Thirty Years War. All this did not in the slightest degree palliate the suffering caused by intermittent and local famine, by plunder, persecution and emigration. Reduced to the impersonality of a graph, the price of wheat in Augsburg certainly ran downhill, but each sudden upward thrust of the line, however temporary, meant hunger and death.[22]
The accounts and figures of contemporaries, exaggerated as they are, give at least a general impression of conditions as they appeared to those who in 1648 were faced with the task of rebuilding Germany. True or false, they have a human value, which, meaningless though it may be to the economist, is important to the historian. The Swedes alone were accused of destroying nearly two thousand castles, eighteen thousand villages and over fifteen hundred towns.[23] Bavaria claimed to have lost eighty thousand families and nine hundred villages, Bohemia five-sixths of its villages and three-quarters of its population. In Württemberg the number of the inhabitants was said to have fallen to a sixth, in Nassau to a fifth, in Henneberg to a third, in the wasted Palatinate to a fiftieth of its original size.[24] The population of Colmar was halved, that of Wolfenbüttel had sunk to an eighth, of Magdeburg to a tenth, of Hagenau to a fifth, of Olmütz to less than a fifteenth.[25] Minden, Hameln, Göttingen, Magdeburg, by their own account, stood in ruins.[26]
So far the legend. Where more solid proof is to be found the figures, if they do not bear out, at least provide some justification for the tradition. The population of Munich numbered twenty-two thousand in 1620, seventeen thousand in 1650; Augsburg forty-eight thousand in 1620, twenty-one thousand in 1650.[27] Chemnitz sank from nearly a thousand to under two hundred, Pirna from eight hundred and seventy-six to fifty-four.[28] The population of Marburg, eleven times occupied, dwindled by half and the municipal debt rose to seven times its original size; two hundred years later the burghers were still paying interest on loans raised during the war.[29] The population of Berlin-Kölln decreased by a quarter, that of Neu Brandenburg by nearly a half. In the Altmark, Salzwedel, Tangermunde and Gardelegen had lost a third of their people, Seehausen and Stendal more than half, Werben and Osterburg two-thirds.[30] As many as two hundred ships had sailed yearly across the Sound from the ports of East Friesland in 1621; by the last decade of the war the average number in a year was ten.[31]
‘I would not have believed a land could have been so despoiled had I not seen it with my own eyes,’ declared General Mortaigne in Nassau.[32] There is evidence enough of such wasting in the drastic efforts of the rulers to revive cultivation.
The loss in agricultural land and live stock is difficult to reckon, since reliable figures rarely exist for the period both immediately before and immediately after the war. It is an easy error to attribute to the war a poverty in cattle and agriculture by which a district may always have been distinguished. Bitterly as they complained, the armies contrived to live on the land to the end, managed to keep some at least of their cavalry mounted on four-footed beasts—apparently not always on horses—and to get their baggage wagons drawn for them. Again, far as the marauding troops would sometimes wander from their base, a village away from a road, or sheltered in the dead end of a remote valley, might escape altogether.
Leipzig went bankrupt in 1625, but the financial position of the municipality had been insecure before.[33] Some towns experienced very little set-back, a few even derived advantage from the war. Erfurt attempted to set up a rival annual fair when Leipzig was occupied by troops in 1623–33.[34] The population of Würzburg rose steadily.[35] Bremen contrived to monopolize the English linen market,[36] Hamburg had engrossed the sugar and spice trade of its rivals and came out of the Thirty Years War one of the finest towns in Europe, able to compete in the Baltic with Sweden and the United Provinces.[37] The county of Oldenburg, thanks to the enlightened dishonesty of its ruler, had executed so intricate a dance among the shifting alliances as always to be not only on the winning side but in a position to prevent occupation by the troops. Frankfort-on-the-Main, after the lean years which followed Nördlingen, emerged again comparatively wealthy, comparatively prosperous. The population of Dresden made up on the harbouring of exiles what it lost by plague, and had neither grown nor diminished in the course of the war.[38]
Above all it must be remembered that the destructive powers of the armies were infinitely less than they are now. The lack of any authority to protect the civilian, the inadequacy of charitable services, the total absence of discipline in the modern sense, made the immediate pressure of the war overwhelming. But there was no such widespread disturbance or total destruction as there would be today. The buildings destroyed were wooden houses, quickly rebuilt; stone and brick mocked the rage of the seventeenth-century soldier. Recovery was therefore in many districts so rapid as to have produced, in certain sceptics, a doubt of the actual horror of the war.
In actual money the losses were never so great as the complaints of the authorities suggest. Much of the wealth seized as war-contributions merely changed hands, flowing back into the pockets of the people in payment for the needs of the soldiery. Comparatively little was saved and sent back to foreign banks and foreign lands by thrifty generals.[39] That little would be abundantly balanced by the money which flowed into the country through the armies from Spain, Sweden, the United Provinces, and above all from France.
Nevertheless, the shortage of capital during the war itself was, at least locally, very strongly marked. Between 1630 and 1650 only two and a half million talers were minted by the Saxon government, as opposed to more than twice that number in the last twenty years of the previous century.[40] The steadily decreasing yield of taxes is proof of the devaluation of property and the decline in prosperity of the taxpayer. It is a grievous thought that the takings of the Leipzig beer-cellar sank to less than a quarter.[41]
On occasion the peasantry profited by the financial chaos. Soldiers did not stop to bargain, and the village boy who exchanged a mug of beer for a silver chalice[42] did well out of the deal. In Augsburg during the Swedish occupation the peasants bought plundered cattle at ridiculous prices, the soldiers having no idea of the value of the animals they had stolen. The breakdown of authority also gave great opportunities to the unscrupulous. When their timorous neighbours had fled, certain bold farmers could sometimes make easy money by selling the produce of their neighbours’ lands, the wood in particular, as if it was their own.[43] Towards the end of the war, indeed, a generation had grown up who knew how to make the best of the unusual freedom which had arisen from the weakness of civil authority.
The incredible decrease in population claimed for so many districts was to some extent the outcome of temporary emigration, and a careful consideration of conditions in Germany both before and after the war reveals the fact that society was dislocated rather than destroyed. But the marks of that dislocation remained long after the limbs had been re-integrated.
The actual loss of population is hard to gauge with accuracy. A detailed inquiry into the conditions of the Altmark reveals a decrease of two-fifths in the towns, of one-half in the open country.[44] This loss affected the male and female population almost equally, for i
t must be remembered, in calculating the damages done by the war, that the mortality among the civilian population was certainly as great in proportion, if not greater, than among the armies. There was no difficult social problem such as arises from a war in which the casualties are confined largely to the males.
The old legend that the population dropped from sixteen to four million people, rests on imagination: both figures are incorrect. The German Empire, including Alsace but excluding the Netherlands and Bohemia, probably numbered about twenty-one millions in 1618, and rather less than thirteen and a half millions in 1648.[45] Certain authorities believe that the loss was less,[46] but the figures, which have been confused over the generations by propaganda of different kinds, are extremely difficult to establish with any certainty.
3.
The breakdown of social order, the perpetual changing of authority and religion in so many districts, contributed to that disintegration of society which was more fundamentally serious than the immediate damages of war.
The slight improvements in the position of the peasant which had resulted in some districts from slackening of the central authority was not firmly enough established to outlast the conditions which had produced it. In Saxony in particular the coming of peace was marked by the peevish outcry of the nobility for government help against the peasants. Of old the serf had not been able to leave the land, but in the chaos of war many had drifted into the towns and learnt trades; these came back to improve the standard of living at home, and the sons and daughters of labourers were now growing up to increase the family income by plying domestic industries. So long as the war lasted, the landed aristocracy viewed these proceedings with impotent dismay, but when peace came all was changed. In Saxony they compelled the Elector—who owed them money—to issue a series of laws forbidding the peasant either to leave his village or to ply any industry in his home.[47] In this way one improvement brought about by the war was effectively destroyed.
The advance and the decline of the landless peasant was most strongly marked in Saxony, but the same process in a less exaggerated form took place in nearly all districts. The economic results of this shameless class-legislation were less disastrous than the social. The landed gentry wished to make their lands prosperous, and though they were narrow-minded, they were not essentially bad masters. In the years following the war there was everywhere scientific and intelligent development of the land. But morally and socially the evil results of this oppression were undeniable. Feudal barriers were recreated where feudal obligations had long ceased to exist, and the seeds of a new caste-consciousness took root and flourished.
The same distinctions existed between town and country, between merchant and peasant and noble, and these were strengthened by the efforts of the dominating classes to maintain their social position in spite of economic distress. Meanwhile the devastation of war had brought into existence a class of landless nobility, pretentious parasites who lived on their kinsfolk and on their wits and preyed on society for generations to come. In spite of that levelling of classes which some claim to be the effect of acute and prolonged emergency, the social hierarchy emerged from the war as rigid as before. Rarely a successful general managed to buy an estate, or marry into the nobility and found a new noble family. Johann von Werth retired with immense wealth and took a Fräulein von Kuefstein to wife; the peasant-born Melander became a Count and died worth a quarter of a million talers. But these appear to be unusual cases. In spite of the booty sometimes accumulated by private soldiers, it was extremely difficult to rise from the ranks. Even the foreign adventurers who distinguished themselves were almost always of noble if impoverished families. Piccolomini came of the distinguished Sienese dynasty, Isolani claimed noble ancestors in Cyprus, the Swedish officers were almost all of the landed class.[48] Even men like the murderers of Wallenstein styled themselves gentlemen. Social castes defied the pressure of military necessity, and although there were many uneducated boors among the officers of both sides, the great majority claimed nevertheless to come of families bearing coat armour. The distinction, absurd in every practical sense, was highly significant in the eyes of contemporaries. It is notable that among the foreign mercenaries names of an aristocratic flavour predominate—Devereux, Ruthven, Montecuculi. Among the Germans, scions of ancient families are no less frequent among the officers in 1648 than in 1618. They were Falkenberg and Kuefstein still, not Müller and Schmidt.
If the war had no effect in mixing classes, it had a slight effect in mixing races. The influx of Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Croatian, Flemish, and French soldiery must have had some influence on the racial composition of the people. It cannot have had very much on that of the middle and upper classes. Of a fundamental alteration in the physical characteristics of the people there is of course no question. The Germans had not absorbed recurrent waves of Goth, Vandal, Frank, with strains of Hun, Slav, and Viking, to be altered out of recognition by the birth of a few thousand hybrid babies. The racial influence of the Swedish occupation on the Czechs rests on popular belief alone, and certainly the numerous ‘Schweden-schantz’ in Germany almost all owe their name to the corruption of some older form.[49]
The commercial middle-classes, long declining in influence, had been altogether undermined by the war; the bourgeoisie of the future was composed not of independent merchants but of dependent officials, not a free and experimental, but a parasitic and conservative, class.[50] By becoming satellites of the governing class and identifying their interests with those of the rulers, the townsfolk virtually destroyed the buffer state between nobility and peasantry.
The importance and the culture of the small town survived, but it was dependent now on the goodwill of the prince who extended his protection over reviving urban life, and exploited the walled cities as strategic points for the defence of his lands. The spontaneous and lively art of the municipality gave way before the restrained and genteel culture of the provincial Court. It was an imitative rarefied culture, remote from the life of the people, remote often from the natural expression of the Germans, but at its best international, civilized, and significant, as the culture of the small town could never be. Losing its national rigidity, German art was merged in the main stream of European development, which meant at that time in the culture of France.
The nationalist regrets the change; an ill-founded belief in the merits of purity blinds him to the virtues of the foreign and the hybrid. Are the arts to be so bounded by the meaningless frontiers of geography that we are to deplore the soaring light of Tiepolo’s ceiling at Würzburg, the Parisian elegance of the Zwinger at Dresden? Are we to stop our ears to the music of the eighteenth century because it derived so much from lands beyond the German border?
German racial consciousness survived the war in a form as aggressive as before. The people resented the French culture from the moment of its coming, and not only because it came with invasion and imperial defeat. The Austrians, the defeated, received it best, and made the best use of it. In the north and west they accepted it resentfully, gracelessly, but accepted it none the less. The princes gave them no alternative and left middle-class writers to protest in vain—Philander von Sittewald crying in the wilderness against a younger generation for whom everything must be à la mode and who characterized their dislikes as ‘altfränkisch’, as we some years ago called ours ‘Victorian’.[51]
For the submergence of German culture the war was not in itself responsible. French fashions triumphed the world over, in Italy, in England, in the United Provinces, even in Sweden and Denmark.
4.
The political effects of the war were more distinct than its social and economic results. The actual boundaries of the Empire had changed. The acceptance of the independence of Switzerland and the United Provinces merely confirmed an already existent situation. Alsace and Hither-Pomerania, on the other hand, although still technically part of the Empire, were virtually under the control of foreign powers, a cession which in the case of Alsace at le
ast was to become permanent. The mouths of the four great rivers were thus in foreign hands: the delta of the Rhine under Spanish and Dutch control, the Elbe, the Oder, and the Vistula under Danish, Swedish, and Polish control respectively. The situation with regard to the Elbe and the Vistula was what it had been in 1618, but the establishment of the aggressive power of Holland in virtual possession of the outlet from the Rhine,[52] and the seizure of the Oder by the Swedes, were bound to react unfavourably on German commerce and self-respect.
Within the Empire it is difficult to analyse the political changes in their exact relationship to the war. The elements out of which the conflict had arisen had resolved themselves into a new formation, and some at least disappeared in the process. The shifting of the balance between Church and State was in process in 1618 and might well have completed itself without unnecessary bloodshed. Calvinism, although not officially recognized, was practised by more of the population before than after the war. The struggle against absolutism in Germany had been hampered from the outset by the jealousies of the privileged classes. If the triumph of the Princes and their separatist tyrannies, over the Emperor on the one hand and the Estates on the other, was not certain in 1618, it was at least highly probable.
The war hastened the development by leaving the princes as the only power to whom the disorganized people could turn. Authority seemed necessary for the survival of the State; despotism was more practically effective than self-government, bureaucracy more stable than elective choice.
The Thirty Years War Page 57
