The Thirty Years War

by C. V. Wedgwood

  The Empire sank to the level of a geographical term. Ferdinand III had entrenched himself in his father’s creation of ‘Austria’; it was as King-Emperor of Austria and her surrounding provinces that he had acted at Münster and was to act afterwards. By confirming the princes in their right to make their own foreign alliances, the peace completed the disintegration of the Empire as an effective State. Out of its decay arose, living and self-conscious, Austria, Bavaria, Saxony, and Brandenburg—the Prussia that was to be.

  By weakening Austria, France had opened the way for a new power in Germany. Frederick William of Brandenburg and his descendants saw to it that the new power should not be Bavaria or Saxony or a revived Austria. It is true that Frederick William was not altogether the product of the war: if the background of his youth had toughened certain qualities in him, his abilities were his own. The war gave him his chance: he made his own use of it.

  Yet the war contributed in north Germany to that suspicion of the Hapsburg which crystallized ultimately into hatred and made them the scapegoats for all disaster. They had sacrificed the Empire to Austria, they had bought peace at the expense of the Holy German Land. Their policy, it was averred, gave the Swedes control of the Oder and threw Alsace into the greedy maw of France. It was in vain to argue that they had in fact fought manfully to unite an unwilling Germany, and that the Swedes had taken advantage of the separatism of the princes to set foot on the Baltic coast. In vain to show conclusive proof that Maximilian of Bavaria had forced an unwilling Emperor to sacrifice Alsace. The psychological fact remains that hatred and blame became, after the Thirty Years War, the natural reaction of the north towards the dynasty which ruled in the south. If the war had done nothing else, it had made inevitable the estrangement of Germany and Austria.

  A claim has sometimes been made that but for the war Germany would have become the greatest, or at least one of the greatest, colonial powers in Europe. The assumption rests on an unsteady foundation. The Empire in 1618 showed no signs of developing as a colonial power; she had not in the mildest degree entered into competition with the Dutch, the Spanish, or the English. Commerce, and more particularly marketing and exchange, had been her gifts, gifts not necessarily the same as those needed for pioneer colonization. The decline of urban enterprise was one of the most distressing elements in the Germany of 1618. Only a sudden and improbable revival, together with the emergence of some strong guiding power, could have converted the Empire of 1618 once more into a leading commercial state.

  The undertakings of Spain, Portugal, England, the United Provinces, were based either on the deliberate policy of a State strong enough to subsidize colonial ventures, on private enterprise backed by immense private resources, or on the desperate need to find a land free of religious tyranny. In the Empire there was no central authority, private wealth was declining, and the principle of cujus regio ejus religio meant that a man could have some degree of freedom of conscience without crossing the Atlantic. On the other hand the restricted outlet to the sea which resulted from the peace treaties turned German enterprise and aspirations towards other goals than overseas expansion.

  5.

  Germany’s tragedy was essentially her own. Without extenuating the actions of Richelieu, Olivarez, the two Ferdinands and the King of Sweden, it is yet possible to see that the opportunity was made for and not by them. Always it proved so easy to separate political allies, to exploit the private interests of rulers and set them at loggerheads one with another. Brandenburg and Saxony were separated and singly subdued, when in 1631 the Leipzig manifesto gave some faint hope of a German party between the clash of foreign interests. Saxony and Bavaria were brought separately into the Peace of Prague and tricked into allying themselves with the Emperor, when in 1635 there had seemed to be a united movement towards a settlement. It is not surprising that the clear-headed egoism of a ruler like the Landgravine of Hesse-Cassel, or even of an adventurer like Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, has been acclaimed and twisted into evidence of German patriotism, for it is so great a relief in that limbo of muddled intentions to find any ruler with a clear conception of policy.

  The responsibility for the catastrophe is so diffused as to defy any effort to localize it. In a sense every man and woman of influence in every German state must stand accused of the dreadful lethargy which allowed the war to spread. Yet the greater the power the greater the responsibility, and the accusation must be heaviest against those who could in fact have stopped the war and did not.

  Frederick and Ferdinand, the protagonists of 1618, can at least claim the justification that each thought himself to be fulfilling the mandate of a Higher Power. Their actions must be judged accordingly. It was not so with John George and Maximilian, and it is fair to apply other standards to them. Each of them was sane enough to draw advantage from the conflict. They should have been sane enough to prevent its continuance. They held the balance at the beginning, and might so easily have held it at the end.

  With a certain poetic completeness, they were among the few who saw the beginning and the end, John George dying full of years in his palace at Dresden in 1654, his children and grandchildren about him, and Maximilian, three years earlier, in a bare room at Ingolstadt with the Jesuit fathers at his side.

  These two, had they been able to sink their parochial ambition, could have formed a central party strong enough to curb Ferdinand’s ambition, and to stifle Frederick’s war, without Spanish intervention on one side or French on the other. They had attempted the task in 1620 when they allied themselves with Ferdinand in order to prevent his appeal to Spain. But Maximilian had sacrificed his position to scramble vulgarly for Frederick’s lands and title, and John George was powerless alone. His demand for Lusatia was an error, but at least Lusatia was Ferdinand’s to give. It was not so with the Palatinate, and Maximilian’s claim was a dangerous and criminal blunder. Afterwards he could never redeem his position. The Electorate stood always between him and his duty as a German. He could never trust his fortunes to a centre party, because no centre party could give its full approval to the bare-faced robbery of a fellow prince’s lands that he had committed under the imperial sanction. It drove him into the Spanish camp against his will when the Swedes came in and French protection failed him; it drove him at the end to do yeoman service for France at the Peace of Westphalia, to wrench Alsace from the body of the Empire and give it to Mazarin. The cession of Alsace was the price which Germany paid that Maximilian might keep the Palatinate.

  He had it in him to be a constitutionalist; he was a clever man and he resented the interference of the foreigner in German affairs, but his own misdeed drove him from the German to the Spanish camp, from the Spanish to the French. Had he at the essential moment thought of Germany and not of Bavaria, he could have ended the war; he had all the cards in his hand in 1620 and he threw them all away. Judged by the provincial standard of the single state he ruled, he might pass for a great man; he extended its frontiers and became for a time the leading secular prince of Germany. Judged by the wider standard of the nation to which he belonged and the Empire to which he himself boasted his unfaltering loyalty, he must be either a dupe or a traitor—perhaps a little of both.

  John George of Saxony struggled longer and with less opportunity to prevent the invading forces from closing in across his country. In 1624 and in 1631 he emerged as the potential leader of a central German party, to be swamped first by the obstinate fear of Maximilian and later by the King of Sweden. Yet again in the years between Gustavus’s death and the Peace of Prague he rose to the surface and attempted valiantly to stem the flood, battling with the cross-currents of Swedish, French, and Spanish intervention. Unsupported, he was dragged out of his course by the perversion of the Peace of Prague into an imperial coalition for war. That perversion, the result of French and Swedish conflict as much as of Hapsburg design, forced the patriot Arnim to resign. John George, who could not leave his post, remained to drift miserably with the tide.

  It was not a
brilliant career, but it was at least a career of honest intentions, and posterity, while it may regret that John George was unequal to his trust, cannot accuse him of betraying it.

  6.

  In Germany the war was an unmitigated catastrophe. In Europe it was equally, although in a different way, catastrophic. The peace, which had settled the disputes of Germany with comparative success because passions had cooled, was totally ineffectual in settling the problems of Europe. The inconclusive and highly unpopular cession of Alsace led direct to war; the seizure of half Pomerania by the Swedish Crown was only less disastrous because the Swedish Crown was palpably too weak to hold it. The insidious growth of Bourbon influence on the Rhine, and Mazarin’s deliberate policy of seizing good strategic points on the frontier, vitiated the settlement. The Peace of Westphalia was like most peace treaties, a rearrangement of the European map ready for the next war.

  The Peace has been described as marking an epoch in European history, and it is commonly taken to do so. It is supposed to divide the period of religious wars from that of national wars, the ideological wars from the wars of mere aggression. But the demarcation is as artificial as such arbitrary divisions commonly are. Aggression, dynastic ambition, and fanaticism are all alike present in the hazy background behind the actual reality of the war, and the last of the wars of religion merged insensibly into the pseudo-national wars of the future.

  At Lissa in Poland the Bohemian Protestant exile Comenius wrote: ‘They have sacrificed us at the treaties of Osnabrück . . . I conjure you by the wounds of Christ, that you do not forsake us who are persecuted for the sake of Christ.’ From the Vatican, Innocent X solemnly condemned the peace as ‘null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time’. After thirty years of fighting the extreme Catholics and the extreme Protestants were left still unsatisfied. Both Ferdinand and Christina had to prohibit their clergy from publicly condemning the peace,[53] and the Bull issued with all the prestige of the Vatican was as ineffective in practical politics as the appeal of the exiled Bohemian.

  After the expenditure of so much human life to so little purpose, men might have grasped the essential futility of putting the beliefs of the mind to the judgement of the sword. Instead, they rejected religion as an object to fight for and found others.

  As there was no compulsion towards a conflict which, in despite of the apparent bitterness of parties, took so long to engage and needed so much assiduous blowing to fan the flame, so no right was vindicated by its ragged end. The war solved no problem. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict. The overwhelming majority in Europe, the overwhelming majority in Germany, wanted no war; powerless and voiceless, there was no need even to persuade them that they did. The decision was made without thought of them. Yet of those who, one by one, let themselves be drawn into the conflict, few were irresponsible and nearly all were genuinely anxious for an ultimate and better peace. Almost all—one excepts the King of Sweden—were actuated rather by fear than by lust of conquest or passion of faith. They wanted peace and they fought for thirty years to be sure of it. They did not learn then, and have not since, that war breeds only war.

  1. Bothe, Geschichte Frankfurts, p. 451.

  2. Chronik des Minoriten Guardians, p. 600.

  3. Ibid., p. 610.

  4. Chéruel, III, p. 227.

  5. Koch, II, pp. 520.

  6. B. Erdmannsdörffer, Deutsche Geschichte. Berlin, 1892, pp. 5–6; Lorentzen, pp. 179–81, 189.

  7. Ibid., p. 155.

  8. Walther, p. 41.

  9. Meiern, Acta Executionis, II, p. 686 f.

  10. Lorentzen, pp. 179–81, 189.

  11. Meiern, Acta Executionis, II.

  12. Riezler, Geschichte, V, p. 660; Lorentzen, p. 207.

  13. Lorentzen, p. 204.

  14. Ibid., pp. 188–9.

  15. Riezler, Geschichte, V, p. 658.

  16. Meiern, Acta Executionis, II, pp. 444–6.

  17. Freytag, Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit. Leipzig, 1859, II, p. 202.

  18. L. Häusser, Geschichte der rheinischen Pfalz. Heidelberg, 1856, II, p. 583.

  19. Dudik, Die Schweden in Böhmen, p. 377.

  20. Wuttke, Gesindeordnung und Gesindezwangsdienst. Leipzig, 1893, pp. 62, 69–70.

  21. Elsas, pp. 22–5.

  22. Ibid., pp. 34–5, 41–2, 48–9, 54.

  23. Dudik, Die Schweden in Böhmen, p. 37.

  24. Meiern, Acta Pacis, V, p. 774; Inama-Stemegg, Die volkswirtschaftlichen Folgen des dreissigjährigen Krieges. Historisches Taschenbuch. Vierte Folge, V, p. 16; Spielmann, Geschichte von Nassau. Wiesbaden, 1910, I, p. 86; Brückner, Beitrag zur Statistik und Geschichte des dreissigjährigen Krieges. Zeitschrift für Deutsche Kulturgeschichte, 1857, pp. 212–13; Häusser, Geschichte der Rheinischen Pfalz, II, p. 583.

  25. Reuss, Alsace au XVIIe. siècle, pp. 110–12; Heinemann, Geschichte von Braunschweig. Gotha, 1892, III, p. 100 f.; Haendke, Deutsche Kulturgeschichte im Zeitalter des dreissigjährigen Krieges. Leipzig, 1906, p. 186; Hanauer, p. 397; d’Elvert, IV, pp. XXIX, cclxxvi.

  26. Heinemann, p. 100 f.

  27. Elsas, p. 79.

  28. Wuttke, Gesindeordnung, p. 65.

  29. Kuerschner, Geschichte Marburgs, pp. 135–6, 149, 150, 151, 166.

  30. Kaphahn, Die wirtschaftlichen Folgen des dreissigjährigen Krieges. Gotha, 1911, pp. 37, 45.

  31. Hagedorn, Ostfrieslands Handel und Schiffahrt. Berlin, 1912, p. 504.

  32. Inama-Sternegg, p. 11.

  33. Kroker, Handelsgeschichte der Stadt Leipzig. Leipzig, 1925.

  34. Kroker, p. 128.

  35. Elsas, p. 79.

  36. B. Hagedorn, Ostfrieslands Handel und Schiffahrt, p. 510.

  37. Aubéry du Maurier, Mémoires de Hambourg, p. 28 f.

  38. Müller, Dresden im dreissigjährigen Kriege. Neues Archiv für Sächsische Geschichte, XXXVI, p. 248.

  39. Kaphahn, pp. 56–7.

  40. Wuttke, Gesindeordnung, p. 66.

  41. Ibid., pp. 63, 64; Kroker, pp. 129, 130.

  42. Einert, p. 52.

  43. Ehrenberg, Aus dem dreissigjährigen Kriege. (Altona unter Schauenburgischer Herrschaft, v. Altona, 1892), p. 33.

  44. Kaphahn, p. 98.

  45. Elsas, p. 78; see also E. Keyser, Bevölkerungsgeschichte Deutschlands. Leipzig, 1938.

  46. Hoeniger, Der dreissigjährige Krieg und die deutsche Kultur. Preussische Jahrbücher, CXXXVIII, pp. 421, 425–6. The best corrective to the old exaggerated views of the effect of the Thirty Years War is Dr Robert Ergang’s The Myth of the All Destructive Fury of the Thirty Years War, Pocono Pines, Pennsylvania, 1956. This concise analysis, very fully referenced, shows clearly that the economic decline of Germany had begun—as I have tried to show in my opening chapter—long before the outbreak of the war. The causes of the decline were to a great extent also the causes of the war; they were also the reasons for Germany’s delayed start in the commerce and industry of Western European nations—namely, in Dr Ergang’s words, the lack of ‘a strong central government to establish a broad national economy.’

  47. Wuttke, pp. 68, 72, 77.

  48. Delbrück, p. 20.

  49. Hebbe, Svenskarna i Böhmen. Stockholm, 1932, pp. 135–50.

  50. Gebauer, Deutsche Kulturgeschichte, p. 111.

  51. See Sittewald, Visiones de Don Quevedo, Part II, passim; K. Bidermann. Der dreissigjährige Krieg und seine Wirkungen auf die gesellschaftlichen und die sittlichen Zustände Deutschlands. Zeitschrift für Deutsche Kulturgeschichte. 1856, p. 165.

  52. It will be remembered that by the Peace of Münster the Scheldt had been closed to traffic, so that all Rhine commerce now had to pass through the Dutch ports.

  53. Chanut, p. 367.

  BIBLIOGRAPHIC
AL NOTE

  The sources from which this book is taken are given at the foot of each page. I have followed an accepted usage in giving the author, title, and place of publication of each authority in full the first time it is cited; thereafter it is given in an abbreviated form.

  The fullest bibliography of the Thirty Years War is to be found in the latest edition of Dahlmann-Waitz, Quellenkunde der Deutschen Geschichte. There is very little on the Thirty Years War in English and almost nothing recent. The account in the Cambridge Modern History, volume iv (Cambridge, 1906), is supported by a full bibliography of the sources and commentaries available at the time. The volume of the new Cambridge Modern History dealing with this epoch is at the time of writing (1960) in preparation.

  Since the publication of my book in 1938, comparatively little has appeared on the subject in English. There have been one or two interesting biographies. Francis Watson, Wallenstein, Soldier under Saturn (1938) is a vigorous straightforward work; Aldous Huxley’s Grey Eminence subtly illuminates some of the spiritual problems behind the policy of Richelieu and Father Joseph. By far the most important recent work is Michael Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus: A History of Sweden, 1611–1632. The second volume (1958) covers the King’s part in the Thirty Years War.

  Carl Burckhardt’s Richelieu: Der Aufstieg zur Macht (Munich, 1935) has been available in an excellent English translation since 1940. There is also my own short life of Richelieu in the Teach Yourself History Series (London, 1949).

  Past and Present for November 1954 published an article on the Thirty Years War by Dr J. V. Polišensky which was enlightening on the Czech elements in the war and the economic background.

  Dr N. G. Ahnlund, whose Gustav Adolf den Store (Stockholm, 1932) can also be had in a German translation, published in 1940 a further valuable study Axel Oxenstierna intill Gustav Adolfs Död.

  In France La Guerre de Trente Ans by G. Pagès (Paris, 1939) appeared a few months after the publication of my book. Henri Hauser has followed his Prépondérance Espagnole, 1559–1660 (Paris, 1933) by studies in the economic background of considerable importance. The majestic and authoritative life of Richelieu begun by Gabriel Hanotaux in 1893 reached completion, with the assistance of the Duc de la Force, in 1947. Its six volumes (Paris, 1893–1947) are a monument of long term scholarship.