Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  The discussions of 1607–9 over whether or not to make peace with Spain polarized these diverse groups. On one side stood the regents of Holland and Utrecht, led by Oldenbarnevelt, who wanted peace abroad and a measure of religious toleration at home. They faced a coalition that comprised Zealand and other areas that profited from the war; most Calvinist ministers; and most southern immigrants, supported by Maurice of Nassau (who stood to lose much of his influence and patronage once the Republic demobilized its armed forces). These divisions deepened once the Truce began because of a controversy between two Calvinist theologians at Leiden University. Francis Gomarus, a refugee from Flanders, preached that everybody's spiritual destiny had been determined from the beginning of time; while Jacob Arminius, a Hollander, argued that an individual's life choices affected their chance of salvation. A vicious pamphlet war on these issues of salvation gathered momentum, with almost 200 published in 1617 and over 300 in 1618. Alarmed by attacks on Arminians, the States of Holland passed a resolution authorizing each town to raise special militia units (known as waardgelders) to preserve law and order whenever necessary, and ordered them to obey the orders issued by the town that raised them. Maurice, who sided openly with the Gomarists, declared these measures an ‘affront to the true Reformed religion and to our person’ (since as captain-general all troops in the Republic owed obedience to him) and he toured the inland provinces to remove Arminians from office.

  Oldenbarnevelt and his supporters retaliated by raising more militia units, whereupon Maurice used regular troops to disarm and disband them, and to arrest Oldenbarnevelt. He also purged the town councils, replacing experienced magistrates with novices who lacked the ability to monitor the Stadholder's policies effectively. Maurice also removed all Arminians from schools and universities, while a National Synod of the Calvinist Church convened at Dordrecht (Dort) condemned the Arminians as heretics and ‘perturbers of the peace’ in both Church and State, and deprived some 200 of their ministers of their livings. In 1619 Maurice persuaded the States-General to sentence Oldenbarnevelt to death, and he used his unchecked authority to welcome his nephew Frederick of the Palatinate and to encourage and fund the latter's efforts to recover his lands. Maurice also welcomed the renewal of war with Spain in 1621, when the Twelve Years, Truce expired.

  Frederick's renewed defiance prompted Emperor Ferdinand II to honour his promise (page 215 above) to transfer the Electoral title to Maximilian. This provoked a spate of hostile pamphlets within Germany, because it was unconstitutional: the Golden Bull of 1356, universally regarded as the fundamental and immutable law of the Holy Roman Empire, ordained that the Electorate should remain in the Palatine house in perpetuity. Even the Spanish Council of State, which normally supported Ferdinand to the hilt, disapproved, realizing that it would ‘mean the renewal of war permanently in Germany’.17 The Spanish ministers were right: now, at last, Frederick found the international support that his cause had previously lacked, and he forged alliances with France, England, Savoy, Sweden and Denmark, as well as the Dutch Republic. All promised to fight until Frederick had recovered his forfeited lands and titles, and Christian IV of Denmark prepared to lead 20,000 soldiers into the empire to achieve this goal.

  Enter Denmark

  King Christian commanded prodigious resources. His dominions stretched from the North Cape to Holstein in Germany and from Greenland to Oland in the Baltic, and included both sides of the Danish Sound. Since every ship entering or leaving the Baltic needed to pass beneath the guns of his castle at Elsinore, the Danish king derived a huge income from the Sound Tolls; and by 1625 his total assets amounted to almost 1.5 million thalers. Despite a propensity for binge drinking, Christian was a devout Lutheran who firmly believed in the existence of a Catholic conspiracy that aimed to extirpate Protestantism throughout the empire; and events after White Mountain confirmed his fears. The victorious Catholic forces began a relentless campaign of ‘Catholicization’, expelling Protestant ministers, prohibiting public Protestant worship, and reclaiming secularized church lands. Thoroughly alarmed, Christian proclaimed himself ‘Defender of German Liberties’ and, despite the objections of his councillors and his lack of military experience, in spring 1626 he led his army across the Weser towards the Palatinate.18

  This development in turn alarmed Count Tilly, commander of the army of the Catholic League, who realized that he could ‘not gain superiority alone’. He warned his master, Maximilian of Bavaria, that ‘The Danes hold great advantages: they will act first and overwhelm us’.19 Maximilian therefore asked Ferdinand for reinforcements and the emperor obliged by ordering Albrecht von Wallenstein, a military entrepreneur who had grown rich from buying up confiscated lands acquired in his native Bohemia, to raise and maintain an army of 24,000 men. With considerable skill, Wallenstein halted the advance towards Bohemia of a Protestant army financed by Christian's allies, and sent reinforcements to Tilly just before he confronted the Danish army at the battle of Lutter-am-Barenberg. Although Christian wrote in his diary only that he ‘Fought with the enemy and lost the battle’, he had in fact sacrificed half his army and all his field artillery.20

  Christian and most of his nobles managed to escape to the Baltic islands, but for the next two years Catholic troops occupied Jutland as well as northern Germany and forced the inhabitants to finance them through ‘contributions’: payments in cash and commodities made directly to local troops. The effectiveness of this system is reflected in a letter written by Wallenstein to the imperial treasurer, boasting that although his army cost at least 12 million thalers annually to maintain, he would only need from Vienna ‘a couple of million thalers every year to keep this long war going’.21 Paradoxically, despite the apparent savings, Wallenstein's system required a steady increase in the size of his army to collect the ‘contributions’. He therefore raised more troops, which in turn necessitated more contributions, until by 1628 he commanded (and had to support) no fewer than 130,000 men.

  Meanwhile, cold winters, late springs and wet summers reduced the supplies available to support civilians and soldiers alike. In south Germany, in May 1626, hailstones the size of walnuts combined with a heavy frost killed many crops; while the following year, according to the diary kept by Hans Heberle, ‘a great snow fell’ just after New Year and covered the ground until Easter Day. ‘It was so harsh a winter that no-one could remember another like it’, and ‘only after Easter could the peasants go to their fields and begin to farm’. The autumn also saw heavy precipitation, and in 1628 some Alpine villages experienced snowfalls, sometimes heavy, every month: it proved to be the first ‘year without a summer’ to afflict Europe during the seventeenth century. In many areas, neither grain nor grapes ever ripened.22 Many sought scapegoats for this extreme weather: an unparalleled spate of witchcraft trials occurred, some involving the execution of hundreds of suspects at a time, while others blamed the Jews. A popular print from 1629 (Plate 9) showed a Jew who has secured a monopoly of the wine harvest, with a series of political and extreme weather events in the background (one of the few contemporary images that explicitly linked climate and catastrophe), and noted the general ‘unrest’ of the time.23

  The most serious case of this ‘unrest’ occurred in Upper Austria, which had rashly joined the Bohemians in revolt but rapidly fell to the army of the Catholic League. After White Mountain, the emperor granted Upper Austria to his ally Maximilian as a pledge against the repayment of his war expenses, and allowed him to use the duchy's taxes both to pay interest on this debt and to sustain the army of occupation. Taxes in the region rose fourteen-fold, all payable in silver at a time when the Kipper- und Wipperzeit had destroyed the savings of most taxpayers. The cowed population might have tolerated these burdens had the government not also ordered the expulsion of all Protestant pastors and schoolteachers, and allowed Catholic creditors to foreclose on Protestants in order to force the sale of their property. When it decreed that by Easter 1626 all residents of the duchy must attend Catholic worship or
leave, open opposition broke out, led by a prosperous Protestant farmer, Stephen Fadinger. The rebels routed the governor and his troops and chased them back to Linz (the duchy's capital), which they besieged. They also sent an envoy to beg for Danish aid, but the defeat at Lutter prevented this; then a bullet killed Fadinger in the trenches around Linz, and a general assault on its defences failed. Eventually 12,000 imperial troops restored order and executed scores of rebels (the nobles by decapitation, the commoners losing their right hands before being disembowelled). The government again ordered Protestants either to convert or leave, but the Little Ice Age delayed the process: the appalling weather made it virtually impossible for anyone to liquidate their assets before they left, and so the deadline for departure was reluctantly extended.24

  Meanwhile, all over Germany, resentment of Wallenstein and his army continued to grow. Thomas Robisheaux's exhaustive study of the Lutheran county of Hohenlohe in southwest Germany shows how the demands of the imperial troops not only quadrupled taxes but also forced the civilian authorities to become far more aggressive in collecting them. By 1628 the county had, ‘for all practical purposes, lost its autonomy and become an extension of Wallenstein's tax state’.25 Catholic rulers suffered almost as much, and a group of them protested directly to Ferdinand that Wallenstein had authorized ‘exorbitant rates of pay to regimental and company staff officers’ and created a contributions system that ruined ‘poor widows and orphans’. All ‘territorial rulers,’ they concluded bitterly, ‘are at the mercy of colonels and captains who are war profiteers and criminals, breaking the laws of the Empire’. They called on the emperor to reduce the size of Wallenstein's army, to end all recruiting, to replace the army's ‘contributions’ with taxes raised and administered by civilians, and to appoint a special commissioner to audit the general's accounts.

  Although Ferdinand rejected these demands, he attempted to placate his Catholic allies with religious promises. He informed them that, after nine years of war, he wished to reconfigure the religious state of the empire, and in particular to repossess church lands secularized by Protestant rulers. These steps, he claimed, would be 'the great gain and fruit of the war’, and he promised his fellow Catholics that ‘just as up to now we have never thought to let pass any chance to secure the restitution of church lands, neither do we intend, now or in the future, to have to bear the responsibility before posterity of having neglected or failed to exploit even the least opportunity’.26

  ‘The root of all evils’

  As long as Christian of Denmark remained in arms, the emperor deemed the ‘opportunity’ too risky; but in 1628, with peace negotiations underway, he prepared a document known as the Edict of Restitution that required Protestant rulers to return to the Church all lands secularized since the peace of Augsburg of 1555, which had brought Germany's religious wars to an end. He had 500 copies of the Edict secretly printed and distributed, with instructions for simultaneous publication on 28 March 1629. Two months later, Christian made peace and Tilly and Wallenstein immediately deployed their troops to enforce the Edict, making no distinction between previously loyal and rebellious Protestant states. Within 18 months, the secularized lands of 6 bishoprics and 100 convents were back in clerical hands, with 400 more convents scheduled for restitution. Naturally such a drastic measure caused uproar throughout the empire. On the title page of one copy of the Edict – one printed in a Catholic stronghold – a contemporary hand added the words Radix omnium malorum: ‘The root of all evils’.27

  International affairs now distracted the emperor from further enforcement of the Edict. First, the Dutch captured a treasure fleet sailing to Spain from America, compromising the Spanish Habsburgs’ ability to fund their troops in both northern Italy, where they sought to crush the defiant duke of Mantua, and in the Netherlands, where they faced the largest Dutch army ever assembled. Ferdinand therefore instructed Wallenstein to send one expeditionary force to the Netherlands and another to Mantua, plus a third to help the king of Poland withstand an invasion by King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. Then a French army crossed the Alps into northern Italy, compelling Ferdinand to divert Wallenstein's expeditionary force from the Netherlands to Italy; and although Wallenstein's reinforcements helped the Poles to inflict a stinging defeat on Gustavus, French diplomats brokered a truce in the Baltic that freed the battle-hardened Swedish army to invade Germany.

  These developments compelled Wallenstein to recruit yet more troops, until by spring 1630 he commanded 151,000 men, spread out over all Germany and northern Italy. The increased demands of his army's commissioners for contributions further outraged his Catholic allies, who now insisted that Ferdinand dismiss his expensive general. The emperor reluctantly agreed to meet the other Electors at Regensburg to resolve this and other contentious issues.

  Since his election as emperor in 1619, Ferdinand had deposed rulers and transferred their lands, created the huge imperial army under Wallenstein and issued the Edict of Restitution – all without convening an imperial Diet. Representatives of German rulers and foreign powers alike therefore converged on Regensburg in the summer of 1630, anxious to make their views known to the Electors; to restore the status quo ante; and, especially, to get rid of Wallenstein. Since the cost of his army far exceeded the available resources, the imperial commander himself made no effort to stay on. ‘There is no other way,’ he thundered to one of his lieutenants. ‘If they want to wage a war in which affairs are arranged and managed in such a way that quartering gives the Empire pleasure and not displeasure, let them appoint Our Lord God himself to be their general – not me!‘28 In August 1630 Ferdinand duly replaced his general – not with God, but with Count Tilly, commander of the army of the Catholic League, who reduced the imperial forces by two-thirds. Wallenstein retired stoically to his estates in Bohemia; his banker committed suicide.

  The Electors capitalized on their success in eliminating Wallenstein by extracting a promise from the emperor that, in future, ‘no new war will be declared other than by the advice of the Electors’, but they failed to persuade him to modify the Edict of Restitution. Many German Catholics, even Maximilian of Bavaria, considered some relaxation advisable in view of increasing foreign support for the Protestant cause; but Ferdinand's confessor, William Lamormaini S. J., answered that the emperor did not care whether he lost ‘not only Austria but all his kingdoms and provinces and whatever he has in this world, provided he save his soul, which he cannot do without the implementation of his Edict’.29 Ferdinand thus made two fatal errors. By sacrificing Wallenstein, he lost the one man who might have defeated all his enemies; and by retaining the Edict intact he convinced the north German Lutherans that they would soon experience its terms themselves.

  Enter Sweden

  Gustavus Adolphus arrived on German soil at the head of a powerful army just as the Electoral meeting commenced. He immediately issued a manifesto in five languages that rehearsed his personal grievances (particularly Ferdinand's dispatch of ‘armies into Poland against His Majesty and the kingdom of Sweden’) and his fear that the Habsburgs aimed to dominate the Baltic. Only at the end did the manifesto mention, briefly, the maintenance of German liberties as a motive for invasion. It said nothing about saving ‘the Protestant cause’.30 At first, Gustavus attracted little support: his sole German ally when he landed was the small port-city of Stralsund, and only the dispossessed and those under direct threat of imperial occupation (such as the city of Magdeburg) declared for him. In addition, just before Gustavus landed, Habsburg troops captured and sacked the city of Mantua. The outlook for the Swedish expeditionary force looked bleak.

  Under intense pressure from the Catholics at his court, Louis XIII of France had sent negotiators to Regensburg with orders to resolve all outstanding disputes with the emperor (albeit without detailed instructions on how to do so). News of the fall of Mantua unnerved his negotiators, who signed a treaty with Ferdinand that not only stipulated the joint evacuation of French and imperial forces from northern Ital
y, but also committed Louis to refrain in future from offering support to anyone who opposed the emperor. In a remarkable volte-face, in October 1630 Louis repudiated the treaty signed in his name. It was, he raged at his envoys, ‘Not only contrary to your powers, to the orders in the Instructions you took with you, and to those I have sent you at various times since, but it even contains several items that I never even thought about, and that are so prejudicial that I could not hear them read out to me except with extreme displeasure.‘31 In addition to repudiating the treaty of Regensburg, Louis concluded an alliance with Sweden that promised Gustavus one million livres annually for five years to finance a war for ‘the safeguarding of the Baltic and Oceanic Seas, the liberty of commerce, and the restoration of the suppressed states of the Holy Roman Empire’. The French subsidy enabled Gustavus to raise more troops and occupy the duchies of Mecklenburg and Pomerania, turning the eastern Baltic into a Swedish lake.

  Meanwhile, Count Tilly and his troops were tied down in blockading the Protestant city of Magdeburg, Sweden's only ally in central Germany, until in May 1631 they stormed and brutally sacked it (see chapter 4 above). The following month Habsburg and French negotiators, assisted by a young diplomat in papal service named Giulio Mazzarini, signed a treaty that brought peace to northern Italy, freeing all imperial troops there to fight in Germany. Once again it seemed as if Ferdinand would be able to expel the Swedes single-handed, but Tilly rashly decided to confront Gustavus before the reinforcements arrived from Italy. To this end, he invaded Lutheran Saxony, which had previously remained loyal to Ferdinand, causing its outraged ruler to join forces with the Swedes. Tilly caught up with them at Breitenfeld, near Leipzig, where on 17 September 1631 the superior discipline and firepower of Gustavus's troops put an end to the Catholic tide of victory: having lost 20,000 men, his field artillery and his treasury, Tilly rapidly retreated.