‘The all-destructive fury of the Thirty Years War’: A Myth?91
The survivors of the Thirty Years War who recorded their experience had no intention of surrounding themselves with ‘the silence of the grave’. On the contrary, Maria Anna Junius, a nun in Bamberg, kept a chronicle specifically ‘so that when pious sisters come after us who know nothing of these distressed and difficult times, they can see what we poor sisters suffered and endured, with the grace and help of God, during these long years of war’. Near Berlin, the tax official Peter Thiele concluded his account: ‘Our descendants can discover from this how we were harassed, and see what a terribly distressed time it was. May they take this to heart and guard themselves against sin, begging God for mercy so that they may be spared such dread.’ In Hessen, farmer Casper Preis lamented that ‘to tell of all the misery and misfortune [of the war years] is not within my power, not even what I know and have seen myself'; and in any case, he added, even ‘if I did report everything which I have seen and so painfully experienced, no-one living in a better age would believe it’ because ‘the times were awful beyond measure’. Pastor Johann Daniel Minck, also living in Hessen, wrote in his journal that ‘without such records … those who come after us will never believe what miseries we have suffered'; while his neighbour Pastor Lorenz Ludolf predicted that ‘Whoever has not himself seen and lived through such circumstances cannot believe what I note here.‘92
Such eyewitness accounts are extremely vivid – but how typical were they? To begin with, of the tens of millions of Germans who lived through the war, the accounts of fewer than 250 eyewitnesses have survived; moreover, of these we know that 226 authors were male and only 9 female. Protestant pastors made up the largest single category with 58 accounts, but only 11 of the accounts come from farmers – a gross distortion, since at least three-quarters of the German population worked on the land whereas pastors constituted less than 1 per cent. Even the geographical distribution was atypical, because the authors of two-thirds of the surviving accounts (including all the women) lived within a quadrilateral bounded by Münster, Magdeburg, Basel and Munich.93 Other discrepancies arose because most eyewitnesses covered only part of the period: many began to record events only after the war affected them; others stopped before the war ended; and several left gaps in their narratives – usually because it became too dangerous to write. Finally, the motive for keeping a journal varied. None of the authors seems to have envisaged publication: the majority wrote a private record to remind families or their descendants of the horrors that they had experienced, and a few wrote just ‘for myself’.94
Despite these disparities, and although none of these authors knew what the others had written, they described many of the same experiences. Thus three-quarters of the civilians stated that they had been plundered by troops – some of them repeatedly. Johann Georg Renner, a rural pastor near Nuremberg, noted that soldiers passed through his village 61 times in 1634 alone, causing serious damage. On one occasion, a spiteful parishioner told passing troops that their pastor was a wealthy man who ‘ate off silver dishes’ and had a large balance on deposit in the city. The soldiers kept him and his son confined until he paid a handsome ransom.95 Over half of the writers reported having to flee their homes at least once; almost half reported the murder by soldiers of individuals whom they had known personally; and about one-fifth described being assaulted themselves. The most striking omission is rape: only three of the printed accounts written by civilians mentioned violence committed against women they knew (such as ‘Hannes Trosten's wife was raped by two cavalrymen near the castle wood on her way back from holy almsgiving’). No doubt, authors who wrote to inform their descendants of what they had seen and endured felt either too traumatized or too ashamed to include the personal tragedies and humiliations that had befallen them and their loved ones.96
Human history is, of course, full of people who claimed that they had experienced misfortunes unparalleled in other ages; yet subsequent research has corroborated the extreme claims of those who lived through the Thirty Years War. Careful analysis of all the 800 or so German parish registers that survive for the period 1632–7 found that only five did not record a significant mortality crisis. The Swedish demographic historian Jan Lindegren has used the records of the Swedish army to calculate that two million soldiers, most of them Germans, perished as a direct result of the war, as did two million German civilians.97 Moreover deaths, whether through violence, starvation or disease, formed only one of three variables that affected all early modern populations. In addition, during the Thirty Years War:
• Births fell because brides postponed their marriage and conceived fewer children, either through abstinence or infertility.
• Migration soared as civilians left their homes either to find security or sustenance elsewhere, or to join an army.
The exact combination of these variables affected not only the magnitude of the demographic decline in each community but also the rate of its recovery. Losses through adult mortality were, paradoxically, the easiest to replace because death might leave a vacant farm or firm that would provide economic opportunities that allowed the next generation to multiply. Migrants were more difficult to replace, because either they took their fortune with them or else they had none to take: only a community with assets would attract migrants from elsewhere to replace those who had left. A shortfall in births – especially female births – proved the hardest to replace in demographic terms because, apart from creating a ‘missing generation’ (children who would have been born but for the trauma of war), a generation that numbered fewer mothers would itself produce fewer children, so that the ‘deficit’ perpetuated itself.98
All this explains why most areas did not recover their pre-war populations until the eighteenth century. Some historians have suggested that Germany's population fell by between six and eight million, or between 20 to 45 per cent, during the Thirty Years War – far more, in relative terms, than the population loss during either of the world wars of the twentieth century – and did not recover its pre-war level for 50 years or even more.
German demographic evolution, 1600–1750 (in millions)100
* * *
Germany (1871 frontiers) Holy Roman Empire
* * *
Year Abel Bosl/Weis Sagarra Kellenbenz Dipper Mitterauer
* * *
1600 16 16 18 18–20 18–20 21
1650 10 10 10–11 11–13 11–13 16
1700 – – – – 15–17 21
1750 18 18 18 18–20 18–20 23
* * *
Given the political fragmentation of early modern Germany, all these ‘national’ aggregations are tentative, and trying to identify regional demographic variations is even more hazardous. Nevertheless, a careful study of local records led John Theibault to suggest that most of the losses occurred in a relatively small area: ‘More than a quarter of the population of the empire may have lived in areas that had no losses or lost less than 10 per cent of their population, while only about a tenth lived in areas that lost more than half their population.‘99 Figure 24 shows the location of the principal states in these two categories. It appears that, in the southern half of Germany, only the Rhine Palatinate (a battleground almost from the moment when Frederick accepted the Bohemian crown) and Württemberg (savagely contested between Catholics and Protestants from 1631 until the war's end) lost one-half – and perhaps more than one half – of their pre-war population. Of those alive in 1655, nearly half were under the age of 15. The number of communicants in the lands of the monastery of Ottobeuren, for example, fell from almost 6,000 in 1626, the last year of peace in the region, to scarcely 1,000 around 1640; even in 1659 it stood at 2,566, still under half of the pre-war total.101 By contrast, Bavaria, Franconia and Hessen seem to have lost between one-third and one-half; while some other areas lost less. In the northern half of Germany, only Mecklenburg and Pomerania (both of them fought over and then occupied by Sweden) lost one-half or more than one-hal
f of their population; while Saxony and Brandenburg (also a battle ground almost continuously between 1631 and 1648) lost between one-third and one-half. Many strategically important regions suffered staggering material as well as demographic losses: two-thirds of the buildings in the once prosperous and densely populated countryside around Magdeburg and Halberstadt were destroyed between 1625 and 1647; the debts of the city of Nuremberg rose from under 2 million gulden in 1618 to over 7 million by 1648; and so on. For all these communities, the Thirty Years War might indeed be described as a ‘catastrophe’ – a phrase used by German writers of the day in its original Greek sense of ‘terminal’.102
24. The depopulation of Germany during the Thirty Years War, 1618–48.
The political fragmentation of Germany means that the demographic impact of the Thirty Years War can only be reconstructed from regional data. These reveal a few areas, notably in the north-west (and in Austria and Switzerland in the south), that lost one-tenth or less of their pre-war population; while the Bohemian lands, where the war began, lost up to one-third. By contrast, some Protestant areas in the north-east and south-west lost over half of their people, while parts of the Catholic South lost between one-third and one-half.
The war destroyed culture as well as people. The booksellers of Germany, the birthplace of the printing industry, brought out 1,780 titles in 1613 but only 350 in 1635; and the international book fair at Frankfurt collapsed. Many of the thriving urban music societies of Germany closed their doors – the Musikkranzlein at Worms and Nuremberg, the Convivia Musica at Görlitz, the musical ‘colleges’ at Frankfurt and Mühlhausen – and princes, too, reduced their musical patronage. Even popular music declined: of over 600 songs from the period 1618–49 that make some reference, direct or indirect, to the Thirty Years War, scarcely 100 appeared after 1634. As early as 1623, one composer recalled how the Devil had given Saul a spear to kill the harpist David and asserted that ‘Saul's spear is … in the hands of court finance ministers who lock their doors when they hear musicians approach.’ Heinrich Schütz, court musician of Electoral Saxony and the finest composer of his day, began to produce short choral pieces of religious music for only ‘one, two, three or four voices with two violins, ‘cello and organ’ because ‘the times neither demand nor allow music on a big scale’.103 Soon afterwards, Schütz left Germany.
Many other intellectuals fled to avoid the war. The largest single group came from the lands ruled by Ferdinand II. The polymath Jan Amos Comenius, who supported the Bohemian revolt, left his native Moravia after White Mountain and sought refuge in Poland where he started work on an ‘encyclopaedia of universal knowledge’, which he believed could solve the world's problems. Later he moved to Holland, to England, and finally to Sweden, with the intention of founding a special college where colleagues could work on his project. The poet Martin Opitz, from Silesia, also fled to Poland after White Mountain and ended his days there as a refugee. The astronomer and mathematician Johan Kepler had to flee twice: first from Graz in 1600, when Archduke Ferdinand expelled all Protestants in Styria, and then from Linz in 1626 when the brutal suppression of the Upper Austrian peasants’ revolt (page 221 above) made him fear for his life. In 1675 the artist and art historian Joachim von Sandrart filled his German Academy of Architecture, Sculpture and Painting, with bitter laments about the cultural consequences of the war:
Time and again, Queen Germania saw her palaces and churches, decorated with splendid paintings, go up in flames, and her eyes were so darkened with smoke and weeping that she no longer had the desire or the strength to pay heed to art … Those that made art their profession fell into poverty and contempt: and so they put away their pallets and took up the spear or the beggar's staff instead of the paint-brush, while the gentle born were ashamed to apprentice their children to such despicable people.
He provided numerous biographies of artists whom ‘bloodthirsty Mars’ had forced to flee, or else (like Sandrart himself) compelled to ‘give up laborious copperplate engraving and take up painting in its stead’ (because it was portable in an emergency). Others lost ‘all their work’ through some act of theft or spite. Thomas Robisheaux has argued that the enormous impact of the war came not just ‘from the harsh and inhuman conduct of the soldiery, but from the way all social, political, and religious order vanished and so contributed to the wild disorder and confusion at every level of society’.104
‘The outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict'?
In the conclusion to her classic study of the Thirty Years War, first published in 1938, Dame Veronica Wedgwood stated sadly: ‘The war solved no problem. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. It is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.‘105 The evidence presented in this chapter lends some support to her verdict: not only Germany but also northern Italy, the Dutch Republic, Sweden, Switzerland and Denmark all suffered effects that were ‘either negative or disastrous’. Nevertheless, the Peace of Westphalia brought eventual benefits not only to Germany but also to at least some of its neighbours. First, pressure from France and Sweden eventually created a political ‘balance’ within the Holy Roman Empire by enhancing the power of the Diet (which after 1648 alone possessed the power to declare war) and of territorial rulers (who could now both take up arms and make alliances), while reducing the powers of the Habsburgs. Second, the new principle of ‘Amicable Composition’ reduced the risk of another religious war: for almost a century, no German state declared war on another – and none would ever wage war again for religion. Moreover, once the states of central Europe ceased to be ravaged by religious and civil wars, foreign powers lacked a plausible excuse to intervene in their disputes – a development that promoted international stability. Finally, the Congress also provided a new model of conflict resolution. In future, international conferences modelled on Westphalia terminated the major wars between European states – the Pyrenees (1659), Breda (1667), Nijmegen (1678), Rijswijk (1697) and Utrecht (1713) – paving the way for the Concert of Europe that would successfully maintain peace among the Great Powers after 1815.
Germany was therefore fully justified in organizing joyous ceremonies to commemorate the Peace of Westphalia. The city of Augsburg organized two celebrations: a general day of rejoicing followed by a peace festival for children, at which the Lutheran clergy distributed copperplate ‘peace etchings’ to remind young people of the horrors they had escaped. After 1748, the first centenary of Westphalia, schoolchildren received a booklet, to be recited rather like a catechism, with 91 questions and answers about the war; and almost 200 textbooks used in German schools depicted the war as a national disaster.106 Small wonder, then, that in 1962 the people of Hessen still regarded a conflict fought more than three centuries before as the greatest catastrophe ever suffered by Germany; or that, even today, Augsburg gratefully commemorates the peace that brought that conflict to an end.
9
The Agony of the Iberian Peninsula, 1618–891
‘The target at which the whole world wants to shoot its arrows’
AT HIS ACCESSION IN 1621, AGED 16, PHILIP IV GOVERNED AN EMPIRE ON which (as his spin doctors put it) ‘the sun never set’, comprising the Iberian Peninsula; Lombardy, Naples and Sicily; the southern Netherlands; and the colonies of Spain and Portugal in the Americas, the Philippines, Asia and Africa. Nevertheless, this global extent brought weakness as well as strength. A letter written in 1600 to Don Balthasar de Zúñiga, a senior diplomat, underlined the strategic dilemma:
We are gradually becoming the target at which the whole world wants to shoot its arrows; and we know that no empire, however great, has been able to sustain many wars in different areas for long. [We] think only of defending ourselves, and never manage to contrive a great offensive blow against one of our enemies, so that when that is over we can turn to the others …
This assessment proved prophetic. Over the next two decades, the Dutch Republic forced Spain to rec
ognize its de facto independence and seized some Iberian outposts in Asia and Africa, while several states in Italy successfully broke free of Spanish influence. In 1619 Zúñiga, now Spain's chief minister, lamented that ‘when matters reach a certain stage, every decision taken will be for the worst, not through lack of good advice, but because the situation is so desperate that it is not capable of remedy’.2
Zúñiga died in 1622, and his position as chief minister fell to his nephew, already the king's Privado or Favourite: Don Gaspar de Guzmán, count of Olivares and later duke of San Lúcar (hence his clumsy title ‘the count-duke’) – a man who, at least initially, rejected such pessimism. ‘I do not consider it useful to indulge in a constant, despairing recital of the state of affairs,’ he chided a critic in 1625. ‘I know it, and lament it, without letting it weaken my determination or diminish my concern; for the extent of my obligation is such as to make me resolve to die clinging to my oar till not a splinter is left.‘3
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