It was clear that Brandenburg’s claims would not go unchallenged. An influential party within the Polish diet was opposed to the Brandenburg succession, and there were at least seven prominent rival claimants to the Jülich-Kleve inheritance, of which the strongest on paper (after Brandenburg) was the Duke of Pfalz-Neuburg in western Germany. Both Ducal Prussia and Jülich-Kleve lay, moreover, in areas of heightened international tension. Jülich-Kleve fell within the orbit of the Dutch struggle for independence from Spain that had been raging intermittently since the 1560s; Ducal Prussia lay in the conflict zone between expansionist Sweden and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Electorate’s military establishment was based on an archaic system of feudal levies that had been in steep decline for over a century by 1600. There was no standing army, beyond a few companies of life-guards and some insignificant fortress garrisons. Even supposing Brandenburg were able to acquire them in the first place, keeping the new territories would require the commitment of considerable resources.
But where would these resources come from? Any attempt to expand the Elector’s fiscal base in order to finance the acquisition of new territories was sure to meet entrenched domestic opposition. Like many European princes, the Electors of Brandenburg shared power with an array of regional elites organized in representative bodies called Estates. The Estates approved (or not) taxes levied by the Elector and (from 1549) administered their collection. In return they possessed far-reaching powers and privileges. The Elector was forbidden, for example, to enter into alliances without first seeking the approval of the Estates.14 In a declaration published in 1540 and reiterated on various occasions until 1653, the Elector even promised that he would not ‘decide or undertake any important things upon which the flourishing or decline of the lands may depend, without the foreknowledge and consultation of all our estates’.15 His hands were therefore tied. The provincial nobilities owned the lion’s share of the landed wealth in the Electorate; they were also the Elector’s most important creditors. But their outlook was vehemently parochial; they had no interest in helping the Elector to acquire far-flung territories of which they knew nothing and they were opposed to any action that might undermine the security of the Mark.
Elector Joachim Frederick recognized the scale of the problem. On 13 December 1604, he announced the establishment of a Privy Council (Geheimer Rat), a body consisting of nine councillors whose task was to oversee ‘the high and weighty matters that press upon Us’, especially in connection with the claims to Prussia and Jülich.16 The Privy Council was supposed to function collegially, so that issues could be weighed up from a range of angles with a greater consistency of approach. It never became the core of a state bureaucracy – the schedule of regular meetings envisaged in the original order was never observed and its function remained primarily consultative.17 But the breadth and diversity of its responsibilities signalled a new determination to concentrate the decision-making process at the highest level.
There was also a new westward orientation in marital policy. In February 1605, the Elector’s ten-year-old grandson George William was betrothed to the eight-year-old daughter of Frederick IV, the Elector Palatine. The Palatinate, a substantial and wealthy territory on the Rhine, was the foremost German centre of Calvinism, a rigorous form of Protestantism that broke more radically with Catholicism than the Lutherans. During the second half of the sixteenth century, the Calvinist, or Reformed, faith had secured a foothold in parts of western and southern Germany. Heidelberg, capital city of the Palatinate, was the hub of a network of military and political relationships that embraced many of the German Calvinist cities and principalities, but also extended to foreign Calvinist powers, most importantly the Dutch Republic. Frederick IV possessed one of the most formidable military establishments in western Germany, and the Elector hoped that closer relations would bring him strategic support for Brandenburg’s claims in the west. Sure enough, in April 1605 an alliance was formalized between Brandenburg, the Palatinate and the Dutch Republic, by which the Dutch agreed, in return for military subsidies, to maintain 5,000 men in readiness to occupy Jülich for the Elector.
This was a departure. In allying themselves with the militant Calvinist interest, the Hohenzollerns had placed themselves beyond the pale of the settlement reached at Augsburg in 1555, which had recognized the right to tolerance of the Lutherans, but not of the Calvinists. Brandenburg was now consorting with some of the Habsburg Emperor’s most determined enemies. A division opened among the decision-makers in Berlin. The Elector and most of his councillors favoured a policy of caution and restraint. But a group of influential figures around the Elector’s hard-drinking eldest son, John Sigismund (r. 1608–19), took a firmer line. One of these was the Calvinist Privy Councillor Ottheinrich Bylandt zu Rheydt, himself a native of Jülich. Another was John Sigismund’s wife, Anna of Prussia, the carrier of the Jülich-Kleve claim. Backed by his supporters – or perhaps driven by them – John Sigismund pressed for closer relations with the Palatinate; he even argued that Brandenburg should pre-empt any dispute over the succession to Jülich-Kleve by invading and occupying it in advance.18 Not for the last time in the history of the Hohenzollern state, the political elite polarized around opposed foreign policy options.
In 1609 the mad old Duke of Jülich-Kleve finally died, activating the Brandenburg claim to his territories. The timing could hardly have been less propitious. The regional conflict between Habsburg Spain and the Dutch Republic was still simmering, and the inheritance lay in the strategically vital military corridor to the Low Countries. To make matters worse, there had been a dramatic escalation in confessional tensions across the Empire. Following a sequence of bitter religious disputes, two opposed confessional alliances emerged: the Protestant Union of 1608 led by the Calvinist Palatinate, and the Catholic League of 1609, led by Duke Maximilian of Bavaria under the protection of the Emperor. In less troubled times, the Elector of Brandenburg and the Duke of Pfalz-Neuburg would doubtless have looked to the Emperor to resolve the dispute over Jülich-Kleve. But in the partisan climate of 1609, there could be no confidence in the Emperor’s neutrality. Instead, the Elector decided to circumvent the machinery of imperial arbitration and sign a separate agreement with his rival: the two princes would jointly occupy the contested territories, pending a later resolution of their claims.
Their action provoked a major crisis. Imperial troops were despatched from the Spanish Netherlands to oversee the defence of Jülich. John Sigismund joined the Protestant Union, which duly declared its support for the two claimants and mobilized an army of 5,000 men. Henri IV of France took an interest and decided to intervene on the Protestant side. Only the French king’s assassination in May 1610 prevented a major war from breaking out. A composite force of Dutch, French, English and Protestant Union troops entered Jülich and besieged the Catholic garrison there. In the meanwhile, new states flocked to join the Catholic League and the Emperor, in his fury at the claimants, bestowed the entire Jülich-Kleve complex upon the Elector of Saxony, prompting fears that a joint Saxon–imperial invasion of Brandenburg might be imminent. In 1614, after further quarrels, the Jülich-Kleve legacy was divided – pending a final settlement – between the two claimants: the Duke of Pfalz-Neuburg received Jülich and Berg, while Brandenburg secured Kleve, Mark, Ravensberg and Ravenstein (see p. 11).
These were acquisitions of considerable importance. The Duchy of Kleve straddled the River Rhine, jutting into the territory of the Dutch Republic. In the late Middle Ages, the construction of a system of dykes had reclaimed the fertile soil of the Rhine floodplain, transforming the territory into the bread basket of the Low Countries. The County of Mark was less fertile and less populous, but here there were significant pockets of mining and metallurgical activity. The little County of Ravensberg dominated a strategically important transport route linking the Rhineland with north-eastern Germany and possessed a flourishing linen industry concentrated mainly around Bielefeld, the capital city. The tiny Lordship of
Ravenstein, situated on the River Maas, was an enclave within the Dutch Republic.
At some point it must have become clear to the Elector that he had overreached himself. His meagre revenues had prevented him from playing more than a minor supporting role in the conflict over his inheritance claim.19 Yet his territory was now more exposed than ever. There was a further complication: in 1613, John Sigismund announced his conversion to Calvinism, thereby placing his house outside the religious settlement of 1555. The momentous long-term significance of this step is discussed in chapter 5; in the short term, the Elector’s conversion excited outrage among the Lutheran population without providing any tangible short-term benefits for the territory’s foreign policy. In 1617, the Protestant Union, whose commitment to Brandenburg’s cause had always been fragile, withdrew its earlier support for the Brandenburg claim20John Sigismund responded by resigning from the Union. As one of his advisers pointed out, he had joined it only in the hope of securing his inheritance; his own territory was ‘so far away that [the Union] could be of no other use to him’.21 Brandenburg stood alone.
Perhaps a sharpening awareness of these predicaments accelerated the Elector’s personal decline after 1609. The man who had displayed such vigour and enterprise as crown prince seemed used up. His drinking, which had always been enthusiastic, was now out of control. The story later recalled by Schiller that John Sigismund ruined the chance of a marriage alliance between his daughter and the son of the Duke of Pfalz-Neuburg by punching his prospective son-in-law on the ear in a fit of intoxication may well be apocryphal.22 But similar accounts of violent and irrational drunken behaviour in the 1610s can probably be believed. John Sigismund grew obese and lethargic, and was intermittently incapable of conducting the business of government. A stroke in 1616 left his speech seriously impaired. By the summer of 1618, when the Duke of Prussia died in Königsberg, activating another Hohenzollern claim to another far-flung territory, John Sigismund seemed, according to one visitor, ‘lebendigtot’, suspended between life and death.23
The careful work of three generations of Hohenzollern Electors had transformed the prospects of Brandenburg. For the first time, we can discern the embryonic outlines of the sprawling territorial structure with its remote eastern and western dependencies that would shape the future of what would one day be known as Prussia. But there remained a gross discrepancy between commitments and resources. How would the House of Brandenburg defend its claims against its many rivals? How would it secure fiscal and political compliance within its new territories? These were difficult questions to answer, even in peacetime. But by 1618, despite efforts from many quarters to broker a compromise, the Holy Roman Empire was entering an era of bitter religious and dynastic war.
2
Devastation
During the Thirty Years War (1618–48) the German lands became the theatre of a European catastrophe. A confrontation between the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II (r. 1619–37) and Protestant forces within the Holy Roman Empire expanded to involve Denmark, Sweden, Spain, the Dutch Republic and France. Conflicts that were continental in scope played themselves out on the territories of the German states: the struggle between Spain and the breakaway Dutch Republic, acompetition among the northern powers for control of the Baltic, and the traditional great-power rivalry between Bourbon France and the Habsburgs.1 Although there were battles, sieges and military occupations elsewhere, the bulk of the fighting took place in the German lands. For unprotected, landlocked Brandenburg, the war was a disaster that exposed every weakness of the Electoral state. At crucial moments during the conflict, Brandenburg faced impossible choices. Its fate hung entirely on the will of others. The Elector was unable to guard his borders, command or defend his subjects or even secure the continued existence of his title. As armies rolled across the provinces of the Mark, the rule of law was suspended, local economies were disrupted and the continuities of work, domicile and memory were irreversibly ruptured. The lands of the Elector, Frederick the Great wrote over a century and a half later, ‘were desolated during the Thirty Years’ War, whose deadly imprint was so profound that its traces can still be discerned as I write’.2
BETWEEN THE FRONTS (1618–40)
Brandenburg entered this dangerous era utterly unprepared for the challenges it would face. Since its striking power was negligible, it had no means of bargaining for rewards or concessions from friend or foe. To the south, directly abutting the borders of the Electorate, were Lusatia and Silesia, both hereditary lands of the Habsburg Bohemian Crown (though Lusatia was under a Saxon leasehold). To the west of these two, also sharing a border with Brandenburg, was Electoral Saxony, whose policy during the early war years was to operate in close harmony with the Emperor. On Brandenburg’s northern flank, its undefended borders lay open to the troops of the Protestant Baltic powers, Denmark and Sweden. Nothing stood between Brandenburg and the sea but the enfeebled Duchy of Pomerania, ruled by the ageing Boguslav XIV. Neither in the west nor in remote Ducal Prussia did the Elector of Brandenburg possess the means to defend his newly acquired territories against invasion. There was thus every reason for caution, a preference underscored by the still ingrained habit of deferring to the Emperor.
Elector George William (r. 1619–40), a timid, indecisive man ill equipped to master the extreme predicaments of his era, spent the early war years avoiding alliance commitments that would consume his meagre resources or expose his territory to reprisals. He gave moral support to the insurgency of the Protestant Bohemian Estates against the Habsburg Emperor, but when his brother-in-law the Elector Palatine marched off to Bohemia to fight for the cause, George William stayed out of the fray. During the mid-1620s, as anti-Habsburg coalition plans were hatched between the courts of Denmark, Sweden, France and England, Brandenburg manoeuvred anxiously on the margins of great-power diplomacy. There were efforts to persuade Sweden, whose king had married George William’s sister in 1620, to mount a campaign against the Emperor. In 1626, another of George William’s sisters was married off to the Prince of Transylvania, a Calvinist nobleman whose repeated wars on the Habsburgs – with Turkish assistance – had established him as one of the Emperor’s most formidable enemies. Yet at the same time there were warm assurances of fealty to the Catholic Emperor, and Brandenburg steered clear of the anti-imperial Hague Alliance of 1624–6 between England and Denmark.
None of this could protect the Electorate against pressure and military incursions from both sides. After the armies of the Catholic League under General Tilly had defeated Protestant forces at Stadlohn in 1623, the Westphalian territories of Mark and Ravensberg became quartering areas for Leaguist troops. George William understood that he would be able to stay out of trouble only if his territory were in a position to defend itself against all comers. But the money was lacking for an effective policy of armed neutrality. The overwhelmingly Lutheran Estates were suspicious of his Calvinist allegiances and unwilling to finance them. In 1618–20, their sympathies were largely with the Catholic Emperor and they feared that their Calvinist Elector would drag Brandenburg into dangerous international commitments. The best policy, as they saw it, was to wait out the storm and avoid attracting hostile notice from any of the belligerents.
2. Portrait of George William (1619–40); woodcut by Richard Brend’amour based on a contemporary portrait
In 1626, as George William struggled to extract money from his Estates, the Palatine General Count Mansfeld overran the Altmark and Prignitz, with his Danish allies close behind. Mayhem broke out. Churches were smashed open and robbed, the town of Nauen was razed to the ground, villages were burned as troops attempted to extort hidden money and goods from the inhabitants. When he was taken to task for this by a senior Brandenburg minister, the Danish envoy Mitzlaff responded with breathtaking arrogance: ‘Whether the Elector likes it or not, the [Danish] King will go ahead all the same. Whoever is not with him is against him.’3 Scarcely had the Danes made themselves at home in the Mark, however, but they were pushed back by
their enemies. In the late summer of 1626, after the imperial and Leaguist victory near Lutter-am-Barenberg in the Duchy of Brunswick (27 August), imperial troops occupied the Altmark, while the Danes withdrew into the Prignitz and the Uckermark to the north and north-west of Berlin. At around the same time, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden landed in Ducal Prussia, where he established a base of operations against Poland, completely disregarding the claims of the Elector. The Neumark, too, was overrun and plundered by Cossack mercenaries in the service of the Emperor. The scale of the threat facing Brandenburg was made clear by the fate of the dukes of neighbouring Mecklenburg. As punishment for supporting the Danes, the Emperor deposed the ducal family and bestowed Mecklenburg as booty upon his powerful commander, the military entrepreneur Count Wallenstein.
The time seemed ripe for a shift towards closer collaboration with the Habsburg camp. ‘If this business continues,’ George William told a confidant in a moment of desperation, ‘I shall become mad, for I am much grieved. [… ] I shall have to join the Emperor, I have no alternative; I have only one son; if the Emperor remains, then I suppose I and my son will be able to remain Elector.’4 On 22 May 1626, despite protests from his councillors and the Estates, who would have preferred a rigorous policy of neutrality, the Elector signed a treaty with the Emperor. Under the terms of this agreement, the entire Electorate was opened to imperial troops. Hard times followed, because the imperial supreme commander, Count Wallenstein, was in the habit of extracting provisions, lodgings and payment for his troops from the population of the occupied area.
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