The Thirty Years’ War

Thus the two armies were standing face to face when an internal crisis in the hereditary Austrian lands of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Upper and Lower Lusatia and Upper and Lower Austria, gave the signal for the fight. In these lands, too, the Jesuit Counter-Reformation had achieved great successes. In particular they had won a fanatical pupil in the Imperial Heir Apparent, the Archduke Ferdinand of Styria. When he came to rule, and was also elected German Emperor in conformity with the tradition that linked the German Imperial throne with the ruling house of Habsburg, he single-mindedly followed the policy of subduing his hereditary possessions to the unity of the Catholic Church. He encountered violent opposition however, particularly in the Kingdom of Bohemia, where the Protestant Estates even declared that by his attempts at a Catholic restoration he had forfeited his claim to the throne, and chose the Elector Frederick of the Palatinate as his successor, in the hope of gaining thus the assistance of the Union. The Union, however, showed itself completely incapable of acting. The League supported the Emperor all the more energetically. On November 8, 1620, at the battle of the White Mountain, near Prague, their General, Tilly, totally defeated the upstart and moreover completely incompetent King. Bohemia fell once more into the hands of the Emperor, who subjected it mercilessly to a bloody political and religious restoration.

With this the flame of war seemed to have been stamped out. But now the Kaiser’s allies demanded their reward in the form of booty from the Elector Palatine, who had fled his lands. The Bavarian Duke particularly laid claim, as head of the League, to the title of Elector of the Palatinate and a share of the Palatinate possessions, and the Emperor showed himself willing to honour, as German Emperor, the debts he had incurred as King of Bohemia. At an Imperial Diet at Regensburg, he fulfilled the wishes of the Bavarians against the impotent protests of the Protestant princes. Thus the power of the Emperor became so great that foreign powers like France, Holland and England began to look askance, particularly since the Austrian and Spanish branches of the house of Habsburg were closely connected. Then England and Holland incited the King of Denmark, with plentiful funds, to offer a strong army along the Elbe and the Weser as a rallying point and stronghold for the Protestant princes in Germany. But the Emperor was now sufficiently reinforced to field a great military force. He accepted the offer of the Bohemian magnate, Wallenstein, to raise him a strong army, and that experienced field commander more than fulfilled his promises in carrying out his task. The war with Denmark began in 1625 and four years later, in 1629, by the peace of Lübeck, Denmark pledged never again to interfere in German affairs. The Imperial arms dominated North Germany too.

Above all the Emperor had his General to thank for this success. Albrecht Wallenstein (1583-1634) followed in Germany the same aim as did Richelieu at the same time in France: the creation of a purely secular monarchy, that was to raise itself, free of all religious differences, over the heads of the quarrelling princes, soften the internal class differences and turn the whole energy of the nation outwards. Wallenstein subordinated the Catholic estates no less than the Protestant ones to the Imperial authority. He was no fanciful politician but had a very clear goal which, as the French example showed, was not only attainable but was in line with historic progress. All religious bickering was most deeply abhorrent to Wallenstein. Although he was himself a Catholic and had been raised by the Jesuits, he still considered that there would be no peace in the Empire until a Bishop had been separated from his head. Wallenstein failed because the sovereignty of the Imperial Estates was far too deeply rooted in the economic conditions of the Germany of the day for him to tear them loose. Not only the princes, Catholic as well as Protestant, opposed him, but so did the towns. The Hansa towns, Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck and the others, refused to provide him with ships to dominate the Baltic, and while Wallenstein was already full of the most farsighted plans for conquering Constantinople and driving the Turks out of Europe, the town of Stralsund victoriously opposed him when he demanded they should accept an Imperial garrison.

At the very time that Wallenstein was brought up short at the walls of Stralsund, Richelieu, after a fourteen month siege, took the fortress of La Rochelle, the centre of French Protestantism (the Huguenots). From now on he had his hands free for his foreign policy, and undertook an extensive fight against the house of Habsburg to ensure the French monarchy’s predominance in Europe. Although Richelieu was as much a Catholic as Wallenstein, and even a Cardinal of the Roman Church, he kept his policies free of any religious prejudices. He incited the Catholic princes in Germany against the Emperor just as much as he tried to persuade the Protestant King of Sweden to attack Germany. But Richelieu found his most effective ally in the German Emperor himself. For his own part he had not cruelly persecuted the defeated Huguenots, but on the contrary permitted them the political rights they could claim under the actual legal conditions, so that he was able to turn the united strength of France outwards. The German Emperor on the other hand, when Wallenstein laid the northern, predominantly Protestant part of Germany at his feet with the Peace of Lubeck, had no more sense than to sow new discord between the two religions. Much to Wallenstein’s annoyance, and in sharp conflict with Wallenstein’s policies, Ferdinand II enacted in 1629, at the same time as the Peace of Lübeck, the Edict of Restitution, that is to say he ordered all the ecclesiastical properties alienated since the religious Peace of Augsburg to be given back to the Catholics. He fanned the flames of the religious quarrel in North Germany at the very moment that an invasion of the foreign enemy into North Germany was imminent.

In summer 1630 King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden (1594-1632) landed with an army on the Pomeranian coast. Long cajoled by France, he had hesitated for a long time before daring to commit the resources of tiny Sweden, which in those days counted no more than a million and a half inhabitants, to an attack on the great empire of Germany. It is a gross falsification of history to say that he finally got involved in the difficult undertaking to save the Gospel, the Protestant faith, in Germany. He was very far from such thoughts. He certainly tried to use the religious quarrel freshly fanned by the Emperor for his plans of conquest after his invasion of Germany, but he did not for a moment think of risking his kingdom to save German Lutheranism, nor is that to his discredit. On the contrary, he was historically completely justified in being solely motivated by the economic and political interests of the Swedish monarchy, which would have been most severely threatened had Wallenstein’s plan to spread Imperial dominion over the Baltic succeeded. Gustavus Adolphus acted thoroughly consistently and logically as a monarch of his time with his invasion of Germany. He can, however, lay no claim to the dubious reputation of having been a knight errant of Lutheranism.

His contemporaries, too, saw no more in his attack on Germany than there actually was: the war of a foreign conqueror. However much the princes and towns had already sinned against the Emperor and the Empire, they refused, even the Protestants among them, to join Gustavus Adolphus. Only in the town of Magdeburg, although that was the commanding position in North Germany, was there a pro-Swedish party; Gustavus Adolphus sent them Colonel Falkenberg as a leader until he could himself come to protect them. In this he was hindered for a while precisely by the Protestant Electors of Brandenburg and Saxony. What permitted him to march into Germany was a betrayal of the Emperor and Empire by the Catholic princes, incited, as Gustavus Adolphus himself was, by France. The reinforcement of the imperial authority that Wallenstein was carrying out was a thorn in the flesh of the Catholic princes as much as it was of the Protestant. At the Diet of Regensburg they demanded of the Emperor the dismissal of Wallenstein and of part of his army, under the threat that otherwise they would elect not the Emperor’s son but the French king as successor to the throne. The Emperor had to give way. He had to dismiss Wallenstein and part of his army, the rest being placed under the command of Tilly, who was the General of the League, and as such dependent on the orders of the Catholic princes.

Thus Gustavus Adolphus met no opposition to equal him in Germany. Tilly was not the bloodthirsty tyrant that Protestant historians have made him out to be, but he was still a mediocre general. After long hesitation whether he should attack the Swedish army or Magdeburg he threw himself upon the town. He succeeded in taking it, but only as a heap of ruins. The Swedish Colonel, Falkenberg, who died in the assault, had ordered it to be set alight when he saw it could no longer be held. The fearful catastrophe was however ascribed to the conquerors of the town, and since the whole world knew how the Emperor had ransacked Bohemia after Tilly’s victory at the White Mountain, great excitement arose in all the Protestant areas. Even the Electors of Brandenburg and Saxony now gave up their opposition to Gustavus Adolphus, who amalgamated the Saxon troops with his own and annihilated Tilly’s army at the battle of Breitenfeld on September 17, 1631. Thus North Germany fell into the hands of the Swedish King and South Germany lay a helpless prey before him.

He did not hesitate a second over taking possession of his prey, although, from the standpoint of Swedish interests, he could have sought peace as soon as he had driven the Imperial forces out of Northern Germany. In predatory incursions, ravaging and destroying, he travelled through the rich ecclesiastical lands around the Main. He held a luxurious court in Mainz during the winter of 1631-1632, then set out for Bavaria, which he ravaged like a vandal. Even his patron, France, was unhappy about the overwhelming increase in his strength, but this Protestant soldier of God had two unshakable defenders in the Grand Turk and the Pope, who honoured in him the oppressor of Habsburg power. The Pope, at that time Urban VIII, who felt himself to be through and through an Italian prince and was drawn by his interests more to the French than the Austro-Spanish side, saw in the heretic king a saviour sent by God. The Emperor was much wiser in recalling Wallenstein to the supreme command than he was in his unsuccessful efforts to obtain the Papal blessing. With amazing speed Wallenstein put a new army onto a warlike footing and drove the Swedish King out of South Germany onto the Saxon plain, where Gustavus Adolphus died at the battle of Lützen on November 16, 1632.

His death changed nothing in the general course of events. Gustavus Adolphus had long passed the peak of his career as a conqueror. The setback that the Swedish army suffered lay in the very nature of things. Sweden could not defeat Germany, and Gustavus Adolphus could not have changed that even if he had lived much longer. But nor could the Imperial authority be restored. When the Emperor once again failed Wallenstein in his plans, and Wallenstein tried to pursue his political goals on his own, the mighty instrument that he thought he had created in his army broke him. His Generals and Colonels deserted him and he fell to the daggers of the Emperor’s assassins. Of all the parties that were struggling against one another on German soil, no single one could force a decision, so that the reins of the war fell into the hands of France. The Swedish conquerers were now no more than Swedish mercenaries, as indeed Gustavus Adolphus had been. As such they were among the most vicious of Germany’s plunderers and ravagers.

After lasting thirty years, the war died of general exhaustion. No great advanced nation has had to suffer comparable destruction. Germany was thrown back two hundred years in its development. It took two hundred years to regain the economic position it could claim at the beginning of the Thirty Years War. In the Peace of Westphalia, which closed the war in 1648, France seized for herself the richest cities of Western Germany. In the North the Swedes took the estuaries of the Oder, the Elbe and the Weser. Both countries retained the right to intervene in German affairs. The last vestiges of the authority of the Emperor and the Empire had irrevocably disappeared. The economic origins of the German Reformation continued to exert their effect. The ‘Liberty of the Estates’, that is, the sovereignty of the territorial ruler, triumphed all along the line. Even the right to conclude treaties with foreigners was guaranteed to them in the Peace of Westphalia.