The Thirty Years War

by C. V. Wedgwood

  Empty as was the imperial title in 1618, the dynasty had not abandoned the hope of restoring to it the reality of power. With a people as traditional as the Germans a lurking respect for the person of the Emperor was always to be found even among the most rabid exponents of the ‘German Liberties’—a feeling which an intelligent Emperor could often exploit.

  ‘The German Liberties’ was a phrase which had become popular in the sixteenth century. It stood in theory for the constitutional rights of the individual rulers of the Empire, in fact for anything which the caprice or interest of the princes dictated, a bald truth which does not derogate from the personal sincerity with which most of them believed in their own motives. In the smaller group of authoritarians which centered about the Emperor, the corresponding rallying cry was ‘Justice’; the emphasis was on government here, on independence there. Ultimately there must come a breaking-point.

  Had the division between the Emperor and his subordinates been clear, the disaster might have been less grave. It was Germany’s fate that no division should be clear. The free cities feared the princes more even than the princes feared the Emperor, and although they subscribed to the theory of the ‘German Liberties’ they were sceptical of the sincerity of the princes in the same cause. Suspicious of the landed aristocracy, from whom they had wrested their freedom in the past, they would rather let things be than exert themselves to win anything that they would have to share with the suspected class. The Catholic rulers of the Church, on the other hand, supported the Catholic Emperor on whom they relied to protect them against hostile and often heretic princes. A highly developed class-consciousness divided landowners, burghers, churchmen and peasants so that the commonweal was sacrificed to sectional interests. The evolution of military organizations by each of these groups added a further menace to a situation already dangerous.

  Even so the political divisions of these sections were not rigid. Some of the free cities regarded their neighbours with embittered commercial jealousy—Lindau and Bregenz each refused to receive ships that had touched at the other, Lübeck resented the prosperity of Hamburg. A weak prince might be intimidated by a strong neighbour and seek protection with the Emperor, or a succession dispute might divide a royal house against itself, as the dynasties that ruled in Saxony, Hesse and Baden were divided. Private fears and petty interests split the party of the German Liberties into innumerable warring fragments.

  Of all these independent princes, prelates, counts, knights and gentlemen, only about a dozen had enough reputation to be reckoned with in European politics; around these outstanding figures the ant-heap politics of the Empire grouped themselves. They were diplomatically in an ambiguous position, being minor pawns in the European game, but giants at home; their politics reflected both the pettiness and the grandeur of their position, veering from dignified diplomacy to backstairs intrigue, from ostentation to parsimony as their interest dictated.

  First in dignity came the seven Electors. Their president was the Elector of Mainz who, with the Electors of Cologne and Treves, took precedence over all the princes in Germany. These three represented the interests of religion, or rather of the Catholic Church in the government of the Empire, and their prestige rested on tradition rather than power. The remaining four Electors were temporal princes—the King of Bohemia, the rulers of the Palatinate, of Saxony, and of Brandenburg.

  The sovereignty of Bohemia, as also that of Hungary, had for nearly a century been vested in a member of the House of Hapsburg. Outside the imperial family the Elector of the Palatinate, briefly the Elector Palatine, was the first secular prince in Germany. The title had been hereditary for many generations in the south German family of Wittelsbach, which had once held the imperial Crown. The Elector Palatine had his capital at Heidelberg on the Neckar and owned the greater part of the rich, wine-growing district between the Mosel, the Saar, and the Rhine, an irregular triangle riddled by the lands of the Bishops of Speier, Worms, Mainz, and Treves. This was called the Rhenish or Lower Palatinate; but the Elector owned also the Upper Palatinate, a comparatively poor agricultural district between the Danube and the Bohemian Forest. Other princes might be richer, but the Elector Palatine held two of the key positions in Germany, vantage points on the Rhine and on the Danube whence he could threaten the communications between the scattered Hapsburg possessions.

  The sixth Elector, Saxony, had his capital at Dresden whence he governed the fertile plains of the Elbe and Mulde. It was a rich, well-populated province with Leipzig, the mart of eastern Europe, to feed its wealth. Leipzig was not a free city but the cherished possession of the Elector. A disinherited elder line of the same family held a string of minor Saxonies—Gotha, Weimar, Altenburg—lying westwards from the parent state.

  The seventh Elector, Brandenburg, had the largest but the poorest possessions, the sandy north-eastern plain of Germany without the trading seaboard. The Elbe and the Oder watered his land but the mouth of the one was at the free city of Hamburg and of the other in the separate dukedom of Pomerania. For capital his thinly populated agricultural land had only the little wood-built town of Berlin with less than ten thousand inhabitants. Not until 1618 did the Elector inherit Prussia with its fine city of Königsberg, and this remote land beyond the Vistula was not part of the Empire but a fief of the Polish Crown.

  Beside the Electors there were several other princes of leading rank. The Duke of Bavaria, the governor of five hundred square miles and nearly a million subjects, maintained a position of unrivalled importance. A distant cousin of the Elector Palatine, he was head of the younger branch of the Wittelsbach dynasty and his lands formed the bulwark between Austria and the central German princes. The duchy of Bavaria was chiefly agricultural and there were few towns; Munich itself, in spite of its new ducal palace, cathedral, and imposing gates, was more like an overgrown mountain village than a capital city.

  The Duke of Württemberg with his capital at Stuttgart, the Margraves of Baden and the Landgraves of Hesse were also princes of some eminence. The Duke of Lorraine, who controlled one of the gateways to France, was more important in the diplomacy of Europe than in the politics of the Empire. The Dukes of Brunswick, princes of the Guelph dynasty, and further east the Dukes of Mecklenburg and Pomerania, dominated the politics of the northern part of the Empire.

  6.

  If it was hard to form two parties on the question of imperial reform when so many currents ran against the main stream of princely interest, religious division made it finally impossible.

  A common faith had alone given unity to the disintegrating Empire. When Protestantism rent the confederate principalities asunder, when the more adventurous princes seized upon it as an additional weapon against the Emperor, the theories of five hundred years went up in smoke. At the religious settlement of Augsburg in 1555 the principle of cujus regio ejus religio was formulated, by which every prince was permitted to enforce either the Catholic or the Lutheran faith in his lands so that subjects who could not conform must emigrate. This extraordinary compromise saved the theory of religious unity for each state while destroying it for the Empire.

  So far the divisions between princes and Empire might have been made the clearer by the religious difference, for the Hapsburg family held by the Catholic faith and were not popular with their Protestant subjects, while the seizure of many bishoprics by the Lutherans in north Germany increased the territorial power of the princes. But Calvinism, appearing within a decade of the settlement, destroyed all chance of a clean issue.

  ‘The Calvinist dragon’, declared a Lutheran writer, ‘is pregnant with all the horrors of Mohammedanism.’[27] The frantic fervour with which certain of the German rulers adopted and propagated the new cult gave some justification for the statement. The Elector Palatine in particular demonstrated his disbelief in transubstantiation in the crudest manner. Loudly jeering, he tore the Host in pieces, ‘What a fine God you are! You think you are stronger than I? We shall see!’[28] In his austerely whitewashed conventic
les a tin basin served for a font and each communicant was provided with his own wooden mug.[29] The Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel took the additional precaution of having the toughest possible bread provided for the sacrament so that his people should have no doubt whatever of the material nature of what they were eating.[30]

  The Lutherans were doubly shocked. Although they no longer revered the symbols of the ancient faith, they had preserved them respectfully as the outward signs of their worship and they had a natural esteem for the settlement which had guaranteed them their liberty. They feared that the Calvinists would discredit the whole Protestant movement and they were panic-stricken when, in direct contravention to the settlement of Augsburg, the Calvinists began to proselytize with ruthless thoroughness. The principle of cujus regio ejus religio was subject to one reasonable modification. No ruling prelate, abbot, bishop or archbishop, might retain his lands if he should at any time be converted to the Protestant religion. This important rule, the Ecclesiastical Reservation, was as little respected by the Calvinists as the settlement of Augsburg itself, the terms of which had made no provision for any Protestant belief other than the Lutheran.

  The Lutherans now began to fear the subversion of that very settlement by right of which they existed. The disregard of imperial edicts by a party who declared that all who were not with them were against them, threatened the Lutherans no less than the Catholics, and among the princes of both these religions there were stumbling gestures towards friendship. Between the uncompromising Catholics on the one side and the Calvinists on the other, a centre party was emerging.

  There was one element common to the Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist religions; each was used by the prince as a means of enforcing his authority. This was well enough for the Hapsburg who held in all their dealings unerringly to the absolutist principle; but for princes who were clamouring for liberties it was a blatant contradiction. They were demanding from the Emperor what they refused to their own people. The libertarian movements, the convulsive outbursts of mercantile or peasant insurrection, terrified those unhappy rulers who were perched between rebellion beneath and oppression above. Two battles were being fought, one between princes and Emperor, another between princes and peoples, and the princes bore the brunt in both, facing both ways, carrying the torch of liberty in one hand and the tyrant’s sword in the other.

  Unconsciously the natural alliance between those who demanded liberty of conscience and those who demanded political freedom was broken asunder. The religious policy of the reformed princes perverted the natural issue and obscured without destroying the antagonism between the Catholic authoritarian states and their Protestant opponents. The Catholic powers gained. Their position remained clear while that of the Protestants, Calvinists and Lutherans alike, was self-contradictory.

  The individual caprice or conscience of rulers played havoc with the welfare of their subjects. Saxony, Brandenburg and the Palatinate jerked from Lutheranism to Calvinism and back, blazing a trail of dispossession, exile and violence. In the Palatinate a Calvinist regent dragged the child successor of a Lutheran prince, screaming and struggling, to the conventicle.[31] In Baden, the ruler dying while his wife was yet with child, the regent imprisoned the widow and carried off the infant prince at birth to educate him in his own faith.[32] In Brandenburg the Elector declared that he would rather burn his only University than allow one Calvinist doctrine to appear in it.[33] Nevertheless his successor became a Calvinist and introduced a pastor at Berlin, whereat the Lutheran mob broke into the newcomer’s house and plundered it so effectively that he had to preach on the following Good Friday in a bright green undergarment, which was all that the rioters had left him.[34]

  The energy of the educated was perverted into the writing of scurrilous books, which were joyfully received by an undiscriminating public. The Calvinists exhorted all true believers to violence and took special delight in the more bloodthirsty psalms. But the Catholics and Lutherans were not innocent and force was everywhere the proof of true faith. The Lutherans set upon the Calvinists in the streets of Berlin; Catholic priests in Bavaria carried firearms in self-defence; in Dresden the mob stopped the funeral of an Italian Catholic and tore the corpse to pieces; a Protestant pastor and a Catholic priest came to blows in the streets of Frankfort on the Main, and Calvinist services in Styria were frequently interrupted by Jesuits disguised among the congregation who would tweak the prayer book from the hands of the worshipper and deftly substitute a breviary.[35]

  Such things did not happen every day or everywhere. There were years of comparative quiet; there were undisturbed districts; there was marrying and giving in marriage between the three religions; there was friendship and peaceful discussion. But there was no security. The individual might be generous or indifferent, the local priest or pastor a man whom all parties could and did respect, but everywhere, open or concealed, there was inflammable material, and the central authority was too powerless or too partial to guard against an outbreak of fire.

  7.

  With an administration chronically diseased and a disintegrating moral background, the intellectual reputation of Germany and her social amenities had declined. Here and there a great man towered above his contemporaries: the Saxon musician Heinrich Schütz, the Silesian poet Martin Opitz, the Augsburg architect Elias Holl, and Johann Valentin Andreae, the theologian of Württemberg. But these men stand out by their very rarity; they are alone. Although there were movements, particularly among the ruling class, to improve education and encourage German culture, the results were small. The intellectual and social life of Germany was overshadowed no less than the political by the rivalry of France and Spain; at the imperial Court, manners, arts and dress were based on Spanish models, at the Courts of Stuttgart and Heidelberg on French. Dresden and Berlin scorned foreign intervention and paid for it by intellectual eclipse. Music, dancing and poetry came from Italy, pictures from the Low Countries, romances and fashions from France, plays and even players from England. Appealing eloquently for the recognition of the German language as a literary medium, Martin Opitz wrote in Latin, so that he might be sure of a hearing. A princess of Hesse turned elegant verses in Italian, the Elector Palatine wrote his love-letters in French, and his wife, who was English, never found it necessary to learn German.

  Germany was in fact celebrated throughout Europe at this period for nothing so much as eating and drinking. ‘Oxen,’ said the French, ‘stop drinking when they are no longer thirsty. Germans only begin then.’ Travellers from Spain and Italy were alike amazed at the immense appetites and lack of conversational talent in a country where the rich of all classes sat eating and drinking for hours to the deafening accompaniment of a brass band.[36] The Germans did not deny the accusation. ‘We Germans’, ran a national proverb, ‘pour money away through our stomachs’.[37] ‘Valete et inebriamini’ a jovial prince was in the habit of closing his letters to his friends.[38] The Land-grave of Hesse founded a Temperance society but its first president died of drink[39]; Lewis of Württemberg, surnamed the Pious, drank two challengers into stupor, and being himself still sober enough to give orders, had them sent home in a cart in company with a pig.[40] The vice ran through all classes of society; young gentlemen in Berlin, reeling home in their cups, would break into the houses of peaceful burghers and hunt them into the street. At the weddings of peasants in Hesse more would be spent on food and drink than could be saved in a year, and the bridal party arrived at the Church more often drunk than sober.[41] In Bavaria and less successfully in Pomerania the government legislated again and again to prevent these outbursts.[42]

  This was not a reputation of which the intelligent German could be proud, yet there was a tendency among the simpler sort of patriots to glorify the national enjoyment of meat and wine. They had the authority of Tacitus that their ancestors had behaved in much the same way. That peculiar form of racial nationalism which later reached its highest development in Germany had already begun in the sixteenth century. Arminius, o
ptimistically Germanized into Hermann, was already on the way to being a national hero, and one scholar at least had tried to prove the unblemished descent of the entire German race from a fourth son of Noah born after the flood.[43] The word ‘Teutsch’ was used as the equivalent of all that was upright and brave, and every ruler appealing for popular support arrogated to himself a particular share of German blood and German virtues. The self-consciousness of the German nation remained unimpaired, perhaps the only guarantee for the continued existence of a state whose cultural and political vitality seemed extinguished.

  There was a deeper cause for the sterility of intellectual life than the absorption of energy into the religious conflict. The conditions which had produced Germany’s greatness were ceasing to exist. Her culture had rested on the towns: but the towns were declining. The uncertainty of transport in a politically disturbed country and the decline of Italian commerce had disastrously affected German trade. Besides which, her currency was wholly unreliable; there was no effective central authority to control the issues from the countless local mints; princes, towns, and prelates made what profit they chose. The Saxon dynasty controlled forty-five mints, the Dukes of Brunswick forty; there were eighteen in Silesia, sixty-seven in the Lower Rhenish Circle.[44]

  Meanwhile German credit declined and dangerous speculation led to the collapse of one great banking house after another. The firm of Manlich of Augsburg failed as early as 1573, that of Haug a year later; the larger business of the Welsers collapsed in 1614 and the world-famed family of Fugger itself could not work out the storm but went into liquidation shortly after with a total loss of more than eight million gulden.[45]