Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  The political geography of the empire therefore possessed striking disparities. Whereas just four states, all Protestant (Brandenburg, Saxony, Pomerania and Mecklenburg), dominated the sparsely populated north and northeast of Germany, the more populous south and west contained a multitude of smaller political entities, some Protestant but most Catholic. Swabia, for example, covering some 16,000 square miles just north of Switzerland, was fragmented between 68 secular lords, 40 spiritual lords and 32 city-states. Among these, Württemberg (Swabia's largest state) contained 400,000 subjects; but some of its neighbours consisted of a single village. Moreover, since the imperial Constitution allowed rulers to determine the religion of their subjects, Württemberg was staunchly Lutheran, whereas most of its neighbours were equally staunchly Catholic.

  Throughout the empire, rulers great and small strove to reinforce their independence. On the one hand, they created schools and universities to train (some might say ‘indoctrinate’) clergy and teachers who would faithfully follow the state religion. On the other hand, they also created tariff barriers designed to protect local production as well as to raise revenues: thus a ship carrying merchandise along the river Elbe between Hamburg and Prague (just over 300 miles) had to pay tolls at 30 border checkpoints; and a barge travelling along the Rhine between Mainz and Cologne (just over 100 miles) had to pay tolls 11 times. In addition, some German rulers spent heavily on defence (both fortifying their towns and raising militia units); several joined a confessional alliance (the Protestant Union from 1608, the Catholic League from 1609); and all sought financial independence. Maximilian, ruler of Bavaria from 1598 to 1648, made no secret of his ambitions. ‘I believe that we princes only gain respect, both from spiritual and secular powers, according to “reason of state”,’ he wrote at the beginning of his reign; adding ‘and I believe that only those who have a lot of land or a lot of money get that respect’.4 Over the next two decades he doubled his tax revenues and used the proceeds to build state-of-the-art fortifications, to fund the Catholic League and to create a war chest of four million thalers.

  Despite these impressive achievements, Maximilian was not an independent prince: like all other German rulers he owed obedience to the Holy Roman Emperor, an elective office held since the mid-fifteenth century by one of the Habsburg Archdukes of Austria. The Habsburgs also held the elective crowns of Hungary and Bohemia; but in all these territories, unlike Germany, the representative assemblies (‘Estates’) had forced their rulers to grant religious toleration to their vassals. Indeed, in 1609 the Estates of Bohemia extorted from the King-Emperor Rudolf II the ‘Letter of Majesty’, an edict that guaranteed full religious toleration throughout the kingdom, and then created a standing committee, known as ‘the Defensors’, to ensure that the concessions went into effect. Rudolf and his successor Matthias fought back by replacing Protestant officials with Catholics, often either foreigners or recently ennobled townsmen with a legal education: both groups became dedicated supporters of the crown and, in return, the crown showered rewards and offices on them. Matters came to a head in the winter of 1617–18 when Matthias, supported by his ‘heir designate’ Archduke Ferdinand, ordered his regents in Prague to prohibit the use of Catholic endowments to pay Protestant ministers, to deny civic office to all non-Catholics and, most inflammatory of all, to forbid Protestant worship in all towns built on church lands. The Defensors determined that these measures contravened the Letter of Majesty and summoned the Bohemian Estates to assemble in Prague in May 1618. Meanwhile Protestants excluded from power produced polemics that criticized the ‘pettiness, deceit and envy’ of the Catholic-dominated court.5

  The Prague Spring

  Unusually cold and wet conditions ruined the harvests in 1617 and 1618 throughout central Europe, so that economic tension was already high by the time the Bohemian Estates convened. Polyxena Lobković, the perceptive wife of the Chancellor of Bohemia (and a staunch Catholic), predicted that ‘Things were now swiftly coming to the pass where either the Papists would settle their score with the Protestants or the Protestants with the Papists.‘6 She was soon proved right. When the regency council declared the meeting of the Estates illegal, in May 1618 the Estates invaded the chamber where they met and threw two councillors, together with their secretary, out of a high window in an event that became known as the Defenestration of Prague. They then created a provisional government – not one member had held office under the crown – and began to raise an army in preparation for the inevitable Habsburg backlash.

  Religious tensions also ran high in Germany, fuelled by Protestant celebrations in 1617 of the first centenary of Martin Luther's successful defiance of the papacy. Hans Heberle, a shoemaker living near Ulm, a city with both Catholic and Protestant inhabitants, later noted in his diary that ‘This Jubilee became one of the causes of the war’ because it set German Protestants and Catholics at each other's throats. Indeed, Lutheran broadsheets, pamphlets and sermons called for an immediate crusade against Rome, centre of idolatry, sodomy and other ‘vices’, while Catholics responded with angry calls for a counter-jubilee, dedicated to the abolition of ‘heresies’. A spate of inflammatory pamphlets and broadsheets flowed from the presses (Fig. 23).7

  The Bohemian Estates made haste to exploit these tensions, appealing for military and financial assistance to the German Protestant Union; but although the Union raised an army of 11,000 men ‘to protect liberty and law’ and ‘to maintain our religion like true patriots’, it refused to deploy them outside Germany.8 Then in March 1619 Matthias died, creating a double succession crisis, one as king of Bohemia and the other as Holy Roman Emperor, because both were elective offices. On 25 August 1619, although they had previously recognized Ferdinand as ‘king-designate’, the Estates of Bohemia elected as their new ruler Elector Frederick of the Palatinate, the Director of the German Protestant Union as well as son-in-law of James I of England and nephew of Maurice of Nassau, the dominant figure in the Dutch Republic.

  23. The rhythm of pamphlet publication in Germany, 1618–50.

  The Gustav Freitag Collection of pamphlets, in Frankfurt, contains over 1,000 items printed between 1610 and 1650, with major peaks in 1618–22 (40 per cent of the total) and 1629–33 (20 per cent). The first peak, predominantly Catholic, centred on the Bohemian Revolt and the intervention of Frederick of the Palatinate; the second, almost entirely Protestant, reflected the hopes aroused by Sweden's intervention in the war.

  Had this momentous event occurred only slightly earlier, it would have affected the choice of the next Holy Roman Emperor, because the king of Bohemia was one of the seven Electors. Instead, as soon as all the Electors (or their representatives) had arrived in Frankfurt-on-Main, according to custom the city was sealed so that no one could legally enter or leave. Therefore on 28 August 1619, when Ferdinand was elected unanimously as Holy Roman Emperor, neither he nor his colleagues knew that, 300 miles away in Prague, he had just been deposed as king of Bohemia.

  The danger created by this double election was immediately apparent. ‘Let everyone prepare at once for a war lasting twenty, thirty or forty years,’ an observer in Frankfurt wrote presciently, because ‘the Spaniards and the House of Austria will hazard everything to recover Bohemia … rather than allow their dynasty to lose control of it so disgracefully’. A few days later, a British diplomat likewise warned that ‘this business of Bohemia is like to put all Christendom in confusion’. If the Bohemian cause was ‘neglected and by consequence suppressed’, he predicted, the German Protestants ‘are like to bear the burden of a victorious army’.9

  Frederick of the Palatinate, aged 23, now held the fate of Europe in his hands: would he accept the crown offered by the Bohemian Estates or not? Several of his advisers argued that allowing the Bohemian cause to founder would open the way for a concerted Habsburg attack on Protestants throughout Europe. Other advisers saw the matter in providential terms, arguing that since the Bohemians’ cause was just, God would clear away all obstacles. This argumen
t seems to have convinced Frederick: the opportunity ‘is a divine calling that I must not disobey. My only end is to serve God and his Church,’ he confided to his wife and in November 1619, eighteen months after the Defenestration, he travelled to Prague for his coronation.10 Meanwhile, his supporters laid siege to Vienna, Ferdinand's capital.

  This marked the zenith of Frederick's fortunes. The following month, disputes among his commanders caused them to abandon the siege of Vienna – an event that Ferdinand and his supporters interpreted as an unmistakable sign of divine favour for their cause – while Duke Maximilian of Bavaria promised to help Ferdinand defeat his rebellious subjects. In return, Ferdinand promised to reimburse all of Maximilian's military expenses and to grant him any of Frederick's possessions that he could capture (including, in the event of total victory, Frederick's Electoral title). The Catholic League authorized Maximilian to raise 25,000 men, and the following summer the new army (whose many notable volunteers included René Descartes) invaded Bohemia.

  Frederick's troops fell back until in November 1620 they made a desperate stand at the White Mountain (Bílá Hora), just outside Prague. The engagement lasted only two hours and ‘the loss of soldiers was not much unequal’ but, as an English diplomat on the spot noted:

  The loss of cannon, the baggage, reputation, is the Imperials’ victory who, as it seems, hold Bohemia now by conquest … And if a new establishment by petition shall be obtained, it will be only the Law of the Conqueror, who does already finely call those of the [Protestant] Religion to account for what they have, and put it into safe keeping, so that they taste already their condition to come.11

  Frederick, whom Catholic polemicists cruelly dubbed ‘The Winter King’, because his reign had lasted barely one year, promptly fled from Prague, while Catholic troops invaded and occupied his German territories.

  Ferdinand immediately pressed home his advantage. He created a judicial commission to try his opponents. He approved the execution of almost 30 ringleaders, and condemned almost 600 more to lose their landed estates – which he promptly sold in order to pay off his troops. It was, in the words of Peter Wilson, ‘the largest transfer of property in Europe before the seizures during the Communist takeover after 1945’.12 This imposition of ‘the Law of the Conqueror’ on the kingdom's elite, though brutal, affected relatively few; but another initiative affected almost everyone. Although his forces had won their victory relatively swiftly, the cost of the campaign far exceeded Ferdinand's available funds. He therefore allowed a consortium of his creditors to mint debased currency, and used it to pay his debts. The rulers of many neighbouring states followed this example and set up mints expressly to produce cheaper coins, causing runaway inflation known as the Kipper- und Wipperzeit (the ‘see-saw’ era) in much of central Europe. Meanwhile, some of Frederick's supporters fought on, preventing Ferdinand from demobilizing his troops. In Württemberg, a chronicler wrote of 1622: ‘This year cannot sufficiently be described, how wretchedly and damagingly it went’ – not only because of ‘murder, robbing and burning, with the quartering of the soldiery whom the people were forced to serve with all their means, with the imposition of war costs’ but also because ‘One no longer traded with money, but with bartered exchange.’ The wages of some urban workers fell by half between 1619 and 1621, and by half again by 1623, provoking riots in several central European towns. One pamphleteer claimed that ‘The last days which Christ prophesied have come’. By the time Ferdinand decreed a return to the old coin values in 1624, many families had lost 90 per cent of their savings. Even a decade later, the Bohemian exile Pavel Stránský recalled the Kipper- und Wipperzeit as the most traumatic of his life.13

  The effects of devaluation were felt far beyond Germany, because it reduced the cost of manufactures there so drastically that no one bought imported goods. Thus the number of English woollen cloths exported to the continent from London fell from over 100,000 in 1618 to 75,000 in 1622, and even those brought no profit because ‘the monies [have] become so variable, that when a merchant has sold his cloth, and hopes to have gained something thereby, by the time that the term for payment is expired, he receives less in value than the cloths cost’, because of the devaluation. At the same time, cheap foreign imports flooded the English market, reducing domestic demand for home manufactures. According to a contemporary economist, the recession caused the English to become ‘improvident and careless … besotting ourselves with pipe and pot, in a beastly manner, sucking [tobacco] smoke and drinking healths until death stares many in the face’.14

  Germany's other trading partners also suffered from the decision of Ferdinand and his neighbours to devalue. In Italy, the reduced demand and the currency shifts in central Europe ruined many merchants (and, therefore, those whom they employed). Spanish Lombardy, whose economy depended heavily on German demand, experienced a dramatic setback: between 1618 and 1622 unemployment in the capital rose to 50 per cent; the trade of Cremona (a centre of cloth production) fell by 90 per cent; and the quantity of coinage issued by the Milan mint fell by 97 per cent. In Spanish Naples, where the poor harvests of 1619, 1620 and 1621 coincided with orders from Madrid to send money to assist Ferdinand, the viceroy allowed the city's public banks to issue paper money to cover the outflow of specie. They preserved their solvency only because the viceroy allowed them to refuse to pay any credit note worth more than ten ducats. Urban and rural property values fell by about half and the economy of the kingdom languished. In the biblical phrase used by a Neapolitan economist of the day, ‘seven lean years began in 1623’.15

  The Crisis of the Dutch Republic

  Meanwhile, civil war almost broke out in the Dutch Republic. The conclusion of a Twelve Years Truce with Spain, in 1609, unleashed deep domestic tensions previously held in check by the common war effort. Neither history nor tradition linked the seven ‘United Provinces’ that composed the Republic. Friesland and Gelderland had spent much of the fifteenth century fighting Holland and Zealand, with Groningen, Overijssel and Utrecht as both prize and battleground. All preserved their local laws and liberties intact, and they even spoke different languages: Dutch in the western provinces, Fries in Friesland, and either Oosters or German in the eastern provinces. The religious complexity of the Republic was even greater. ‘After having consulted the local people’, one foreign observer estimated that ‘one might divide the population of these provinces into three parts, each more or less equal’: one-third were Calvinists, another third Catholics, and the rest either Anabaptists, Lutherans, Jews, members of some other ‘sect’, or atheists. The pattern of distribution was not uniform. Thus the Anabaptists constituted more than half the population of some areas of Friesland, and perhaps one-tenth of the whole province; while almost one-tenth of the 20,000 inhabitants of Rotterdam were Catholics, with the rest belonging to one of ten other religions, or to none.16

  The House of Orange-Nassau provided a degree of cohesion. Count Maurice of Nassau (prince of Orange after 1618) served as captain-general of the confederate army and governor (Stadholder) of five provinces, while his cousin governed the other two. Certain institutions also served the entire Union – the Council of State (for military matters), the Admiralty boards and the Audit Office – but executive power rested with the individual assemblies (the Staten or States) of the seven United Provinces, each of which sent delegates to the States-General. This central body remained surprisingly small, seldom more than 12 deputies (and often only four or five), because most decisions (including those on war, peace and new taxes) required ratification by the seven provincial assemblies. Naturally, unanimity often proved difficult (sometimes impossible) to achieve; but until 1618 the views of Holland, which provided almost two-thirds of the Union's tax revenues, generally prevailed.

  Securing the consent of each provincial assembly required much time and patience, because even there the delegates could settle little without reference to their ‘principals’: the magistrates of each major town and the local nobility. The States of Hol
land (for example) could only discuss an agenda of issues that had circulated beforehand among the magistrates of 18 towns and the representative of the province's nobles. This requirement gave great influence to their chief legal officer, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, who prepared the agenda for each meeting and led the discussions. Although the States of some other provinces proved more tractable, their decisions still involved large numbers of the local elite. In all, perhaps 2,000 magistrates (known as ‘regents’) in 57 towns, plus scores of noblemen, participated directly in the Republic's decision-making process. It was not ‘democratic’ by modern standards, but in virtually no other major state in the early modern world did so many people help to shape national policy.

  With so many protagonists in decision-making, friction frequently developed – particularly over contentious issues such as finance, religion and foreign policy. Holland, for example, normally favoured peace with Spain because war was expensive and Holland paid more in taxes than all the other provinces combined. Its southern neighbour Zealand, by contrast, normally opposed peace with Spain because the province prospered from piracy at Spain's expense and from the revenues generated by tolls and passports to trade with the enemy. The Calvinist clergy, too, vociferously favoured war with the Catholic ‘arch-enemy’, using not only the pulpits but also their contacts with individual regents (often their brothers, nephews and fathers) to sabotage peace initiatives. Finally, most of those who had fled Catholic persecution in Flanders and Brabant likewise opposed any settlement with those who had driven them into exile.