Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Rather like Lutter five years before, the battle of Breitenfeld transformed the military balance – and thus guaranteed that the war would go on. Meeting with no effective resistance, Gustavus sent one army to Bohemia, allowing the return of the exiles who had fled in 1620, while he plundered his way through Germany's Catholic heartland to the Rhine. Meanwhile, his principal Swedish minister, Axel Oxenstierna, created a ‘government-general’ to administer all the occupied territories and organized ‘contributions’ to maintain the 120,000 victorious soldiers deployed across northern Germany.

  Ferdinand now saw no choice but to recall Wallenstein because, as one of his councillors put it: ‘Now we shout “Help, Help”, but nobody is listening’.32 But before the general could recruit a new imperial army, Tilly and the battered troops of the Catholic League rashly attacked the nearest Swedish positions. Gustavus promptly defeated Tilly (who died of battle wounds soon after) and, accompanied by a jubilant Frederick of the Palatinate, systematically plundered Bavaria while Maximilian pleaded with Wallenstein for help. Instead, the new imperial army retreated to the Alte Veste, a huge fortified camp near Nuremberg that Gustavus vainly besieged for two months before withdrawing northwards; but on 16 November 1632 he launched a surprise attack, and at the battle of Lützen, near Leipzig, Wallenstein lost so many soldiers that he decided to retreat. He did not learn until some days later that the Swedes, too, had suffered heavy casualties – among them King Gustavus himself.

  For the next 16 years rival armies moved to and fro across the empire, seeking to gain a decisive strategic advantage – and leaving death, devastation and insecurity in their wake. Initially Axel Oxenstierna, who after Gustavus's death became both head of the Swedish regency council and director of the Protestant war effort, tried to negotiate a favourable settlement with Wallenstein; but in February 1634 Ferdinand had his general murdered (on the grounds that he was supposed to wage war, not make peace), and the following September, at Nördlingen, Habsburg forces won a crushing victory over the Swedes and their German allies. Oxenstierna now withdrew his forces to the Baltic and sought to renew the peace talks ended by Wallenstein's death but, deeming the emperor's terms unacceptable, he decided to fight on. Ferdinand, by contrast, concluded the peace of Prague with some of Sweden's allies in May 1635, and a few months later declared war on France. Oxenstierna renewed Sweden's alliance with France, promising (among other things) that neither side would make peace without the other. The alliance – and therefore the war – would last for 13 more years.

  The Tipping Point: The Rape of Germany

  The battle of Breitenfeld in 1631 saved the Protestant cause, but in doing so it transformed both the scope and the impact of the war. Previously, most Germans had seen hostilities as both exceptional and temporary: in the words of a Protestant miller's daughter near Nuremberg, until the summer of 1632 ‘we had indeed heard of the war, but we had not thought that it would reach us [here]’. The situation changed abruptly when imperial troops sacked both her town and her mill during the siege of the Alte Veste, leaving ‘not a grain of wheat, not a speck of flour’. Likewise, a Lutheran pastor near Ulm scarcely mentioned military operations in his chronicle until 1628, when ‘a new and frightening catastrophe threatened us’ in the shape of Wallenstein's army of occupation. For the next three years he still interspersed comments about billeting and contributions with reports of the harvest, weather and freak accidents, but that too changed after Breitenfeld, when the victorious Swedish army advanced into central Germany. Henceforth war dominated the pastor's narrative – which also became far more detailed. On the other side of the religious divide, a monk near the Swiss border who had filled his diary with details on the weather and the wine harvest suddenly changed his focus and tone when the Swedish army approached, and ‘the trouble really started around here’. Looking back a decade later, the author regretted that he had not applied himself ‘more assiduously to noting everything’ as it happened; but ‘I did not suppose that this protracted and disastrous Swedish situation would drag on for so long’.33

  Many rural areas saw a complete collapse of public order as the secular and religious elite fled whenever ‘their’ side suffered a defeat. A region of strategic importance, like the county of Hohenlohe in the southwest, might change hands so often that ‘at times one cannot say with certainty who actually controlled the territory’.34 Not far away, in the villages ruled by the Benedictine abbey of Ottobeuren, parish priests recorded some of the ‘evil tricks and wicked villainies’ committed by troops in Swedish service. In Unteregg they beat little children with sticks and dragged them around on ropes like dogs; and they bored through a miller's leg and roasted his wife in her own oven. In Niederrieden they disembowelled and tortured to death the parish priest. In Westerheim ‘Jerg Lutzenberger was stripped by the soldiers in the woods [and] in an inhuman and worse than barbarous manner was tortured in his secret parts and shockingly tormented’. Three days later, two soldiers ‘stabbed him in the hands and one in the back; he died shortly thereafter.’ Many entries in the local burial registers record parishioners who ‘died of hunger’, sometimes after eating mice and ‘such things as heretofore [even] the pigs didn't eat’, and in a few cases after eating human flesh. The duchy of Württemberg suffered a ‘coal-black, bitter hunger, in which many therefore starved’. People lived on ‘grass, thistle and greenery of that kind’ because ‘hunger is a good cook’. Others begged for scraps and ‘those who were ashamed to do that died of hunger’.35 Philip Vincent, a peripatetic English pastor who had visited Massachusetts and Guyana as well as Germany, also saw Breitenfeld as a turning point in his graphic book of 1638 entitled The lamentations of Germany. Wherein, as in a glass, we may behold her miserable condition and read the woefull effects of sin. ‘Before the king of Sweden's coming,’ he asserted, the war ‘had consumed no less than 100,000. If that be true, what has it done since? How many millions have miserably perished?’ Vincent saw no silver lining because there was now ‘No tilling of the land, no breeding of cattle; for if they should, the next year the soldiers devour it.’ Instead ‘there is now no other abode but some camp, no other plough to follow, no other employment but the war’.36

  Abnormal weather also increased the ‘lamentations of Germany’. A Catholic soldier in central Germany reported in August 1640 that ‘at this time there was such a great cold that we almost froze to death in our quarters’, while in January 1641 the river Danube froze so hard at Regensburg that the Swedish army and its artillery could cross over and bombard the city. In Hessen-Kassel, a chronicler recorded in 1639 that ‘The corn froze this year’, while a pastor noted sadly that 'the little that we could sow in the winter anno 40 [1640], and also the summer crop [of 1641] was all eaten by mice, so we did not harvest much. One went to the fields to cut, and the grain was stripped away so bare that one could not tell what kind of – or even if – grain had been planted there … Anno 1642, all the misery continued just as bad as in the previous year, so that the despair pressed all the harder’. Yield ratios for grain crops fell from 1:6 to 1:1 in these years. In Bavaria, an abbot living in the Alpine foothills filled his diary in these years with reports of the misery caused by the ‘coldest winter’, the ‘raging storms’, the ‘wintery spring’ and the ‘stormy summer'; and, in 1642, by ‘a flood that was worse than any in human memory’, by ‘hailstones weighing up to a pound’, and by a hoarfrost that covered the fields in mid-June and ruined the harvest. He also noted the ‘multiplication’ of wild boars and wolves, ‘making the roads and paths of all places unsafe’.37 Many civilians fled their homes in panic at least once. Pastor Lorenz Ludolf and his parishioners abandoned their village in Hessen for 18 weeks in 1646 and for much of both 1647 and 1648, hiding in neighbouring woods because their region had become a war zone. Farmer Caspar Preis, also in Hessen, felt ‘so afraid and panicky that even a rustling leaf drove us out’. Shoemaker Hans Heberle complained that he and his family ‘were hunted like wild beasts in the forest’, and they fled fr
om their village no fewer than 30 times during the war in search of safety.38

  Peace Breaks Out in Germany

  Remarkably, only one of the printed eyewitness accounts blamed the rulers of Germany for their misfortunes. Peter Thiele, a tax official in Brandenburg, pulled no punches: ‘This whole war has been a veritable robbers’ and thieves’ campaign. The generals and colonels have lined their purses while princes and lords have been led about by the nose. But whenever there has been talk of wanting to make peace they have always looked to their reputations. That's what the land and people have been devastated for.‘39 Yet although Thiele condemned one obsession of the rulers of his day, ‘reputation’, he remained silent about another: religion.

  Many Protestants, like Frederick of the Palatinate, firmly believed that they fought in response to a direct call from God (page 215 above); most Catholics consulted their confessors, and sometimes special committees of theologians, before making painful decisions concerning war and peace. Thus in 1634–5, the imperial confessor Lamormaini opposed any accommodation with the Protestant rulers who sought to negotiate with Ferdinand in the wake of Nördlingen. Unconvinced, the emperor convened a committee of 24 theologians and asked them whether he could make religious concessions to achieve peace without falling into mortal sin, or whether (as Lamormaini claimed) he must reject all compromise in the expectation that divine intervention would produce a Catholic triumph. Some of the theologians supported the confessor because ‘God, who up to this point has rescued our most pious emperor from so many dangers, in this extremity will also show us the way either to continue the war or to obtain a better peace'; but most approved limited religious concessions to Protestants as ‘the lesser of two evils’. Ferdinand therefore signed the Peace of Prague with Saxony and some other Lutheran princes.40 When in 1640 the Diet of Regensburg debated whether Protestants might retain secularized church lands, even the hard-headed Maximilian of Bavaria ordered his advisers to consult theologians about their ‘scruples’ against making peace with Protestants; while in 1646 Emperor Ferdinand III consulted the ‘court theologians’ on the same issue. In each case, the theologians favoured modest concessions, provided they improved the chances of peace.41

  The agreements reached at Prague and Regensburg settled most of the German disputes, and they formed part of the final peace settlement; so why did the war drag on until 1648? Part of the problem lay in the fact that, although most of the German protagonists sought the redress of a specific past injustice, first Sweden and then France had invaded Germany primarily to prevent a potential future injustice – namely the threat that a Habsburg victory might pose to their national security. This goal meant that the ‘two crowns’ (as contemporaries called France and Sweden) could not be bought off with the transfer of one or even several tracts of land (although both did indeed make territorial demands): instead they refused to sign an agreement until they had created structures to guarantee its implementation.

  European history offered no precedent or guidance for achieving such aims and so, despite prayers, pamphlets, broadsheets, medals and plays calling urgently on the ‘two crowns’ to make peace, they continued to make war. In April 1643 the Swedes sent an open letter to all Protestant rulers pointing out that ‘the emperor [had] usurped everything by right of sovereignty. This is the highroad to absolute rule and the servitude of the territories. The “two crowns” are seeking, as far as they are able, to obstruct this, because their security rests on the liberty of the German territories.‘42 Sweden (and, to a lesser extent, France) therefore sought to create a balance of power between the emperor and the states of the empire, and between Catholics and Protestants. They insisted that only the imperial Diet, not the emperor, could legally declare war, and that all territorial rulers with seats in the Diet should have the right both to arm themselves and to make alliances. The ‘two crowns’ hoped that these measures would make any future war in Germany virtually impossible because, in the words of a Swedish diplomat, ‘The first rule of politics is that the security of all depends on maintaining the equilibrium between each individual state. When one begins to become more powerful and formidable, the others throw themselves onto the scale [Waagschale] by means of alliances and federations in order to offset it and maintain a balance.‘43 The ‘two crowns’ hoped to impose their vision on the diplomats representing almost 200 European rulers (150 of them German), who late in 1643 began to arrive in Westphalia: those of the Protestant states gathered at Osnabrück, while those representing Catholic states assembled 30 miles away at the city of Münster.

  Negotiations ceased for a few months, while Sweden launched a surprise attack on Denmark (page 231 below), but in December 1644 the four major protagonists (France and Sweden on the one side, Spain and the emperor on the other) exchanged documents that set out their peace terms. However, they refused to suspend hostilities while they negotiated. France ‘and its allies had no intention of reducing the fires of war by a ceasefire,’ Cardinal Mazarin explained, ‘but rather sought to extinguish them totally by a good peace’. This meant that the demands of each side waxed and waned with the changing fortunes of war – as Mazarin well knew: ‘We have always said that we would increase our demands to reflect how events improved in our affairs,’ he reminded his diplomats at the peace conference, and so his variable bargaining position reflected ‘how much the situation has changed in our favour recently’. He continued unconvincingly, ‘It is not we who have changed, but circumstances’.44

  The 1645 campaign gave France and its allies a decisive advantage. A Swedish army invaded Bohemia, routed a Habsburg army under the personal command of Emperor Ferdinand III (r. 1637–57), and then spent the summer ravaging the Habsburg lands; while one French army destroyed the field army of the Catholic League in Germany, and another captured ten towns in the Spanish Netherlands. In October 1645, Ferdinand faced the inevitable and drew up in his own hand a secret instruction for his chief negotiator at Westphalia that authorized a layered sequence of humiliating concessions on all the major issues. In religious matters, Ferdinand hoped to turn the clock back to 1630, the high watermark for the Catholic cause following the Edict of Restitution; but, if that proved impossible, he would settle for 1627; and ‘in extremo casu’ (when writing his final concessions, the emperor invariably switched from German to Latin) he would accept 1618, the optimal date for the Protestant cause. In political matters, Ferdinand would allow the Palatine and Bavarian branches of the Wittelsbach family to hold a seat in the Electoral College alternately, but ‘ad extremum’ he would create an additional (eighth) Electorate so that each branch would enjoy permanent representation. Furthermore, Sweden could keep eastern Pomerania plus, ‘if it cannot be avoided’, the archbishopric of Bremen and parts of Mecklenburg for the lifetime of the present ruler – and ‘in ultimo necessitatis gradu’ in perpetuity. Finally, ‘in extremo casu’, France could annexe the Habsburg lands in Alsace and, ‘in desperatissimo casu’, Breisach too.45

  Since further defeats placed Ferdinand ‘in desperatissimo casu’, he eventually made all these concessions, and in September 1646 his negotiators signed a ‘preliminary treaty’ with France that granted even Breisach – but the terms would only come into effect when Sweden also made peace. Only now did the Congress turn serious attention to thorny religious issues, such as a ‘normative date’ for the religious settlement.46 Like Ferdinand, the German Catholics (supported by France) wanted to turn the clock back to 1630, while the Protestants (supported by Sweden) pressed for 1618: in the end the peace congress annulled the Edict of Restitution and settled on a ‘normative date’ of 1624. Those who had fled their homes to avoid religious persecution since then received the right to return (thus granting, for the first time in European history, legal protection to religious refugees). The Congress also determined that, in future, any religious change required an ‘amicable composition’ between Catholics and Protestants, instead of a simple majority vote – a remarkable compromise in such a devout age.


  Yet even after settling the crucial religious issues, the war dragged on for six more months while the French tried to extract a promise from the emperor that he would never again assist the Spanish Habsburgs, and the representatives of the Swedish army tried to extract 30 million thalers to pay its wage arrears. Perhaps unexpectedly, the second issue proved easier to resolve. On the one hand, after three decades of taxation, recession, depopulation and material destruction, it was obvious that the surviving inhabitants of Germany lacked the resources to raise such a sum; and in any case, as France's chief minister observed dryly, ‘there are not enough coins minted in the whole of Germany to satisfy the claim’ of the Swedish veterans.47 On the other hand, the Little Ice Age indirectly facilitated a compromise, because appalling weather continued to afflict Germany. The summer of 1647 was exceptionally cold: according to a Spanish diplomat in Münster, July was ‘like November’ and in August ‘the weather is so cold that it could be the end of October’. The winter that followed proved unusually long and hard – in March 1648, a Bavarian nun recorded that ‘there came such a great cold spell that everyone might have frozen’ – followed by an exceptionally wet summer.48 The bedraggled Swedish troops eventually settled for 5 million thalers (1.8 million immediately in cash, 1.2 million in assignations and the remaining 2 million payable within two years), and with everything resolved, on 24 October, the ‘plenipotentiaries’ of the major states signed multiple copies of the complex ‘peace instruments’ that had taken so long to finalize. The news reached the Swedish troops besieging Prague on the 31st and the fighting there ceased immediately. The Thirty Years War was over.49