The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins

by Will Durant

  The struggle between Lutherans and Calvinists was as bitter as between Protestants and Catholics, and it damaged Protestant co-operation during the war, for each alternation of roles between persecutors and persecuted left a heritage of hate. In 1585 Count Wolfgang of Isenburg-Ronneburg removed all Lutheran functionaries in his territory and installed Calvinists in their place; in 1598 his brother and successor, Count Henry, informed the Calvinist preachers that they must leave within a few weeks, despite wintry weather; in 1601 Count Wolfgang Ernest succeeded to the government, expelled the Lutheran preachers, and restored Calvinism. Similar replacements of Lutherans with Calvinists occurred in Anhalt (1595), Hanau (1596), and Lippe (1600). In East Prussia Johann Funck, accused of Calvinist leanings, was put to death in the market place of Königsberg amid popular rejoicing (1566).39 Chancellor Nikolas Krell was beheaded at Dresden (1601) for altering the Lutheran ritual in a Calvinist direction and for supporting French Huguenots.40 In 1604 Landgrave Maurice of Hesse-Cassel adopted Calvinism; in 1605 he enforced it there and in Upper Hesse; his troops beat back a resisting crowd of Lutherans and tore down the religious images in the churches; preachers unwilling to change from Lutheranism to Calvinism were banished.41 In the Electorate of Brandenburg Lutherans and Calvinists disputed violently as to whether the consecrated Host was really Christ; finally the government decreed Calvinism to be the true religion (1613 f.42

  Amid these fluctuations of truth what Melanchthon had called rabies theologorum raged as seldom before or after in history. The Lutheran pastor Nivander (1582) listed forty characteristics of wolves and showed that these were precisely the distinctive marks of Calvinists. He described the dreadful deaths of leading anti-Lutherans; Zwingli, he said, having fallen in battle, “was cut into straps, and the soldiers used his fat—for he was a corpulent man—to grease their boots and shoes.”43 Said a Lutheran pamphlet of 1590: “If anybody wishes to be told, in a few words, concerning which articles of the faith we are fighting with the diabolical Calvinistic brood of vipers, the answer is, all and every one of them … for they are no Christians, but only baptized Jews and Mohammedans.”44 At Frankfurt fair, wrote Stanislaus Rescius (1592), “we have noticed for several years past that the books written by Protestants against Protestants are three times as numerous as those of Protestants against Catholics.”45“These raging theologians,” mourned a Protestant writer in 1610, “have so greatly aggravated and augmented the disastrous strife among the Christians who have seceded from the papacy, that there seems no hope of all this screaming, slandering, abusing, damning, anathematizing, etc., coming to an end before the advent of the Last Day.”46

  To understand this “theological rabies” we must remember that all parties to the dispute agreed that the Bible was the infallible word of God, and that life after death should be the main concern of life. And the picture must find room for the real piety that humbled and exalted many Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics behind the delirium of the faiths. The Pietists fled from the hustings of theology and sought in privacy some reassuring presence of divinity. Johann Arndt’s Paradisgärtlein (Little Garden of Paradise) is still read in Protestant Germany as a manual of devout contemplation. Jakob Böhme carried the mood into a mystical union of the individual soul with a God conceived as the Universal Well and Ground of all things, containing all contradictions, all “evil” as well as “good.” Böhme claimed to have seen the “Being of all Beings, the God, the Abyss, also the birth of the Holy Trinity.”47 A mind unsympathetic to mysticism will find only a whirlwind of absurdities in Böhme’s De signatura rerum (On the Signature of All Things, 1621); it is consoling to discover that another mystic, John Wesley, described it as “sublime nonsense.”48 Better were the simple and sensuous hymns of the Jesuit Pietist Friedrich von Spee.

  As everywhere in Europe, it was the Jesuits who led the Catholic crusade to recover lost terrain. They began by seeking to reform the Catholic clergy. “Pray God,” wrote the Jesuit Peter Faber from Worms in 1540, “that in this city there are even two or three priests who have not formed illicit liaisons or are not living other known sins.”49 But the main strategy was to capture the young; so the Jesuits opened colleges at Cologne, Trier, Coblenz, Mainz, Speyer, Dillingen, Münster, Würzburg, Ingolstadt, Paderborn, Freiburg. Peter Canisius, head and soul of this Jesuit campaign, traversed nearly all Germany on foot, spawning colleges, directing Jesuit polemics, and explaining to German rulers the advantages of the old faith. He urged Duke Albert V to root out by force all Protestantism from Bavaria.50 Through the Jesuits, the Capuchins, the reformation of the clergy, the zeal of bishops, and the diplomacy of popes and nuncios, half the ground won by German Protestantism in the first half of the sixteenth century was regained for the Church in the second half. Some forms of coercion were used here and there, but the movement was largely psychological and political: the masses were tired of uncertainty, controversy, and predestination; their rulers saw in a unified and traditional Catholicism a stronger support of government and social order than in a Protestantism chaotically divided and precariously new.

  Realizing at last that their internal divisions were suicidal, the Protestants turned their pulpits and their pens against the Roman foe. A war of words and ink prepared for the war of guns and blood, and mutual vituperation mounted to an almost homicidal ecstasy. Words like dung, offal, ass, swine, whore, murderer entered the terminology of theology. The Catholic writer Johann Nas in 1565 accused the Lutherans of practicing “murder, robbery, lying, deceit, gluttony, drunkenness, incest, and villainy without fear, for faith alone, they say, justifies everything”; and he thought it likely that every Lutheran woman was a prostitute.51 Catholics took the damnation of Protestants as an axiom of theology; but the Lutheran preacher Andreas Lang wrote (1576) with equal certainty, “Papists, like other Turks, Jews, and heathen, are outside the pale of God’s grace, of forgiveness of sins, and of salvation; they are destined to howl, lament, and gnash their teeth everlastingly in the burning fire and brimstone of the flames of hell.”52 Writers on both sides told scandalous tales of each other, as we do now in the war of political creeds. The myth of the Popess Joanna was popular in Protestant literature. “People could see and know,” wrote a clergyman in 1589, “what double-dyed knaves and villains the Jesuiwiders were [who] obstinately persisted in denying that the English whore Agnes had been popess at Rome and had given birth to a boy during a public procession.”53 The popes, said a sermon (1589), had always been, and still were, without a single exception, sodomites, necromancers, and magicians; many of them had been able to spit hellfire out of their mouths. “Satan often appeared visibly to the popes … and joined with them in cursing and trampling the cross of Christ underfoot, and held naked dances over it, which they called divine service.”54 Congregations drank in such intoxicants eagerly. “Children in the streets,” said a Protestant clergyman in 1584, “have learned to curse and mark the Roman Antichrist and his damned crew.”55

  The Jesuits were favorite targets. In hundreds of caricatures, pamphlets, books, poems, they were accused of pederasty, adultery, and bestiality. A German woodcut of 1569 (still preserved in the Goethe collection at Weimar) showed the pope, in the form of a sow, giving birth to Jesuits in the form of little pigs. In 1593 the Lutheran theologian Polycarp Leiser published a Latin Historia Jesuitici ordinis, which described the Jesuits as practicing the most obscene vices with full license and pardon from the pope.56 Eine wahrhaftige neue Zeitung (A Truthful New Journal, 1614) informed its readers that the Jesuit Cardinal Bellarmine had committed adultery 2,236 times with 1,642 women, and it went on to describe the agonizing death of the Cardinal, who was not yet dead by seven years.57

  The Jesuits at first replied with restraint. Canisius advised temperate language; so did the Protestant pastor Johann Mathesius; but the public preferred vituperation to moderation. Protestant polemists accused the Jesuits of accepting the doctrine of the Jesuit Mariana defending tyrannicide; a German Jesuit replied that this was precisely the do
ctrine that ought to be applied to princes who forced Protestantism upon their subjects; but other Jesuits assured the Protestant rulers that they were considered legitimate princes, and that not a hair of their heads would be hurt.58 The Jesuit Conrad Vetter published (1594–99) ten pamphlets in which he used the grossest terms of abuse, excusing himself on the ground that he was following the lead of Lutheran divines; these pamphlets were bought by the public as fast as they could be printed. The Jesuits of Cologne declared that “the stubborn heretics who spread dissension everywhere” in Catholic territory

  ought to be punished as thieves, robbers, and murderers are punished; indeed, more severely than such criminals, for the latter only injure the body, while the former plunge souls into everlasting perdition. … If forty years ago Luther had been executed, or burned at the stake, or if certain persons had been put out of the world, we should not have been subjected to such abominable dissensions, or to those multitudes of sects who upset the whole world.59

  In the same spirit the Calvinist David Parens, professor of theology at Heidelberg, summoned (1618) all Protestant princes to a crusade against the papacy; in this enterprise they should “stop at no kind of severity or punishment.”60 The barrage of pamphlets culminated with 1,800 publications in the one year 1618, the first year of the war.

  As the power and the temper of the Catholics rose, a number of Protestant princes formed a Union of Evangelical Estates (1608), or Protestant Union, for mutual protection. The Elector of Saxony held aloof, but Henry IV of France seemed ready to help in any enterprise against the Hapsburg Emperor. In 1609 several Catholic rulers, led by Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria, formed a Catholic Union, which came to be known as the Catholic League; by August 1610 nearly all the Catholic states of the Empire had joined, and Spain offered military aid. The Protestant Union agreed (February 1610) to help Henry IV take possession of the duchy of Jülich-Cleves, but the assassination of the French King (May 14) left the Protestants shorn of their strongest ally. Fear ran through Protestant Germany, but the League was not ready for action. In January 1615 Landgrave Maurice of Hesse-Cassel warned the Protestant Union that “the Catholic League, protected by the pope, the king of Spain, the court of Brussels, and the emperor, … had ordered its munitions of war … with a view … to the extirpation of the evangelical religion.”61Caspar Scioppius added to the excitement by warning the Catholics and the Lutherans (1616) that the Calvinists “intended to overthrow the Religious and Public Peace, and the whole of the Holy Roman Empire, and to eradicate the Augsburg Confession, as well as the Catholic faith, from the Empire”;62 perhaps this was an attempt to further divide the main Protestant bodies. Territorial conflicts between Austria and Bavaria weakened the Catholic League in 1616, and men again dreamed of peace.

  But in Prague Count Heinrich von Thurn pleaded with the Protestant leaders to prevent the ardently Catholic Archduke Ferdinand from taking the throne of Bohemia. Emperor Matthias had left five deputy governors to administer the country during his absence. The governors overruled the Protestants in disputes about church building at Klostergrab, and sent the objectors to jail. On May 23, 1618, Thurn led a crowd of irate Protestants into Hradschin Castle, climbed to the rooms where two of the governors sat, and threw them out the window, along with a pleading secretary. All three fell fifty feet, but they landed in a heap of filth and escaped more soiled than injured. That famous “defenestration” was a dramatic challenge to the Emperor, to the Archduke, and to the Catholic League. Thurn expelled the Archbishop and the Jesuits and formed a revolutionary Directory. He could hardly have realized that he had let loose the dogs of war.

  VI. THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR

  1. The Bohemian Phase: 1618–23

  Matthias sent to the Directory an offer of amnesty and negotiation; it was refused.63 Archduke Ferdinand, ignoring the Emperor, dispatched two armies to invade Bohemia. Frederick V, Elector of the Palatinate, persuaded Charles Emmanuel, the anti-Hapsburg Duke of Savoy, to send to Bohemia’s aid a force led by an able condottiere, Peter Ernst von Mansfeld; Mansfeld captured Pilsen, the stronghold of the Catholics in Bohemia; Ferdinand’s armies retreated. Christian of Brunswick, Frederick’s Chancellor, suggested to the directors that they would strengthen their defense and better exclude Ferdinand from the throne if they offered it to Frederick. On March 20, 1619, Matthias died, leaving Ferdinand the legal King of Bohemia and heir presumptive to the Imperial crown. On August 19 the Bohemian Diet declared Ferdinand deposed as its king; on the twenty-seventh it proclaimed Frederick of the Palatinate King of Bohemia; on the twenty-eighth the Imperial electors made the Archduke of Styria the Emperor Ferdinand II.

  Frederick hesitated to accept his new honors. He knew that, as a leading Calvinist, he could not count on Lutheran support, while against him would be the Empire, the papacy, and Spain. He appealed to his father-in-law, James I of England, for an army; instead, the canny King sent him good advice—to reject the Bohemian throne. Frederick’s gay and spirited wife, Elizabeth, did not urge him to accept, but she promised to share with good cheer whatever fate his choice should bring; and this promise she kept. Christian of Brunswick counseled acceptance. On October 31, 1619, the new King and Queen entered Prague and were enthusiastically welcomed by the Diet and the populace.

  Frederick was still a youth of twenty, of fine character and chivalrous disposition, but too immature for statesmanship. One of his first actions after being installed in Prague was to order the removal of all altars and images from the national sanctuary, the Church of St. Vitus, and soon his followers similarly denuded other Bohemian shrines. The Catholic minority denounced the procedure, the Bohemian Lutherans frowned upon it; Lutheran Germany looked coldly on this enthusiastic Calvinist. On April 30, 1620, Ferdinand proclaimed Frederick a usurper and ordered him to leave the Empire by June 1; if he failed to do so he would be declared an outlaw and his property would be confiscated. The Emperor offered to guarantee the Protestant states of Germany freedom from attack if they would give the Catholic states a similar pledge; in the Treaty of Ulm (June 3, 1620) this offer was accepted. The Protestant princes argued that Frederick had endangered their liberties by defying Ferdinand. Elector John George of Saxony aligned his Lutheran state with the Catholic Emperor.

  In August an Imperial army of 25,000 men crossed from Austria into Bohemia under Maximilian of Bavaria’s general, Johan Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, who had learned his piety from the Jesuits and the art of war from the Duke of Parma. Near the White Mountain, west of Prague, this army met and routed the Bohemians (November 8). Frederick, Elizabeth, and their entourage fled to Silesia. Failing to raise an army there, the King and Queen dismissed their followers and sought refuge in Calvinist Brandenburg. On the day after the battle Maximilian of Bavaria occupied Prague. Soon Catholicism was restored; images were replaced in the churches; the Jesuits were called in; all education was put under Catholic control; no religion was to be allowed except Catholicism and Judaism. Communion in wine as well as bread was abolished; John Huss’s Day, formerly a national festival, was made a day of mourning, with all churches closed. Thirty leading rebels were arrested; twenty-seven were executed; and for ten years twelve severed skulls grinned from the tower of the Charles Bridge over the Moldau.64 All rebels were forbidden to emigrate. Their property was forfeited to King Ferdinand, who sold it at bargain prices to Catholics; a new Catholic nobility was established, on the basis of peasant serfdom. The middle and commercial classes almost disappeared.

  While Maximilian of Bavaria was thus refuting Calvinism in Bohemia, Spinola, during the truce in the Netherlands, led a large force from Flanders to capture the Palatinate. Some minor Protestant princes raised a force to oppose him, and Frederick, leaving his wife in The Hague, joined their camp. When Spinola was recalled to the Netherlands by the renewal of the Dutch war with Spain, Tilly replaced him, defeated the Protestants (1622), and captured and pillaged Heidelberg. The great library of the university was packed into fifty wagons and transported to Rome as a
gift from Maximilian of Bavaria to Gregory XV. Maximilian, returning in triumph from Bohemia, was given the Palatinate and its electoral privilege in return for his services to the Emperor. Catholic states now had a majority in the Electoral Diet.

  The scope and thoroughness of the Catholic victory disturbed Catholic as well as Protestant potentates. The increased prestige and power of Ferdinand II threatened the “liberties” of the German princes; Maximilian was disturbed to find that he was permitted to hold the Palatinate and Bavaria only as dependencies of the Emperor. Pope Urban VIII sympathized with the French view that the Hapsburgs were becoming too strong for the good of France and the freedom of the papacy, and he winked at Richelieu’s taxing of French Catholics to help German Protestants—and later a Swedish king—against a Catholic Emperor. In 1624 the amazing Cardinal suddenly transformed the political scene with a succession of diplomatic strokes. On June 10 he signed an alliance with the Protestant Dutch against Catholic Flanders and Spain; on June 15 he brought Protestant England into the bond; on July 9, Sweden and Denmark; on July 11 he persuaded Savoy and Venice to join him in an attempt to cut the Spanish-Austrian line of supplies and reinforcements through the Valtelline passes in the Italian-Swiss Alps. In 1625 Christian IV of Denmark brought 20,000 men to join Mansfeld’s 4,000 in Lower Saxony. Alarmed, Maximilian urged the Emperor to send aid to Tilly, whose 18,000 troops had been reduced to 10,000 by weather, hunger, and disease. Ferdinand responded by summoning Wallenstein from Bohemia.