by Will Durant
Wallenstein, having for the first time tasted defeat, seemed to lose his nerve. After Lützen he retired to Bohemia and slowly organized another army. But he too, now fifty, was tired of war, and he hoped for leisure to treat his gout. He negotiated independently with the Protestant leaders, even with Richelieu;71 and Ferdinand must have known that Bohemian exiles, with Oxenstierna’s approval, were plotting to place Wallenstein on the Bohemian throne.72 When Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar led an army into Bavaria, Maximilian and Ferdinand begged Wallenstein to come to the rescue; Wallenstein replied that he could spare no men for such a move. He quartered his idle army on the Imperial estates in Bohemia; the Emperor asked him to lighten the contributions imposed upon these Imperial lands; Wallenstein refused.
On December 31, 1633, Ferdinand and his Council decided that their greatest general must be deposed. Rumors were disseminated through Wallenstein’s army that he was plotting to make himself King of Bohemia, and Louis XIII King of the Romans. On February 18 Imperial orders were posted throughout his army, relieving him of his command. Four days later, taking a thousand men with him, he fled from Pilsen. At Eger, on the twenty-fifth, a few soldiers, hoping for reward, broke into his room, found him alone and unarmed, and pierced him through with their swords. “Presently,” reported a contemporary, “they drew him out by the heels, his head knocking on every stair.”73 The assassins hurried to Vienna, where they received promotion, money, and land. The Emperor, who had spent days and nights in fear and prayer, thanked God for His co-operation.
The war dragged on fourteen years more. Ferdinand’s twenty-six-year old son and namesake replaced Wallenstein as commander in chief of the Imperial armies. He was a likable youth, educated, kindly, generous, loving philosophy, writing music, carving ivory, yet no fool on the battlefield. Helped by older generals, he overwhelmed Bernhard at Nördlingen in the most decisive Imperialist victory of the war. The Protestant forces neared collapse. Oxenstierna saved the situation by the Treaty of Compiègne (April 28, 1635), which committed Richelieu to fuller participation in the conflict; but the Protestant princes of Germany did not relish the prospect of a French cardinal determining their fate. One by one they followed John George of Saxony in making peace with the Emperor, who welcomed them because he saw himself faced with the armies, as well as the money, of France. By the Treaty of Prague (May 30, 1635) he agreed to suspend the Edict of Restitution for forty years, and in return most of the Protestant princes promised to help him and his allies to recover all territories lost by them since the coming of Adolphus. As these included Lorraine, the treaty was in effect aimed at France as well as Sweden; it was a reassertion of German unity against invaders. The religious question disappeared from the war. By the end of 1635 the army of Protestant Saxony was fighting the Protestant Swedes in northern Germany, where Banér and Torstensson, with a military genius worthy of Gustavus, struggled to hold some Continental possessions for Sweden’s security.
In the west Bernhard stood off bravely the growing forces of the Empire. In 1638 France sent him funds and, better still, 2,000 troops under Turenne, who was already rising to fame as a general. So reinforced, Bernhard undertook a campaign memorable in military annals for tenacity of purpose and brilliance of strategy. He defeated the Imperialists at Wittenweier, and compelled the great fortress of Breisach to capitulate. Then, exhausted at thirty-four, he died (1639), and his army and his conquests, including Alsace, passed to France.
The old Emperor had left the scene in 1637, and Ferdinand III, inheriting an Empire of untaxable destitution, found it almost impossible to finance armies against a Richelieu who could still wring francs from impoverished France. In 1642 Torstensson carried the Swedish arms to within twenty-five miles of Vienna and won a major victory in the second battle of Breitenfeld, where the Imperialists lost 10,000 men. The defeated Archduke Leopold William, brother of the young Emperor, court-martialed his officers for cowardice, beheaded those of high rank, hanged those of less degree, and shot every tenth man in the ranks of the survivors.74
Every year seemed now to bring new blows to the new Emperor. In 1643 his ally Spain was broken by the victory of the Duke of Enghien at Rocroi; in 1644 Enghien and Turenne conquered the Rhineland as far north as Mainz; in 1645 Torstensson again swept down almost to the gates of Vienna, the French won a bloody battle at Allerheim, and a Swedish army under Count Hans Christoph von Königsmarck overran Saxony, took Leipzig, and forced John George out of the war. The Bavarian army had been driven out of the Palatinate in 1634; in 1646 Turenne invaded and devastated Bavaria itself, and the once proud Maximilian sued for peace and begged the Emperor to come to terms with France. Ferdinand III, not as somberly inflexible as his father, and hearing the cry of the prostrate Empire, sent his ablest negotiators to Westphalia to seek some compromise between the faiths and the dynasties.
He was too young to know that the carnage and the desolation were probably greater than men had ever wrought in one generation in any land before. There were not two armies but six—German, Danish, Swedish, Bohemian, Spanish, French; armies manned largely by mercenaries or foreigners having no attachment to the German people or soil or history, and led by military adventurers fighting for any faith for a fee; armies fed by appropriating the grains and fruits and cattle of the fields, quartered and wintering in the homes of the people, and recompensed with the right to plunder and the ecstasy of killing and rape. To massacre any garrison that had refused to surrender, after surrender had become inevitable, was a principle accepted by all combatants. Soldiers felt that civilians were legitimate prey; they shot at their feet in the streets, conscripted them as servants, kidnaped their children for ransom, fired their haystacks and burned their churches for fun. They cut off the hands and feet of a Protestant pastor who resisted the wrecking of his church; they tied priests under wagons, forcing them to crawl on all fours till they fainted with exhaustion.75 The right of a soldier to rape was taken for granted; when a father asked for justice against a soldier who had raped and killed his daughter, he was informed by the commanding officer that if the girl had not been so stingy with her virginity she would still be alive.76
Despite the spreading promiscuity, the population of Germany rapidly declined during the war. The decline has been exaggerated and was temporary, but it was catastrophic. Moderate estimates reckon a fall, in Germany and Austria, from 21,000,000 to 13,500,000.77 Count von Lützow calculated a reduction of population in Bohemia from 3,000,000 to 800,000.78 Of 35,000 villages existing in Bohemia in 1618, some 29,000 were deserted during the conflict.79 Throughout the Empire hundreds of villages were left without a single inhabitant. In some regions one might travel sixty miles without seeing a village or a house.80 Of 1,717 houses standing in nineteen Thuringian villages in 1618 only 627 stood in 1649, and many of these were untenanted.81
Thousands of fertile acres were left untilled for lack of men, draft animals, or seed, or because peasants had no assurance that they could reap where they had sown. Crops were used to feed armies, and what remained was burned to prevent the feeding of foes. Peasants in many localities were reduced to eating hidden remnants or dogs, cats, rats, acorns, grass; some dead were found with grass in their mouths. Men and women competed with ravens and dogs for the flesh of dead horses. In Alsace hanged offenders were torn from the gallows to be eagerly devoured; in the Rhineland exhumed bodies were sold for food; at Zweibrücken a woman confessed to having eaten her child.82 Transportation was too disrupted to let a local surplus feed a distant drought; roads were torn up with battle, or dangerous with brigands, or clogged with deserters and fugitives.
The towns suffered only less than the villages. Many of them were reduced to half their former population. Great cities were in ruins—Magdeburg, Heidelberg, Würzburg, Neustadt, Bayreuth. Industry declined for lack of producers, purchasers, and trade; commerce hid its head; once-wealthy merchants begged and robbed for bread. Communes, declaring themselves bankrupt, repudiated their debts. Financiers were loath to lend, fearing
that loans would be gifts. Taxation impoverished everybody but generals, tax collectors, prelates, and kings. The air was poisonous with refuse and offal and carcasses rotting in the streets. Epidemics of typhus, typhoid, dysentery, and scurvy ran through the terrified population and from town to town. Spanish troops passing through Munich left a plague that in four months carried off 10,000 victims.83 The arts and letters that had ennobled the cities withered in the heat of war.
Morals and morale alike collapsed. The fatalism of despair invited the cynicism of brutality. All the ideals of religion and patriotism disappeared after a generation of violence; simple men now fought for food or drink or hate, while their masters mobilized their passions in the competition for taxable lands and political power. Here and there some humane features showed: Jesuits gathering and feeding deserted children; preachers demanding of governments an end to bloodshed and destruction. “God send that there may be an end at last,” wrote a peasant in his daybook. “God send that there may be peace again. God in heaven, send us peace.”84
VII. THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA
Ever since 1635 the rulers and their diplomats had been extending feelers for peace. In that year Pope Urban VIII proposed a congress to discuss terms of reconciliation; negotiators met at Cologne, to no result. At Hamburg in 1641 the representatives of France, Sweden, and the Empire drew up a preliminary agreement for a double conference to meet in Westphalia in 1642: at Münster France would treat with the Empire under the mediation of the papacy and Venice; at Osnabrück, thirty miles away, France and the Empire would treat with Sweden under the mediation of Christian IV of Denmark. This antiseptic segregation was made necessary by the unwillingness of the Swedish emissaries to confer under the presidency of a papal nuncio, and the refusal of the nuncio to sit in the same room with a “heretic.”
Delays were caused by questions of safe-conducts and protocol. Torstensson’s victory at Breitenfeld spurred the Emperor to promise that his deputies would arrive by July 11, 1643. Then the French delegates dallied while France arranged an alliance with the United Provinces against Spain. The Congress of Westphalia was formally opened December 4, 1644, with 135 members, including theologians and philosophers. Even then six months were consumed in deciding in what order of precedence the delegates were to enter rooms and be seated. The French ambassador would not negotiate unless he was given the title Altesse—Highness. When the Spanish ambassador arrived he shunned the French ambassador because neither would give precedence to the other; they communicated through a third person. France refused to recognize Philip IV’s title as King of Portugal and Prince of Catalonia; Spain refused to accept Louis XIV’s title as King of Navarre. The Swedish representatives quarreled and marked time until the resolute young Queen Christina peremptorily ordered them to make peace among themselves and with the enemy. Meanwhile men were going to their death in war.
As each party’s armies were victorious or defeated, its envoys delayed or hurried negotiations; lawyers were kept busy inventing difficulties or compromises, tying or untying knots. France’s generals were striking their stride; so she insisted on having all the German princes represented at the conference, though most of them had long since made peace with the Emperor; time was asked to stop till all the electors, princes, and Imperial cities had sent their diplomats. To weaken France, Spain signed (January 7, 1648) a separate peace with the United Provinces—which had just promised France to sign no separate peace; but the Dutch could not resist the chance to acquire, by a few strokes of the pen, what they had fought for through eighty years. France retaliated by refusing to make peace with Spain; their war went on till the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659).
The Congress might have adjourned without result had not the devastation of Bavaria by Turenne, and the attack of the Swedes upon Prague (July 1648), and the defeat of the Spanish at Lens (August 2) persuaded the Emperor to sign; while the outbreak of the Fronde in France (July) impelled Mazarin to concessions that would leave him free for war at home. So, at last, the Treaty of Westphalia was concluded, at both Münster and Osnabrück, on October 24, 1648. Bloodshed went on for nine days more while the news traveled to the fronts. Humble and joyous Te Deums rose from a thousand villages and towns.
Let us admit that the negotiations had faced more complicated problems of adjustment than any peace conference before the twentieth century, and that they settled the conflicting claims as wisely as the prevailing hatreds, prides, and powers allowed. The terms of this Europe-remaking treaty must be summarized, for they condensed and produced much history.
1. Switzerland and the United Provinces won formal recognition of their independence.
2. Bavaria received the Upper (south) Palatinate, with its electoral vote.
3. The Lower (north) Palatinate, as an eighth electorate, was restored to Charles Louis, son of the dead Frederick.
4. Brandenburg acquired eastern Pomerania, the bishoprics of Minden, Halberstadt, and Cammin, and the succession to the bishopric of Magdeburg. France helped the rising dynasty of the Hohenzollerns to get these plums, with a view to raising another power against the Hapsburgs; France could not be expected to foresee that Brandenburg, become Prussia, would, under Frederick the Great, challenge France and, under Bismarck, would defeat her.
5. Sweden, chiefly through her victorious armies, but partly through French support at the congress, received the bishoprics of Bremen and Verden, the towns of Wismar and Stettin, and the territory at the mouth of the Oder. Since these were Imperial fiefs, Sweden had now a seat in the Imperial Diet; and as she already held Livonia, Esthonia, Ingria, Karelia, and Finland, she was now one of the Great Powers, mistress of the Baltic till Peter the Great.
6. The German principalities retained and confirmed their prewar liberties as against the emperors.
7. The Emperor had to be content with the acknowledgment of his royal rights in Bohemia and Hungary; so the Austro-Hungarian Empire took form as the actuality within the shell of the Holy Roman Empire. The economic back of the aging Empire was broken, partly by the reduction of population and the disruption of industry and trade through the war, but also by the passing of the great river outlets to foreign powers—of the Oder and the Elbe to Sweden and of the Rhine to the United Provinces.
8. The greatest gains went to France, whose money had financed the victorious Swedes and whose generals had forced the peace. Alsace was in effect yielded to her, with the bishoprics of Metz, Verdun, and Toul and the fortress of Breisach on the German side of the Rhine; Louis XIV was now in a position to take Franche-Comté and Lorraine at his convenience. The aim of the now dead Richelieu had been achieved—to break the power of the Hapsburgs, to extend the frontiers of France, to improve French unity and defense, and to preserve in the Empire a chaos of principalities, a conflict between princes and emperor, and an opposition between the Protestant north and the Catholic south, that would protect France from the peril of a united Germany. France had replaced Spain—the Bourbons had replaced the Hapsburgs—as the dominant force in Europe; soon Louis XIV would be equated with the sun.
The hidden victim of the war was Christianity. The Roman Church had to abandon the Edict of Restitution, to return to the property situation of 1624, and to see the princes again determining the religion of their subjects; this, however, enabled the Church to banish Protestantism from Bohemia, the land of the Hussite Reformation. The Counter Reformation was checked; for example, it was out of the question that Poland should establish Catholicism in a Protestant Sweden twice as strong as before. The papal nuncio at Münster refused to sign the treaty; Pope Innocent X declared it “null and void, accursed, and without any influence or result for the past, the present, or the future” (November 20, 1648).85 Europe ignored the protest. From that time the papacy ceased to be a major political power, and religion in Europe declined.
Some Protestants protested, too, especially those who had lost their homes in Bohemia and Austria. But all in all the treaty—fruit of a dead and a living cardinal—was a P
rotestant victory. Protestantism had been saved in Germany. It was weakened in the south and along the Rhine, but in the north it was stronger than before. The Reformed, or Calvinist, Church was officially recognized in the treaty. The lines of religious division established in 1648 remained essentially unchanged until, in the twentieth century, the differential birth rate began a gradual and peaceful extension of Catholicism.
But though the Reformation had been saved, it suffered, along with Catholicism, from a skepticism encouraged by the coarseness of religious polemics, the brutality of the war, and the cruelties of belief. During the holocaust thousands of “witches” were put to death. Men began to doubt creeds that preached Christ and practiced wholesale fratricide. They discovered the political and economic motives that hid under religious formulas, and they suspected their rulers of having no real faith but the lust for power—though Ferdinand II had repeatedly risked his power for the sake of his faith. Even in this darkest of modern ages an increasing number of men turned to science and philosophy for answers less incarnadined than those which the faiths had so violently sought to enforce. Galileo was dramatizing the Copernican revolution, Descartes was questioning all tradition and authority, Bruno was crying out to Europe from his agonies at the stake. The Peace of Westphalia ended the reign of theology over the European mind, and left the road obstructed but passable for the tentatives of reason.
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I. In the sixteenth century Germany was divided into seven administrative “circles”:
1. Franconia, including Würzburg, Bamberg, and Bayreuth.
2. Bavaria, including Munich, Regensburg (Ratisbon), and Salzburg.