No single event did more to threaten the cohesion of the Holy Roman Empire than the Thirty Years War, which in reality was not one war with a single set of priory reasons, but a complex set of interwoven conflicts that began before 1618 and continued through and beyond 1648. The war was known at the time as the Teutschen Krieg or German War,(9) as the greatest suffering primarily took place within the confines of the Holy Roman Empire. In some regions, such as Brandenburg, certain historians have estimated that up to two-thirds of the population died as a result of the war. The consequent death toll was worse than that of the Black Death and the resounding effects remained in this part of Germany which has the least folkloric tradition, much of it having been lost with the death of so many of its citizens.
The reasons for the war stemmed from the internal fault lines within the empire, which were interwoven with confessional and dynastic conflicts that criss-crossed the whole of Europe. Confessional resentments had lingered on since the wars of Charles V, with the Habsburgs actively courting and supporting the empire’s smaller states in their efforts at Counter-Reformation. Within their own personal dominions, they practised a root and branch extermination of the Reformation in tandem with the horrors of the Inquisition from Austria to Italy, and with particularly genocidal and racial brutality against the Jews and Moriscos in Spain.(10) But the true turning point came in Bohemia, with the Prague ‘defenestration’ of 1618, which fired the starting gun for all-out war. The estates and the citizens of Prague undertook an act of defiance against the new Habsburg monarch, Ferdinand II, and his continued attempts at reinstating Catholicism in all of the empire’s provinces, not least within his own dominions in Austria where he had unleashed a policy of religious ‘cleansing’ by destroying Protestant churches, burning Protestant books and disinterring Protestant corpses. They insisted on their right to maintain an elected monarchy in Bohemia and thus rejected Ferdinand’s hereditary claim to their throne. Their actions had far-reaching consequences well beyond the borders of the Bohemian crown lands that would come to envelope many of the 300 states of the Holy Roman Empire, whose population at the outset of hostilities encompassed some 20 million souls. Consequences that went to the core of the confessional conflict at the heart of the empire, where the emperor was elected by seven of the most powerful princes, the three Catholic Archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne, the three Protestant rulers of Saxony, Brandenburg and the Rhineland Palatinate with the confessional casting vote therefore resting in the hands of the King of Bohemia, a vote the Catholic House of Habsburg had no intention of relinquishing. Therefore, putting aside the humiliating act of throwing the Holy Roman Emperor’s ministers out of a 18-metre high window (their death only being narrowly avoided by their landing in a dung heap), the more pressing matter for Emperor Ferdinand was that the Bohemian nobility had replaced him as King of Bohemia with the Protestant Elector of the Rhineland Palatinate, Friedrich V, who more importantly was also the leader of the Protestant Union within the empire.(11)
In the end, it was not so much the crushing defeat that Ferdinand’s armies inflicted on the Bohemian alliance, but the manner of the retribution he wrought that put the fear of God into the Protestant electors and Protestants across Europe. The leaders of the Bohemian revolt were publicly tortured and executed, twenty-four of them eventually being put to the sword and three of them hanged, their remains then being put on public display and left to rot. The Bohemian nobility was not only emasculated, but their property and lands — along with that of the Protestant Church — were confiscated and given to Catholic nobles and the Catholic Church. A vigorous and brutal Counter-Reformation took place across the kingdom and all the ancient rights and privileges of the old kingdom of Bohemia and its Estates were abolished. Bohemia effectively became a Habsburg colony. Ferdinand II was tearing up all the ancient conventions of the Holy Roman Empire with gleeful abandonment. Without recourse to a vote in the college of electors, he stripped the Elector of the Palatinate of his status and awarded an imperial ally, the Duke of Bavaria, with the rank of elector along with the lands of the Palatinate. The Counter-Reformation was now well underway in north-western Germany, backed by the Emperor’s troops.(12) The Emperor sought to manipulate, gain and maintain a majority in the Reichstag in favour of the Catholics. Protestants everywhere felt threatened and pushed onto the back foot in a way they had not been since 1548.
The Elector of the Palatinate fled to the Protestant Netherlands where he sought out allies. This did not take him long. The King of Denmark, Christian IV, lent his weight to the Protestant cause in northern Germany and in 1625 he was joined by England and the Netherlands in what was known as the Hague Alliance, with the support of Prince Gabriel Bethlen of the ‘Siebenburgen’ Germans from Transylvania.xxx But the Kaiser dealt the Alliance a mortal blow between 1626–28 with the support of his most loyal and illustrious general, Albrecht von Wallenstein, a Catholic Bohemian nobleman who had a significant army at his disposal which was self-financed, largely by plundering the resources of the places he besieged.xxxi In 1629 at the ‘Peace’ of Lübeck, Christian IV had to accept defeat and pull his Danish forces out of the war.(13)
Ferdinand II sought to force home his advantage by issuing the Edict of Restitution, an attempt to turn the confessional clock back to 1552. Again he did this without referring to or consulting the empire’s Estates. The result would have been chaos, with countless formerly Catholic lands and property having to be forcibly removed from Protestant control — against the wish of the regional rulers — and then re-Catholicised. After witnessing how this had taken place in Bohemia, it only strengthened the resolve of the Protestant princes to continue the fight. In 1630 at Regensburg, the electors put pressure on Ferdinand to dump the Edict of Restitution, but he would not give way, resulting in Saxony and Brandenburg settling their differences and uniting against the Emperor to form the League of Leipzig in 1631. As the confessional conflict in the empire expanded and its strongest constituent parts began to wear each other down, more neighbouring powers saw opportunities to take sides in the hoped for return of territorial spoils.
Gustavus Adolfus, the King of Sweden,xxxii was next to sweep into the empire as ‘Protector of the German Protestants’. Gustavus had a string of military successes from Pomerania to Bavaria, leading to ever more Protestant German princes rallying to his standard. Together they formed the alliance of Heilbronn to specifically unite the Protestant estates under Swedish leadership. In turn, this coalition was met and defeated by a combined imperial army with contingents from Bavaria and Spain in 1634.(14) Ferdinand appeared to learn his lesson from what had happened in 1629 and the reactions to his Edict of Restitution. As a result, he favoured restoring the peace and unity of the empire, which he realised he could only do through alliance with the electors and by respecting their rights and privileges. This resulted in the Freedom of Prague between the Emperor and the Elector of Saxony, which was eventually joined by all the other electors and princes of the empire. They came to a common agreement in their desire to remove all foreign troops from the Reich. These troops had stripped much of the land bare, and after two and a half decades all sides had grown weary of war and dismayed by its consequences on their populations. The German historian Barbara Rillinger has argued that the Freedom of Prague could have ended the war in 1635, ‘If it had only been about the resolution of constitutional and confessional conflicts between the Kaiser and the Estates. But it did not prevent foreign powers from continuing to pursue their own interests on the German battleground. Thus began the last and the most destructive phase of the war, and out of a “German war” became a European war in Germany.’(15)
Around the same time, Cardinal Richelieu of France, who was allied to the Netherlands and the northern Italian princes, was embroiled in a war against Habsburg Spain. In 1636, he decided to expand the war against the Habsburgs by declaring war on the Emperor Ferdinand II and carrying his war into Germany. Richelieu, who was more a hard-nosed disciple of Machiavelli
than Jesus Christ, saw an opportunity to weaken the Habsburg encirclement of France, which hitherto had held French expansion in check. The Habsburgs after all ruled in the Spanish Netherlands to the north of France, in the Holy Roman Empire to the east and in Spain to the south. Richelieu calculated that the Holy Roman Empire was all but exhausted and that if France were to expand this was the perfect opportunity to diminish the power of the Habsburgs. When Ferdinand II died of natural causes in 1637 the electors and the Estates attempted to use the opportunity afforded by his death to plead with his son and heir Ferdinand III to bring an end to the war. However, these considerations were swept aside when France — having seen success in Spain — mobilised additional forces into the battle in Germany in the hope of gaining territory along France’s eastern frontier. The conflict continued, and from 1640 onwards the Swedes, Danes, and the Siebenburgen Germans threw all of their remaining resources into it and consequently both sides stripped the land like locusts, leaving the local German populations without food or supplies, many starving to death or dying from disease as a result. The seminal work of German literature of this period, Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelhausen‘s Simplicissimus, charts the seemingly never-ending horror inflicted by marauding armies of all sides upon the civilian populations they overran, none of which were spared apocalyptic scenes of rape, torture and pillage in the name of religion; and of the increasing use in the later years of the war of scorched earth policies by all armies to deprive their enemies of resources to fight the next season’s campaign. Whilst France and Sweden were both keen to force their advantage, the next attempt to negotiate a resolution to this ceaseless war began in 1642, but it took another six years of war and political wrangling to bring it to an untidy conclusion. France demanded much of Lorraine and parts of the Alsace as compensation for its costs, and Sweden in turn demanded and received much of Pomerania, along with the ancient Hanse ports of Wismar, Stralsund and Stettin. Both countries favoured and supported the established particular interests of the German princes and for the Holy Roman Empire to be reconstituted merely as a ‘loose federal system of independent estates, which restricted the power of the Habsburg Emperor.’(16) In plain language, that meant the empire’s neighbours wanted a weak and fragmented Reich and an emasculated emperor. Somewhere where they could continue to fight their wars in the future, on someone else’s turf and where they would seek further territorial expansion.
German historians have traditionally seen the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which concluded the Thirty Years War, as a significant breaking point in history, and a low point in the history of Germany. Nevertheless, the end of the war was celebrated with joy and peace festivals, which took place across Germany. Some important lessons were learnt and enacted as a century of genocidal confessional conflict finally came to an end.xxxiii The Thirty Years War was a milestone in the empire’s and European history on the long road to religious tolerance and ultimately to secularisation of state institutions. Europe learned a hard lesson from the Hussite Wars in the 1400s through to the mid seventeenth century of how dangerous confessional differences could be. It is no accident that European nations have a far more rigorous and clearly defined separation between Church and State than many other parts of the world. Beyond that, the Peace of Westphalia allowed the confessional map of the empire to be reset to 01.01.1624, which pretty much nullified the conquests of both Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolfus. The Elector of the Palatinate was restored, Protestant gains from 1552 onwards were confirmed and the Duke of Bavaria maintained his new status as Elector. The empire’s princes and their Estates were no longer allowed to make alliances with foreign powers that were directed either against the Reich or the emperor, nor were they allowed to discriminate against their subjects who were of a different faith. Nevertheless, there was a large-scale movement of populations across the empire to territories ruled by rulers that shared their faith. The empire’s institutions were reformed so that no confession could achieve a majority and the principle of parity became gospel. A complicated bi-confessional constitution was hammered out with the balance of power between the Kaiser and Reich now firmly weighed against the emperor. The constitutional settlement born of the Treaty of Westphalia however also led to political polarisation and renewed paralysis in the empire’s institutions, and left the Reich too weak to effectively defend itself against outside incursions.(17)
The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation became frozen in time in its fractured medieval particularism, its institutions gridlocked and unable to evolve. Changes, in terms of modernising institutions, effective administration, tax raising powers and standing armies, would now not take place at the level of the empire’s institutions but at the level of and within the states of the Electors. The most powerful electors and princes increasingly strode out along their own path, establishing ever more powerful and autonomous states within a state. Only the smaller, weaker states still looked to the Kaiser and his support to maintain them. The most powerful German dynasties turned their attentions beyond the empire’s borders. The Brandenburg Hohenzollerns were ever more absorbed by their endeavours in Prussia, the Austrian Habsburgs with northern Italy and the Balkans, the Wettin Saxons with Poland and the Welfen Hanoverians with their new possessions in England.xxxiv A British monarchy made in Germany, which from 1714 throughout the Hanoverian and Victorian eras redefined monarchy in the United Kingdom in its own image and commissioned the music of its pomp and circumstance, gave it many of its ceremonial traditions, the coronation coach, the union flag, the Royal Academy of Arts and the concept of great trade and cultural exhibitions.
The Holy Roman Empire’s last great hurrah came at the Siege of Vienna in 1683, when the Habsburgs cobbled together a coalition of troops from Austria, Bavaria, Baden, Lorraine, Saxony and of course Jan Sobieski’s glorious Poles to lead the largest cavalry charge in history and relieve the latest in a long line of Turkish sieges. It was a triumph of Emperor Leopold I’s diplomacy to raise an army of Christendom to finally check the power of the Ottoman advance into Europe and from this point on, steadily reverse it. A not insignificant event for those who had come under the heel of Ottoman rule in Hungary and the Balkans, where all too often the Turks upon taking a territory would march an entire population into slavery, as they had done with the inhabitants of Belgrade on taking the city in 1521.
Therefore somewhat ironically, while the Holy Roman Empire stagnated economically and politically from the late seventeenth century onwards, a number of German dynasties were in the ascendancy in many parts of Europe, expanding their dynastic holdings well beyond the borders of the old empire. Had the energies of one of these dynamic dynasties been harnessed for the common good of the empire, rather than for their own particular dynastic interests, the Reich might have received greater unity and strength to ward off renewed external threats. When revolution erupted on the streets of France, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation represented the exact opposite of the despotic and over-centralised Ancien Régime. The German princes watched as the French Revolution quickly slid out of control, ending finally in the mass murder and terrors of 1793–94. The revolution was an atrocity committed in the name of the Enlightenment and was regarded by many as the downfall of reason. There was no desire within the German states for a bloody Jacobite revolution; instead, it was hoped that the fear of a revolution within the empire would act as a spur for long-overdue reforms to the Reich’s Institutions.(18)
THE FRENCH PUSH ON THE RHINE AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
If the Holy Roman Empire were to have had a natural western frontier that best represented its historical, linguistic, cultural, architectural and culinary history, then this certainly wouldn’t be the Rhine. The southern Moselle river would have been culturally more representative as a dividing line — had borders ever been drawn along such lines. The kingdom of France was nowhere near the Rhine from the tenth to the seventeenth centuries. The idea of the Rhine frontier as a part of French foreign po
licy did not emerge until the mid seventeenth century under the era of Louis XIII, when his First Minister, Cardinal Richelieu, proposed the notion that France had a ‘natural frontier’ in the east.(19) The Rhine, and particularly the Elsass (Alsace) region, had been a major transport route, a crossroads for trade, and of strategic military significance since Roman times. Louis XIV saw an opportunity in the weakened state of the Holy Roman Empire, following the devastating Thirty Years War, and set out to realise Richelieu’s dream of making the Rhine France’s eastern frontier.
Louis XIV is perhaps France’s best-known king. Few monarchs taxed their people more heavily than Louis XIV — not for their own sake but more for his own vanity and personal extravagance.xxxv Nor did any French monarch help cement the borders of modern France more than Louis, who was also known as le Roi Soleil (the Sun King). Yet his greed was not limited to land and taxes. Even though the Thirty Years War had been a great opportunity for France to play all ends against the middle and come out on top (the Treaty of Westphalia had given France the bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun, along with a large part of Lorraine at the expense of the Holy Roman Empire at a time when the bulk of these territories had not been French-speaking), Louis XIV was in no way sated by these great achievements. These merely whetted his appetite and spurred him on to launch a succession of bloody wars in an attempt to push France’s boundaries further east. France became the pariah state of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, seeking out conflicts and opportunities for further expansion both in Europe and the wider world.
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