The Thirty Years War

10 Key excerpts on "The Thirty Years War"

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  Seventeenth-Century Europe

  State, Conflict and Social Order in Europe 1598-1700

  • Thomas Munck(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  1 The Thirty Years War in the German lands The early seventeenth century was a period of such complex and widespread warfare that few parts of Europe remained unscathed. Ever since, the motives of the major protagonists have been disputed, the overall significance of religious, economic and diplomatic factors debated, the severity of the material destructiveness reviewed, and the long-term significance of the concluding peace settlements re-assessed – even the very existence of a definable ‘Thirty Years War’ between 1618 and 1648 has been challenged. 1 Without denying the usefulness of this revisionism, historians have more recently concen-trated on detailed studies of individual regions and localities within the Holy Roman Empire, in order to provide more finely drawn analy-ses appropriate to the territorial particularism which became so prominent a feature of the Empire during the course of the war and thereafter. Interestingly, however, many of these studies have revealed the continuing strengths and positive aspects of the imperial machin-ery, especially after 1648. What older generations of historians, taking their cue from an out-of-context phrase from Pufendorf ’s De statu imperii Germanici of 1667, regarded as a monstrous medieval consti-tutional anachronism in fact remained a loose but in many respects beneficial confederative framework capable of protecting the inde-pendence and security of the smaller states, at least in the western and south-western parts of the Empire. It has also become apparent that it is meaningless to generalise about the causes and effects of the war in terms of the Empire as a whole: experiences varied enormously from one part to another, and contemporary observers, like some historians later on, tended to portray the conflict in extreme terms. The Thirty Years War, therefore, can be examined in a number of different ways.

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  European Warfare, 1494-1660

  • Jeremy Black(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7 EUROPEAN WARFARE 1618–60

  The Thirty Years’War

  The Thirty Years’War (1618–48) acted as the focus and culmination of the struggles between Catholic and Protestant, Holy Roman Emperor and German princes, Spain and France.1 Seen by many German contemporaries as parts of an essentially continuous war dating back to 1618,2 it brought together several different conflicts, including those between Spain and the Dutch, and the dynastic struggle within the Vasa family between the kings of Poland and Sweden.The war has played a major role in discussion of military history.This is particularly so because of the role of the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus in the original formulation of the Military Revolution (see Chapter 3 ).The revision of the thesis to take note of the Spanish army further directed attention to the conflict, specifically to the major Austro-Spanish victory over the Swedes at Nördlingen in 1634.3

  Irrespective of the debate over the Military Revolution, the Thirty Years’ War has played a major role in military history. This reflects its inherent interest, and its importance for the course of German history and European international history, as well as the prominent part of German scholars in military history. The Thirty Years’War, and the conflicts closely related to it, especially the war between France and Spain that became full-scale in 1635 and lasted until 1659, will take a major part in this chapter, but it is also necessary to give due weight to other conflicts in this period. This is due not only to their inherent importance for the development of other countries, but also to their role in military history. In particular, it is appropriate to consider how far analyses of military development focused on the Thirty Years’War are more generally appropriate.

  The war initially began as a rising against the Habsburg position in Bohemia, that stemmed from recent crises in its political and religious situation. The Bohemians rejected the authority of the Habsburgs who had held the elective crown for nearly a century. Instead, Frederick V, Elector Palatine (r. 1610–23), a Calvinist and the leader of Protestant activism in the Empire, was elected king. The Habsburg Duke Ferdinand of Styria, who had already been elected King of Bohemia and Hungary (1617), and was to become the Emperor Ferdinand II (r. 1619–37), was unwilling to accept being deposed as King of Bohemia. A Catholic stalwart, Ferdinand was unprepared to accept this challenge to the Habsburg position in the Empire and the Habsburg hereditary lands. The election of Frederick threatened the Habsburg grasp on the Imperial crown as it altered the balance among the Electors to four Protestants versus three Catholics.

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  The Ashgate Research Companion to the Thirty Years' War

  • Olaf Asbach, Peter Schröder(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Thirty Years' War – An Introduction

  Olaf Asbach and Peter Schröder DOI: 10.4324/9781315613666-1

  The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) remains a puzzling and complex subject for students and scholars alike. One might even ask whether the term ‘Thirty Years’ War’ is justified in the first place, since the war seems to dissolve into a series of individual conflicts with different issues, often with no real common denominator, and different participants, without any clear beginning or end. One might thus think of the European conflicts as, for instance, the war between Sweden and Poland1 or the struggle between France and the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs for hegemony in Europe as being distinct episodes which cannot be conflated under a single label.

  1 See R.I. Frost, The Northern Wars 1558–1721 (Harlow, 2000).

  But there was one central issue which justifies the contemporary judgement that the ‘Thirty Years’ War’ was a contest with a definite beginning and a definite end and with a structure giving coherence to the various military campaigns, rather than simply an amorphous series of individual wars: the struggle for the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire and – inseparable from this question – the balance of political and religious forces in Central Europe. The beginning of this conflict was clearly a German war: at stake were internal issues of the empire. This conflict was increasingly internationalised, especially from 1630 onwards, when Sweden invaded the empire. Thus several phases can and have to be distinguished. However, until 1629 the conflict was essentially centred on the imperial constitution and the relationship between the confessions. The war was fought by German Protestants (Lutherans and Calvinists) and Catholics alike in order to enforce their own ‘authentic interpretation’ of the Peace of Augsburg (1555). This happened notably when the Emperor issued the Edict of Restitution in 1629, where it was claimed that the Edict was the authentic interpretation of the Peace of Augsburg. The war was thus manifold: about the empire, about religion and about power politics in Europe. This was also reflected in the Peace of Westphalia, a treaty which, after all, had the twofold aim of both settling international relations and of introducing a settlement for the empire, and all this by simultaneously, and fundamentally, changing the relationship between politics and religion.

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  From Reich to Revolution

  German History, 1558-1806

  • Peter H. Wilson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4: The Great War (1618^48) 4.1 Causes The debates The Thirty Years War appeared to subsequent generations as a deep chasm, scarring German history by wrecking the country’s social, eco-nomic and cultural fabric and stunting its political growth. To those who lived through the con£ict, it was simply ‘the Great War’. Yet, they were as concerned to explain its causes as later historians. The contro-versy was already well under way by 1643 when it became enmeshed in the long peace negotiations as the contending parties sought to improve their positions by blaming their opponents for starting hostilities. The only area of agreement was expressed in contemporary poetry that blamed the Germans for bringing the catastrophe upon themselves through their sinful lives, which had induced God to send foreign armies to ravage their land. Later historians have favoured three alternative explanations. 1 The most common Anglophone interpretation sees the war as part of a longer, international struggle between the Habsburg dynasty and its rivals. This shifts the emphasis to Spain and its prolonged con£icts with the Dutch rebels (1568^1648) and France (1635^59), reducing events in central Europe to a side show after the suppression of the initial Bohe-mian revolt (1618^20), until Sweden’s intervention in 1630. The most extreme version of this approach denies that the ¢ghting between 1618 and 1648 constituted a distinct, coherent war, and subsumes it entirely within these wider European con£icts. 2 The term ‘thirty years war’ was already current by 1645, and though a myth, in that the con£ict was not 103 a single, uniform struggle across this time, none the less indicates that contemporaries believed its intensity and duration warranted distin-guishing it from other, parallel wars.

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  Gustavus v Wallenstein

  Military Revolution, Rivalry and Tragedy in the Thirty Years War

  • John Pike(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Pen and Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  Chapter I A Time of Wars The Thirty Years’ War T he Thirty Years’ War was a long time coming. The states of the Empire had lived under the shadow of the Peace of Augsburg 1555, which had settled the post-Luther outbreak of civil war. However, tensions were rising in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth- century Germany, as the Counter-Reformation took hold on the Emperor and various of the Catholic states, especially powerful Bavaria. ‘A tactical concession’ was how Pope Pius V characterised the Augsburg settlement, while militant Jesuits argued that the original 1521 ban on the Lutherans was only ‘suspended’. The legitimacy of the Peace of Augsburg was also undermined by the militant Tridentine Decrees of 1564. This Papal analysis would give encouragement to any Holy Roman Emperors so inclined to adopt a dangerous revanchist religious and political policy. When the Catholic church started to support aggressive Counter- Reformation and the Jesuits became their vanguard in all the important Catholic courts of Europe as confessors to monarchy, then the tensions ratcheted upwards. The French Wars of Religion of 1562–98 were just one of the consequences. Hurtling from the other end of the spectrum were the equally dogmatic Calvinists led by Frederick V Palatine, who was developing the perfectly plausible thesis that there was a danger of the Habsburgs assuming occupation of the Imperial throne by hereditary right unless the eight electors exercised a different choice. With Germany divided between the Protestant Union led by Frederick Palatine and the Catholic League, war was increasingly likely if not certain; it had almost broken out in 1611 over the Cleves-Julich succession dispute. The Empire was suffering the push and pull of a multilayered polity between the Habsburg Emperor and the hundreds of subsidiary polities such as the electoral states, the princely states, clerical states, and the Imperial cities that were all represented in an Imperial diet. However,

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  Western Civilization

  Beyond Boundaries

  • Thomas F. X. Noble, Barry Strauss, Duane Osheim, Kristen Neuschel(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Royal governments continued to consolidate authority, but resistance to royal power by provinces, nobles, or towns accustomed to independence now might have a religious sanction. Warfare over these issues had consumed the Holy Roman Empire in the first half of the sixteenth century. The conflict now spilled over into France and the Netherlands and threatened to erupt in England. In the early seventeenth century, the Holy Roman Empire once again was Europe in the Age of Religious Wars, 1560–1648 Imperial Spain and the Limits of Royal Power ◆ ◆ What circumstances permitted Spain’s ambitious policies and to what degree were they successful? Religious and Political Conflict in France and England ◆ ◆ What conditions led to civil war in France? How did religious and political conflict develop differently in England? The Holy Roman Empire and the Thirty Years’ War ◆ ◆ Why did war erupt again within the Holy Roman Empire and what was the significance of the conflict? Economic Change and Social Tensions ◆ ◆ What caused the economic stresses of these decades and how did ordinary people cope with them? Writing, Drama, and Art in an Age of Upheaval ◆ ◆ In what ways do the literature and art of this period reflect the political, social, and religious conflicts of the age? Chapter Overview 15 Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 418 Chapter 15 Europe in the Age of Religious Wars, 1560–1648 wracked by a war simultaneously religious and political in origin.

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  The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815

  • Charles W. Ingrao(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  2 The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) The Monarchy and the “General Crisis” The difficulties posed by the monarchy’s diversity and exposed central European position preoccupied its rulers throughout its history. These problems were, however, compounded by other challenges that con- fronted it and much of the rest of European society at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Over the past generation most historians have accepted the notion that Europe was then in the throes of a “General Crisis” as it tried to adjust to the dramatic developments that had taken place over the previous century. The economy was changed forever by the dramatic expansion in trade and by the inflation, or “price revolu- tion,” caused by the influx of silver from the New World. Europe had heretofore had a predominantly barter- and subsistence-oriented agrar- ian economy controlled by landowning nobles but worked by their peasant labor force. It now began slowly converting to a money- and market-oriented economy controlled by the bourgeoisie and other capit- alist elements seeking higher profits from trade and industry, as well as from agriculture. International relations were revolutionized by the sudden emergence of the new Habsburg global empire and the almost perpetual wars between it and its two natural enemies, France and the Ottoman empire. The need to feed the resulting arms race transformed domestic politics into a struggle between rulers and their people over the power to tax. Finally, the monarchs’ concern for the security of their realms extended to their growing insistence on religious uniformity among their subjects, lest the growth of heresy inspire rebellion or civil war. The Austrian Habsburg monarchy faced all of these problems by the opening decades of the seventeenth century. The Economic Crisis As they entered the seventeenth century the Habsburgs needed to gain greater control over taxation, but first had to decide on whose shoulders 24

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  The Causes of War

  Volume III: 1400 CE to 1650 CE

  • Alexander Gillespie(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  54 The Expanding War: France 153 55 Cooper, J (ed) (1970) The New Cambridge Modern History. The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years’ War , Vol IV (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press) 398, 600. 56 As noted in Mowat, R (1888) A History of European Diplomacy: 1451–1769 (London, Butler) 102–05. 57 ‘The Peace of Prague, 1635’ in Helfferich, T (2009) The Thirty Years’ War: A Documentary History (Cambridge, Hackett) 170; Bireley, R (1976) ‘The Peace of Prague and the Counter-Reformation in Germany’, The Journal of Modern History 48 (1), 31–70; Moutoux, E (1982) ‘Wallenstein: Guilty and Innocent’, The Germanic Review 57 (1), 23–40. Ferdinand II and his armies then vanquished the Swedish-German Protestant force in 1634 at the Battle of Nördlingen, the Protestants losing some 8,000 men on the battlefield, with a further 4,000 being captured. The imperial and Spanish armies, who had lost only 1,500 men out of a combined force of over 30,000, advanced easily through Franconia, Swabia and Württemberg. The entire populations of towns fled as the armies advanced and the Swedish forces withdrew from central Germany to the coast. Realising that they could not afford to fight on two fronts—against the Emperor and against Sigismund III Vasa—in 1635 the Swedes agreed the Treaty of Stuhmsdorf with Poland-Lithuania. This provided for a 26-year armistice between the two sides. In exchange, although Sweden kept Livonia, Poland regained what she had lost in Prussia, and the Swedes had to give up all their ‘licences’ in Prussian ports. Although nothing was said on the long-standing dynastic questions between the two realms, this treaty kept Sweden in the war, and kept one potential enemy, Poland-Lithuania, out of it. 55 As the Heilbronn League dissolved, the Protestant Elector of Saxony, soon to be followed by other German estates and princes, made peace with Ferdinand II in the Peace of Prague in May 1635.

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  The Emergence of Modern Europe

  c. 1500 to 1788

  • Britannica Educational Publishing, Heather Campbell(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Britannica Educational Publishing

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 3 THE THIRTY YEARS ’ WAR , 1618–48

  T he war originated with dual crises at the Continent’s centre: one in the Rhineland and the other in Bohemia, both part of the Holy Roman Empire.

  “The dear old Holy Roman Empire,How does it stay together?”

  asked the tavern drinkers in Goethe’s Faust —and the answer is no easier to find today. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was a land of many polities. In the empire there were some 1,000 separate, semiautonomous political units, many of them very small, and others comparable in size with smaller independent states elsewhere, such as Scotland or the Dutch Republic. At the top came the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs, covering the elective kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary, as well as Austria, the Tyrol, and Alsace, with about 8,000,000 inhabitants; next came electoral Saxony, Brandenburg, and Bavaria, with more than 1,000,000 subjects each; and then the Palatinate, Hesse, Trier, and Württemberg, with about 500,000 each.

  These were large polities, indeed, but they were weakened by three factors. First, they did not accept primogeniture: Hesse, for instance, had been divided into four portions at the death of Landgrave Philip the Magnanimous in 1567. Second, many of the states were geographically fragmented. These factors had, in the course of time, created in Germany a balance of power between the states. The territorial strength of the Habsburgs may have brought them a monopoly of the imperial title from 1438 onward, but they could do no more: the other princes, when threatened, were able to form alliances whose military strength was equal to that of the emperor himself. However, the third weakness—the religious upheaval of the 16th century—changed all that: princes who had formerly stood together were now divided by religion. Swabia, for example, more or less equal in area to modern Switzerland, included 68 secular and 40 spiritual princes and also 32 imperial free cities. By 1618 more than half of these rulers were Catholic; the rest were Protestant.

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  Early Modern Military History, 1450-1815

  • G. Mortimer(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  101 6 War by Contract, Credit and Contribution: The Thirty Years War Geoff Mortimer Asked to list the great powers of the day, an informed European in the mid-1600s would undoubtedly have named Sweden, if not first at least in the first breath, along with France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. This sur- prising fact arises from Sweden’s intervention in The Thirty Years War in 1630, and her central role in the conflict during the following 18 years. Although the war had no clear winner, Sweden emerged as the main gainer at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, securing large territories on the German Baltic coast and a huge cash indemnity for her war expenses. This did not seem a likely outcome in 1630, at which time the Imperialist side did not perceive a signifi- cant Swedish threat, and Gustavus Adolphus himself invaded Germany equipped with maps only for a limited war in the north (Roberts, 1992, p. 138). In the event he took Munich two years later, and although there were many setbacks his successors later threatened Vienna, while at the end of the war almost half of the 250,000 troops estimated to be on active service within the Empire territories were in Swedish units (Parker, 1988, p. 303). By any realistic standard waging war on this scale was beyond the capacity of Sweden, a poor northern country with limited natural resources and a pop- ulation estimated at no more than 1.3 million (Roberts, 1992, p. 13). That she nevertheless did so illustrates the far-reaching effects of three developments in the organization of early modern warfare, which in combination not only enabled Sweden to achieve disproportionate military strength, but also sus- tained all the principal participants in the largest and longest war in Europe up to that time.

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