Which country or entity/polity gained the most from the Thirty-Year War?

Read the attached to this week 8 (FILES) “30-year war : a new interpretation “30-year war : a new interpretation” file authored by S.H. Steinberg and “Causes of the 30-year War.”

“Causes of the 30-year War”by Wilson and respond to the following questions:

Which country or entity/polity gained the most from the Thirty-Year War? What was the lasting result of the wars? Use examples, evidence, and quotes from this reading by Steinberg and Wilson only. Provide MLA citations in text and works cited.

The format for the forum:

The main post: a three to five-paragraphed narrative introducing your idea or reaction, backed with evidence, and a conclusion. A paragraph is understood to be composed of 5-8 sentences with proper citations, references, and style/grammar. Use only these two references

Requirements: 6 paragraphs

The Causes of the Thirty Years War 1618-48 Author(s): Peter H. Wilson Source: The English Historical Review, Jun., 2008, Vol. 123, No. 502 (Jun., 2008), pp. 554-586 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20108541JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/termsOxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The English Historical ReviewThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

English Historical Review Vol. CXXIII No. 502 doi: 10.1093/ehr/cen 160 ? The Author [2008]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. The Causes of the Thirty Years War 1618-48 The Thirty Years War consistently features on lists of major conflicts in world history. It is widely recognised as a period of great change, either as a gradual transition or as a sharper turning point, but always associated with the ‘birth’ of absolutism, of the standing army, and of an international order based on sovereign states. It was also one of the most destructive wars in European history, responsible for the deaths of at least eight million people at a time when the continent numbered only a hundred million inhabitants. Yet while certain aspects have attracted considerable research, there is comparatively little agreement on its causes.1 Several general explanations have been advanced, but their advocates rarely discuss the merits of alternative interpretations and do not fully articulate the assumptions on which their arguments rest.2 The debate so far has posed a number of fundamental questions. First, how long did the conflict last? Can it be properly considered as lasting thirty years, or should it be subsumed as part of a much longer struggle? Secondly, was the Thirty Years War inevitable? But were there not clearly moments or periods at which when the conflict could have been reduced from a major to a minor war, if not stopped altogether? Thirdly, should the war and its causes be regarded as primarily German, or was the conflict truly international, encompassing other parts of Europe? Fourthly, was the Thirty Years War a war of religion, or was it shaped more by politics, economics or other secular factors? The numerous answers to these questions essentially come down to one of two basic types of explanation. One set of arguments stresses the agency of human action, drawing directly on the kinds of evidence that record the motives or the justifications of those who fought the war: official manifestos, state documents, diplomatic correspondence and sermons. Apart from using insights from psychology in an attempt to understand key individuals, those advocating agency rarely in working out their explanation borrow from other disciplines. They concentrate instead largely on the high politics of interstate rivalry, on the leadership of revolts and on the realm of ideas, especially political ideology or theology. Such perspectives have, in the past, often reflected national prejudice: accounts written in this tradition have often involved attempts to attach the ‘blame’ for the war on particular countries, or even on individuals. i. H. Duchhardt, ed., Bibliographie zum Westf?lischen Frieden (M?nster, 1996); H. Duchhardt, ed., Der Westf?lische Friede (Munich, 1998); K. Bussmann and H. Schilling, eds., 1648: War and Peace in Europe (3 vols., M?nster, 1998); PH. Wilson, ‘New Perspectives on the Thirty Years War’, German History, xxiii (2005), 237-61. 2. The literature on the causes of great wars is too extensive to be cited here. For those seeking introductions, good starting points include T.C.W Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London, 1986), ch. 1; J. Black, Why Wars Happen (London, 1998). EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 555 The other set of arguments relies on structural explanations, highlighting long-term ‘underlying’ change as leading to war. This perspective relies more heavily on insights from social and political science, emphasising economic change or state formation. It tends to be driven by theory rather than by direct evidence, and its proponents often dismiss contemporary statements as justification rather than as evidence of true motivation. Whereas agency implies contingency and historians who emphasise agency often see each event as unique, those who espouse structural explanations tend to stress continuity and the interconnections between changes across time and space. If blame is apportioned, it pinned on social classes, notably the aristocracy, rather than on countries or on individuals. Most accounts of the Thirty Years War start with what is presented as the revolt of the Protestant Bohemians against Catholic Habsburg rule in 1618, and then describe a conflict that spread outward in concentric circles from this flashpoint in Central Europe.3 Catholic and Protestant powers elsewhere identified with the contending groups in Bohemia and felt intervention was necessary to prevent trouble spreading to their own lands. This standard interpretation has greatly influenced how the course of the war is narrated. It suggests a series of chronological phases, each beginning with the entry of a new major belligerent into the war. In the initial Bohemian phase, fighting was restricted to the Emperor and rebels in the various Habsburg provinces and their respective allies from the German princes. A second?Palatine?phase is generally identified for the years after the Bohemians’ defeat in 1620 as the war moved into western and southern Germany. The scope of the conflict widened still further after the Spanish-Dutch truce expired in 1621: Spain became an active participant. The remainder of the war is then divided into Danish (1625-9), Swedish (1630-34) and French (1635-48) phases, with Germany seen as slipping from active participant to helpless victim. Such a chronological framework dovetails with the traditional assessment of the impact of the war that presents each stage as escalating into more generalised destruction. Given the scale and complexity of the war, it is not surprising that most historians have sought refuge in this convenient framework when marshalling their material. Many, one suspects, have embarked on their tale full of confidence, and inspired by the presence of tragic or charismatic figures, such as Frederick V, Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus. Their deaths were followed after 1634 by the start of the French phase. The narrative appears simpler, with a Franco-Swedish Dutch bloc pitted against a Habsburg-Bavarian bloc. Apart from 3- This interpretation has been presented most recently by J.H. Elliott, ‘War and Peace in Europe 1618-1648’, in Bussmann and Schilling, eds., 1648: War and Peace, i. 23-39. See also C.V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (London, 1938); R. Huch, Der Drei?igj?hrige Krieg (Frankfurt and Main, 1974: first published in 1912). EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

556 THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 dashing French generals such as Turenne and Conde and that master schemer, Cardinal Richelieu (who died in 1642), this final phase seems bereft of characters who fire the imagination. Battles are no longer heroic contests, but bloodbaths needlessly prolonging Germany’s agony, especially once peace negotiations began in earnest in 1644. Perhaps fearing their readers might share the growing fatigue of the soldiers after so many years of fighting, most authors have been keen to bring their accounts to a close, devoting only a third or a quarter of their text to events after 1635, and using most of this to explain the peace and its consequences rather than the continuation of war. Throughout, few are explicit in how their discussion of the causes and the spread of the war function as historical explanations. Detailed differences apart, historians diverge primarily on whether this was a German war which other powers joined, or whether it was an international war simply triggered, or restarted, by events in the Empire. The former explanation chimed with the concerns of nineteenth-century Germans seeking to create a unified nation state. For many of them, the Holy Roman Empire symbolised internal division and international impotency.4 Associated with Catholicism and pretensions to lead all Europe, the Austrian Habsburg dynasty appeared representatives of a fading medieval past. Their attempt to assert greater authority over their hereditary lands and the Empire in general was construed by many nineteenth-century writers as a vain struggle against historical progress. The future was Protestant and its champion was the Hohenzollern dynasty ruling the territories of Brandenburg and Prussia. In the pro-Prussian historical tradition, the Thirty Years War thus became a painful but necessary step towards national unity. Thanks to Swedish intervention, the Habsburg Catholic grip was loosened. Brandenburg-Prussia gained new resources and influence, allowing it to emerge by the mid-eighteenth century as German challenger to Austria. The timid and minor role played by the Hohenzollerns during the Thirty Years War was an embarrassment for nineteenth-century Prussian apologists, but they could point to the conflict at least to underscore their claims ofthat Habsburg leadership was bankrupt. Regardless of confession or political persuasion, all Germans saw the War as a national tragedy. The internal problems of their country had been ruthlessly exploited by foreigners bent on 4- The most influential work from this perspective was G. Freytag, Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit (5 vols., Leipzig, 1859-67). Further discussion in W Hagen, ‘Descent of the Sonderweg: Hans Rosenberg’s History of Old-Regime Prussia, Central European History, xxiv (1991), 24-50; PH. Wilson, ‘Still a Monstrosity? Some Reflections on Early Modern German Statehood’, Historical Journal, xlix (2006), 565-76. D.A. Meier, ‘An Appeal for a Historiographical Renaissance: Lost Lives and the Thirty Years War’, The Historian, lxvii (2005), 254-74, a survey of seventeenth-century writing on War, indicates the early origins of this and other interpretations; while useful, this paper is marred by some minor errors and the bizarre assertion (255) that Ferdinand II lost the battle of White Mountain. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 557 plunder and on keeping Germany weak. Significantly, the most prominent participants in the war did not become central to German culture. Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein trilogy is one of the great works of German drama, but presents its central character as a tragic figure rather than national hero. Goethe abandoned plans to write a biography of Bernhard von Weimar, the Protestant German commander of the middle stage of the war. Gustavus Adolphus was celebrated in Protestant German historiography, but he remained a foreigner and not entirely free of criticism.5 What might be called the ‘international war school’ emerged as an alternative to this German interpretation. The distinguished British historian C.V. Wedgwood has been credited by some with first shifting attention from the problems of the Austrian Habsburgs and the Empire to emphasise instead the long-running Franco-Spanish rivalry.6 A more deliberate and provocative attempt was made by Sigfrid Henry Steinberg who deliberately set out to demolish the German perspective and its associated myth of an ‘all-destructive war’. For Steinberg, the war began in 1609 with the dispute over who should inherit the duchies of Jiilich and Cleves that straddled the lower Rhine just where the Spanish Road reached its destination.7 Since Spain and Austria backed a Catholic claimant, while France and the Dutch favoured Protestant candidates, the so-called German problem was really an international matter. Later events were fitted into this pattern as Steinberg continued his narrative of the war up to the peace treaties of 1659 and 1660, throughout emphasising the international dimensions of the conflict. Steinberg also dismissed reports of mass death and destruction, arguing that only some areas were badly affected and that overall the German population actually rose during the conflict. While his minimisation of the impact of the war has not been well received, Steinberg’s presentation of it as an international conflict has become orthodoxy in Anglophone scholarship.8 This predominantly takes a western perspective, presenting the Thirty Years War of 1618-48 as an outgrowth of the eighty-year struggle between Spain and the Dutch that began with the revolt of 1568 and overlapped with the French 5- D. B?ttcher, ‘Propaganda und ?ffentliche Meinung in protestantischen Deutschland 1628 36’, Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte, xliv (1953), 181-203, and xlv (1954), 83-98; J.R. Paas, ‘The Changing Image of Gustavus Adolphus on German Broadsheets, 1630-3’, Journal of the Warburg and Courthould Institutes, lix (1996), 205-44; J- Paul, ‘Gustav Adolf in der deutschen Geschichtschreibung’, Historisches Vierteljahresschrift, xxv (1931), 415-29. 6. N. Sutherland makes this claim in her ‘The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Structure of European Polities’, ante, cvii (1992), 587-625 at 587. G. Parker, ed., The Thirty Years War (London, 1984), xv, makes the opposite?and more plausible?claim that Wedgwood represents a continuation of the German war approach. 7. S.H. Steinberg, ‘The Thirty Years War: A New Interpretation’, History, xxxii (1947), 89-102; The ‘ Thirty Years War and the Conflict for European Hegemony 1600-1660 (London, 1966). 8. For the debate on the impact, see J. Theibault, ‘The Demography of the Thirty Years War Revisited’ German History, xv (1997), 1?21. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

558 THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 Wars of Religion 1562-98 and the Anglo-Spanish war of 1585-1604.9 The most influential statement of this view was made in a collaborative study published in 1984 by an international team of scholars under the direction of Geoffrey Parker, a distinguished historian of the Hispano-Dutch conflict. Parker dismissed the German interpretation as ‘parochial’, arguing that events such as the Bohemian Revolt ‘merely anticipated’ the renewal of general conflict marked by the expiry of the twelve-year Hispano-Dutch truce in 1621.10 Like Paul Kennedy, who disparaged the ‘venality and idiocy of some of the German princes’,11 Parker’s international perspective finds much support in traditional German scholarship that saw the Empire as in terminal decline, the concerns of which were only secondary to the interests of the great powers. Events in Germany became a sideshow to the titanic struggle along Europe’s Atlantic seaboard, and military operations in the Empire merited attention only after 1630 because Sweden and France had become involved. From 1635 the war in Germany was entirely dictated by outsiders who then settled their differences at the Emperor’s expense in 1648. Even the intervention of non-western states is downplayed in this interpretation, as in the characterisation of Christian IV’s involvement as the ‘Danish intermezzo’.12 This international interpretation nevertheless agrees with the German interpretation which its proponents despise in its presentation of the war as inevitable. For many historians, the constitutional arrangements agreed in Augsburg in 1555 were nothing more than a truce that shelved only temporarily the outbreak of open conflict’, because ‘neither side was sincere’.13 Mounting tensions by the 1580s precipitated the ‘dissolution of the imperial constitution’.14 Most historians employ the metaphor of a pressure cooker, describing the polarisation of the German princes into armed confessional alliances by 1608-09 by when ‘to a large extent, the battle-lines which divided Germany during the 1620s were thus drawn’. It appears ‘a source of wonderment, to historians as to contemporaries, that a general conflict did not break out between the already embattled parties for a whole decade … despite several serious clashes’. The explanation for this, it is suggested, lies in the attitude of the western states that were still recovering from their struggles in the 9- David Maland starts with the Dutch Revolt and regards the Twelve-Year Truce of 1609-21 as pivotal, not the Bohemian Revolt of 1618: Europe at War 1600?1650 (London, 1980). Others share this interpretation: P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London, 1988); M.P. Gutmann, ‘The Origins of the Thirty Years War”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xviii (1988), 749-70. For an attempt to shift attention back to Central Europe, see R.G. Asch, The Thirty Years War. The Holy Roman Empire and Europe 1618-48 (London, 1997). 10. Parker, ed., Thirty Years War, xvi, 43. 11. Kennedy, Great Powers, 52. 12. Parker, ed., Thirty Years War, 71-81, in, 133,154. 13. P. Wende, A History of Germany (Basingstoke, 2005), 45. 14. M. Ritter, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Gegenreformation und des Drei?igj?hrigen Krieges (3 vols., Stuttgart, 1889-1908), ii. 1. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 559 later sixteenth century and were not yet ready to renew their war.15 The delay was institutionalised in the Hispano-Dutch Twelve-Year Truce that dampened international tensions precisely when the Germans were forming their confessional alliances. Germany in the years after 1609 *s almost uniformly presented as on a ‘knife-edge’ waiting for the ‘spark’ that would transform ‘a cold war into a hot one’.16 The idea of a pre-programmed major war becomes most rigid in Nicola Sutherland’s development of the ‘international war’ school to its logical conclusion. She continues the challenge mounted by Steinberg and his successors to urge that the dates 1618 and 1648 have no real significance other than for strictly German history. Like Parker, she interprets the Central European war as an outgrowth of western European rivalry, but she greatly extends his time frame by fitting all western European wars into ‘the great anti-Habsburg struggle, spanning at least three centuries’.17 This had its root causes in the accumulation of power thanks to the dynastic marriages arranged by Emperor Maximilian I that saw his family acquire Spain, the Netherlands, Bohemia and Hungary between 1477 and 1526. French attempts to break out from perceived encirclement fused a series of local conflicts into a general war once Charles VIII invaded Italy in 1494. For Sutherland, this first phase came to an end when France was forced to accept peace in 1559. France then descended into religious civil war just when the power of her Habsburg rivals was weakened by the effects of Charles V’s partition of his dynastic Empire between Spain and Austria after 1556. Conflict in the second phase of the Franco-Habsburg struggle was consequently concentrated in north-west Europe with the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt by 1568 and the related Anglo-Spanish war of 1585 1604. Events in Central Europe are dismissed as only of local importance as Sutherland paints the standard picture of mounting confessional tension and the incipient paralysis of the imperial constitution that already featured in nineteenth-century German writing. By dating the third phase of the Franco-Habsburg struggle as between 1598 and 1659, Sutherland deliberately eschews the standard dates, stressing instead the resumption of the Hispano-Dutch war in 1621 and presenting operations 15- Quotations from Parker, ed., Thirty Years War, 24. See also uff. Those arguing from a different perspective also frequently present the war as the ‘logical outcome’ of a range of long standing problems: G. Schmidt, Geschichte des alten Reiches (Munich, 1999), 132. 16. The term ‘knife-edge’ is used by P. Englund, Die Verw?stung Deutschlands. Eine Geschichte des Drei?igj?hrigen Krieges (Stuttgart, 1998), 64. Other phrases from Kennedy, Great Powers, 49. Elliott phrases is as ‘the spark generated by the Bohemian uprising had set the European tinder-box alight’ in his ‘War and Peace in Europe’, 23. Several authors present the J?lich-Cleves crisis as the ‘Prelude to the Thirty Years War’: E.W. Zeeden, Das Zeitalter der Glaubensk?mpfe (4th edn., Munich, 1980), 73; H. Ollmann-K?sling, Der Erbfolgestreit um J?lich-Kleve (1609-1614). Ein Vorspiel zum Drei?igj?hrigen Krieg (Regensburg, 1996). The most recent discussion of this crisis is A.D. Anderson, On the Verge of War. International Relations and the J?lich-Kleve Succession Crises (1609-1614) (Boston, 1999). 17. Sutherland, ‘Origins’, quote from 589. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

560 THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 in the Empire as an adjunct of those in the west. The final phase extends from the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659 to the death of Louis XIV and is dominated by the decline of Spain and its replacement by France as the major European power. The Empire only retains any significance in this interpretation because of the Westphalian Settlement that allegedly emasculated the emperor and prevented him from mobilising Germany’s still considerable resources. Here again, the international war school draws sustenance from much older German scholarship that depicts the Empire as weak and divided after 1648. Conflict remained western and focused on a France that was contained only by Austria’s joining forces with England and the Dutch. Throughout, Sutherland stresses the relatively seamless nature of international conflict, claiming that ‘contemporaries did not distinguish clearly between peace and war. They rather perceived continuous, evolving fluctuating conflicts, within shifting foci and theatres of activity’.18 By stretching the argument to such extremes, Sutherland unintentionally exposes the serious flaws within the entire international war school. Its coherence rests on seeing all wars related to a single Franco-Habsburg struggle. Sutherland claims her end date of 1715 is justified by ‘the emergence of new powers and, not least, by the transference of the Spanish Netherlands to Austria’.19 But a case could just as easily be made for continuing the sequence up to 1815, as Franco-Austrian antagonism remained a feature of European relations, or even to 1945 if Germany is seen as the inheritor of the early modern Central European counterpoint to France. The emergence of Spain as a power distinct from Habsburg Austria by 1559 is noted in passing but without this being interpreted as a disjunction in the Franco-Habsburg conflict that had begun in the 1490s. In short, the international war school suffers the same problems faced by all those who have tried to fit different wars into a single systemic rivalry lasting many decades.20 More specifically, arguments for long-running continuity rest on the faulty premiss that contemporaries did not recognise a distinct Thirty Years War between 1618 and 1648. This dubious assertion rests on a claim made by Steinberg who disputed both the number ‘thirty’ and the singular ‘war’, reporting that the subsequently accepted phrase did not appear until Samuel Pufendorf used it in his history of the imperial constitution in 1667.21 More recent research has unearthed overwhelming evidence that those living through the war believed it started with the Defenestration of Prague in 1618 and ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The term Thirty Years War was already commonplace by 1648 i8. Sutherland, ‘Origins’, 589. 19. Sutherland, ‘Origins’, 590. 20. For example, those who have presented all European strife as a second thirty years war 1914-45: see P.M. Bell, The Origins of the Second World War in Europe (London, 1986). 21. Steinberg, ‘The Thirty Years War’, 92; The’Thirty Years War, 93. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 561 when a twenty-four page pamphlet appeared entitled ‘From the Thirty Years German War. A Short Chronicle’. Similar phrases were repeated in many other publications, even if most communities did not celebrate peace until 1650, the year in which the terms agreed at Westphalia were implemented. Few personal accounts from ordinary people survive from this period, but at least seventy that do confirm that the inhabitants of the Empire saw the war as beginning in 1618 and continuing as a coherent struggle until the Westphalian Settlement. No one suggested that their troubles had began with the Jiilich-Cleves crisis or that they were simply an extension of western European rivalry.22 Moreover it is clear that Central Europeans could distinguish between war and peace, even when they were viewing events from the safety of regions as yet unaffected by fighting. They recognised that the struggles in their region were connected to those elsewhere, but saw them as nonetheless distinct, just as their twentieth-century counterparts perceived the Korean and Vietnam wars as separate conflicts within the broader rivalry of the Cold War. It is not surprising that the ideas of the international war school are articulated mainly by Anglophone historians writing about France, Spain and the Netherlands. Sutherland, in particular, ignores northern and eastern European wars that cannot, as Robert Frost has pointed out, be fitted into her scheme and yet were as much a part of seventeenth-century rivalry as the various struggles in the west.23 It is fair to ask why certain connections between wars are given greater prominence than others, elevating Franco-Habsburg hostility above the struggles for Baltic or Balkan dominance as themes deployed to give coherence to international events. Perhaps more fundamentally, the reliance on the ‘inevitability’ of strife raises serious methodological issues that are not addressed explicitly. The implicit explanation for war being unavoidable and continuous is that religious animosities prevented lasting peace. Here again the international war school chimes with older German scholarship that likewise stressed mounting confessional tension as a major cause of war in 1618. Reliance on inevitability is also a convenient narrative device that sees each problem as the precursor to the next and explains events from the benefit of hindsight, depicting those seeking peace as deluded, na?ve or an isolated minority. There is little place for contingency, nor room to express disjunction and difference between events. Explanation boils down to some kind of rational choice, interpreting international relations through the metaphor of a game in 22. G. Mortimer, ‘Did Contemporaries Recognise a “Thirty Years War”?’, ante, cxvi (2001), 124-36; and the two pieces by K. Repgen, ‘Seit Wann gibt es den Begriff “Drei?igj?hriger Krieg”‘, in H. Dollinger et al., eds., Weltpolitik, Europageganke, Regionalismus (M?nster, 1982), 59-70, and ‘Noch einmal zum Begriff “Drei?igj?hriger Krieg”‘, Zeitschrift fur Historische Forschung, ix (1982), 347~52’ 23. R. Frost, ‘Poland-Lithuania in the Thirty Years War’, in Bussmann and Schilling, eds., 1648: War and Peace, i. 197-205. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

562 THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 which the state is a player that goes to war because it is in its interest to do so and acts rationally to maximise gain and minimise risk. The emphasis can be structural, as in ‘situational logic’ in which certain variables, such as economic conditions or military preparedness (for example the urge to control material resources that would give the state a competitive advantage in a hostile international climate) are seen as creating situations that more or less compels people to make certain choices. Alternatively the emphasis can be placed on ‘agency’ by postulating and then discussing a supposedly rational decision-making process in which groups or individuals holding political power act according to their interests, whether personal, dynastic or confessional. Although careful to stress that seventeenth-century rulers often made faulty assessments of their own interests or of those of the state, most proponents of the international war school explain war by reference to decisions taken by those in power to advance those supposedly rational interests. It has been pointed out against them that the metaphor of a game does not work: most people do not play simply to win a material prize, but to gain recognition from their opponent or an audience. Choice and action are not the same, and not all interests are ‘rational’ in a strictly material sense.24 Furthermore, like much of modern international relations, rational choice explanations rely on Clausewitz’s definition of war as an extension of diplomacy by another means. This implies the existence of a coherent state that ‘controls’ war and uses it as a political weapon. As many writers have suggested, this might fit the era in which Clausewitz wrote, but does not apply to the earlier period when state structures were much weaker.25 This criticism provides the starting point for Johannes Burkhardt’s thesis of a ‘state-building war’ which has become the most influential interpretation in German scholarship since its publication in 1992.26 Burkhardt adapted a discussion of the interrelationship between the state and war by Ekkehard Krippendorf, a German political scientist who argued that states and state systems cause wars. Using Max Weber’s definition of the state as the holder of the monopoly of legitimate violence within a given territory, Krippendorf stressed that state organisation was inherently linked to military organisation and that interstate relationships were inherently defined by violence.27 Burkhardt 24- E. Ringmar, Identity, Interest and Action. A Cultural Explanation of Sweden’s Intervention in the Thirty Years War (Cambridge, 1996). For a critique of ‘inevitability’, see W Schulze, ed., Friedliche Intentionen?Kriegerische Effekte. War der Ausbruch des Drei?ig ?hrigen Krieges unvermeidlich? (St Katharinen, 2002). 25. For example, K.J. Holsti, The State, War and the State of War (Cambridge, 1996). 26. Burkhardt first advanced these ideas in his book Der Drei?igj?hrige Krieg (Frankfurt am Main, 1992) and then elaborated them in a series of articles, the most important of which is cited in n 34 below. 27. E. Krippendorf, Staat und Krieg. Die historische Logik politischer Unvernunft (Frankfurt am Main, 1985). These arguments have a long heritage in German scholarship dating back at least to the work of Otto Hintze in the late nineteenth century. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 563 modified Krippendorf s analysis by arguing that it applies only to fully developed modern states. Early modern states were still in the process of formation and, consequently, early modern wars were ‘state-building wars’. These involved two related areas of conflict. One centred on disputes about the internal shape of each state and its relationship to its inhabitants; the other was caused by disagreements over how the emerging states should interact. The situation was still unclear in the sixteenth century, because ‘at this pubescent stage of the state, .. .war presented a confrontation not between fully developed states but between different political allegiances and concepts’.28 Burkhardt argues that early modern politics operated on two levels. The first was the arena of practical politics at the particular level of households and communities. These were woven into larger structures by jurisdictions exercised by a great variety of lords: lay and ecclesiastical rulers of varying status, religious houses and foundations with dependent subjects, corporations and municipalities that held jurisdiction over surrounding villages, confederations of urban and rural communes. These jurisdictions remained distinct, so that a person or body exercising more than one would have different rights and a different relationship to the inhabitants in each case. This sense of the particular was reinforced by the pattern of relatively restricted communication networks, through which news, ideas, goods and services were exchanged. Some sections of society were connected to more than one network. Nobles and richer burghers travelled for education, careers and business, but so did other groups such as drovers who herded animals several hundred miles each year, or seasonal workers travelling far from home. Yet the predominant identification was with the home community, reinforced by dialect and by the absence of uniform systems of spelling, currency, weights and measures. Larger political units existed, but these were patchworks of different provinces and localities held together by allegiance to a common ruler, generally some kind of monarch, though known by a great variety of different titles. These conditions have been discussed by other early modern historians in terms of a Europe of ‘composite monarchies’ or ‘dynastic states’.29 Such states differed from their successors: there were no clear distinctions between private and public spheres, legal and political systems were not uniform; and such states were often composed of regions far apart and inhabited by speakers of different languages.30 28. J. Burkhardt, The quotation is from his chapter ‘The Thirty Years War’, in R.P Hsia, ed., A Companion to the Reformation World (Oxford, 2004), 272-90 at 277. 29. R. Bonney, The European Dynastic States 1494-1660 (Oxford, 1991); J.H. Elliott, A Europe of Composite Monarchies’, Past and Present, cxxxvii (1992), 48-71. See also J.G. Ruggie, ‘Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Towards a Neorealist Synthesis’, World Politics, xxxv (1983), 261-85. 30. G. Chittolini, ‘The “Private”, the “Public”, the State”, Journal ofModern History, lxvii (1995), supplement 34-61. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

564 THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 These early modern states interacted at Burkhardt’s second level of universal politics. This was a realm of ideas and sentiment, rather than binding structures, and included concepts that could legitimise or condemn attempts to marshal resources at the particular level for action on a wider scale. One aspect was the general sense of Europeans belonging to a single Christendom. Though undermined by the consolidation of a permanent schism with the Reformation, this sense nonetheless retained significant appeal, kept alive by the presence of the Islamic Turkish menace in the Mediterranean and Balkans. Catholics could look to the established figures of pope and emperor as spiritual and political leaders. The Holy Roman Empire claimed direct descent from that of ancient Rome and so from the classical antiquity that was so prized by the writers of the Renaissance as a source of inspiration for civic action.31 Many other kingdoms had imperial traditions, either as inheritors of some element of the Roman or Byzantine Empires or as the successors of peoples such as the Goths who had defeated them. Even where these ideas did not hold sway, most rulers governed regions that had once been larger, or had been associated with rule over some other part of Europe. Burkhardt argues that the modern sovereign state emerged as an intermediary between the particular and universal levels by grouping various jurisdictions into more distinct, internally uniform and centralised units. The Reformation accelerated this process by destroying the universality of canon law that had underpinned the medieval international order. Universalism ceased to mean a benign, vague sense of belonging to a common Christendom, and came to be a cloak for the illegitimate and hegemonic pretensions of a single sovereign state to dominate others.32 This process began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and peaked with the Thirty Years War which determined the size and character of individual states and settled how they were going to interact. These changes were disputed from within states by those losing out to the centralisation of power, and from without by neighbours fearing encroachment, or ambitious to expand into areas now occupied by emergent states. Political development was thus propelled by a convergence of pressures from above and below; from the universal and the particular. States with universalist pretensions, such as the Spanish monarchy, cracked under pressure from those resisting their dominance and fragmented into several smaller states. Portugal and the northern Netherlands both rebelled and secured independence with the assistance of other countries that feared Spanish hegemony. Meanwhile, other states 31. N. Hammerstein, ‘Imperium Romanum cum omnibus qualitatibus ad germanos est translatum’, in J. Kunisch, ed., Neue Studien zur fr?hneuzeitlichen Reichsgeschichte (Berlin, 1987), 187-202. 32. E. Straub, Pax und Imperium. Spaniens Kampf um seime Friedensordnung in Europa zwischen 1617 und1635 (Paderborn, 1980); C. Kampmann, ArbiterundFriedensstiftung: DieAuseinandersetzung um den politischen Schiedsrichter im Europa der Fr?hen Neuzeit (Paderborn, 2001). EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 565 emergence from below, as in the case of the Duchy of Savoy that slowly accumulated surrounding territories and ultimately emerged as the only state capable of unifying the Italian peninsula by the mid-nineteenth century. The growth of Brandenburg-Prussia also fits this pattern. But such state-building from below did not have to follow this monarchical route. Peter Blickle has drawn attention to an alternative path that built states up from the communal level through civic leagues and alliances between peasant villages. The Hanseatic League of northern European cities failed to convert its alliance into a permanent state structure, but the network of rural cantons and civic leagues in the western Alps that emerged in the late thirteenth century came to form the basis of modern Switzerland. While Blickle sees the communal approach as anti-aristocratic and proto-democratic, it is clear that it could be embraced by nobles as readily as by peasants and burghers. The Dutch rebels forged a new state based on a confederation between provincial Estates, each containing nobles and towns. Burkhardt argues that the Bohemian Revolt represented a similar attempt to create a confederal state through the union of the five provinces of the Bohemian crown. As in the case of the Dutch, the Austrian Habsburgs criminalised this project, labelling it rebellion and proceeded to crush it by force.33 Burkhardt developed his state-building thesis in a major article published in 1997 that sought to explain the growing density of European conflicts around 1600.34 He pointed to three ‘structural deficits’ in early modern states that left them prone to war. One aspect was the lack of equality between them. Burkhardt sees the modern international order resting on equality regardless of each state’s form of government, military capacity or economic potential. Sovereignty is defined by mutual recognition and respect. These ideas were certainly at odds with the late medieval and early modern hierarchical social order of Estates that underpinned all political thought. Sixteenth-century rulers saw themselves not as independent sovereigns, but as the leading Estates of a single Christendom. They distinguished sharply between themselves and the infidel Turks. Intra-Christian wars thus represented competition for status within a distinct system. Through their possession of the only imperial title, as well as prestigious kingdoms such as Spain, the Habsburgs claimed pre-eminence in this system, but this did not amount to an intention to expropriate other European rulers. Challengers to Habsburg pre-eminence 33- Blickle’s views are most accessible through his Obedient Germans? A Rebuttal (Charlottesville, 1997). See also H. Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton, 1994); J. Bahlcke, ‘Die B?hmische Krone zwischen staatsrechtlicher Integrit?t, monarchischer Union und St?ndischen F?deralismus’, inT. Fr?schl, ed., F?derationsmodelle und Unionsstrukturen (Munich, 1994), 83-103; J. P?nek, ‘Das St?ndewesen und die Gesellschaft in den B?hmischen L?ndern in der Zeit vor der Schlacht auf dem Weissen Berg (1526-1620)’, Hist?rica. Les sciences historiques en Tsch?coslovaquie, xx (1985), 73-120. 34. J. Burkhardt, ‘Die Friedlosigkeit der fr?hen Neuzeit. Grundlegung einer Theorie der Bellizit?t Europas’, Zeitschrift fur Historische Forschung, xxiv (1997), 509-74. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

566 THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 contested this pole position, rather than seeking necessarily to extend their actual territory. Burkhardt makes much of the ‘universalist myths’ legitimising such challenges, such as Moscow’s claim to be the Third Rome, or Sweden’s use of its Gothic heritage. Institutional deficits constituted a second problem. One aspect of this was the reliance on hereditary dynasticism to provide political stability, coordination and symbolic integration in most states. This came with a price. Dynasticism perpetuated the political control of a social elite convinced of the need to defend its honour and prove itself in battle. It also placed the unpredictability of human reproduction at the heart of international relations. The need to produce an heir forced ruling houses to intermarry, creating a web of competing claims to rule the same lands. Burkhardt labels the Thirty Years War as ‘the school of the war of succession’ that Johannes Kunisch has identified as a structural feature of subsequent old regime relations.35 It began with disputes as to who should succeed the incapacitated Emperor Rudolf II, disputes that weakened the Habsburgs and exacerbated their problems in Bohemia. The revolt there in 1618 involved a clash between Habsburg pretensions to hereditary succession and the Bohemian’s claim for elective monarchy. Other succession disputes included those over Jiilich-Cleves, Marburg, Mantua and the long-running conflict between the Protestant and Catholic branches of the House of Vasa as to which should rule Sweden. Disputes involved titles as well as land: the contest within the Wittelsbach dynasty over the Palatine electoral title, the wide disagreement over the right of cathedral chapters to chose Protestant bishops in Catholic ecclesiastical territories and the possibility that the electoral princes might choose a Protestant emperor. Further institutional deficits were to be found in the inability of most early modern states to cope with the fiscal-military problems of the wars they were causing. Here Burkhardt is far less convincing as he resurrects old claims that the inability to control ‘military enterprisers’ like Wallenstein contributed to the war, or at least prolonged it through their desire to enrich themselves.36 Lack of autonomy constituted a third deficit. Burkhardt draws on the extensive literature on ‘confessionalisation’ that analyses the relationship between political centralisation and the formation of distinct sectarian identities following the Reformation.37The permanent schism after 1517 weakened the bonds of universal Christendom and created new divisions. The continued fusion of church and state made it impossible, however, to disassociate religion and politics, and raised new problems as to how political action could be legitimised. The 35- Burkhardt, Drei?igj?hrige Krieg, 204-12; J. Kunisch and H. Neuhaus, eds., Der dynastische F?rstenstaat (Berlin, 1982). 36. Burkhardt, ‘Friedlosigkeit’, 543-8. 37. The literature on confessionalisation is summarised in A. Schindling and W Ziegler, eds., Die Territorien des Reiches im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung (7 vols., M?nster, 1989-98). EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 567 standard solution was to enforce confessional uniformity as the bedrock of political stability, linking dissent to rebellion. This introduced a confessional edge to rebellions in which differences of religion overlapped with resistance to centralisation. While confessional solidarity may have reduced conflict between states of the same faith, it opened new possibilities for international alliances that could link conflicts in one part of Europe with those in another. Thus the appeal of’international Calvinism’ reinforced English, Dutch andTransylvanian support for the Bohemian rebels, while Counter Reformation solidarity induced Spain to favour the Polish Vasas’ plans to reconquer Sweden. These arguments allow Burkhardt to subsume evidence that the Thirty Years War may have been a religious conflict within his otherwise largely political explanation. While he rejects various materialist explanations as determinist, he does point to the lack of sufficient resources as a further autonomy deficit’, thus bringing competition over the Baltic tolls and other sources of revenue within his state building thesis. In Burkhardt’s view, the scale and duration of the Thirty Years War stemmed from the intersection of violent disputes on both levels of early modern politics. Struggles over status within the international order led to French opposition to Spanish-Habsburg universalism, as well as attempts by Sweden and other countries to assert regional dominance. Struggles over the internal order produced a great number of disputes at the particular level of individual provinces, duchies and kingdoms, especially between rulers and their Estates. Conflicts at both levels were related by a series of succession crises and given a confessional edge by the allegiance of the different parties to competing versions of Christianity. The state-building thesis offers one major advantage over the international war school in that it incorporates internal as well as external conflict in its explanation. Burkhardt’s choice of the term ‘state building’ implies purposeful intent and thus agency. Yet the argument relies largely on a structural explanation, presenting war as the consequence of long-term political changes not completed until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. The emphasis on dynasticism nonetheless leaves some scope for human action, since it created a system of rule where decisions were greatly affected by each ruler’s ability and personality. It also allows for contingency, as a ruler’s death could trigger a major crisis. At its core, however, Burkhardt’s state building process is a narrative of modernisation narrative which is implicitly rational. Conscious of this, he incorporates Krippendorf’s argument that war is an irrational consequence of state development, yet much of his explanation rests on the belief that those in power do make ‘rational choices’. Narratives of modernisation and their alleged rationality have come under fire from postmodernists who claim they impose a false coherence EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

568 THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 on the past. Few postmodernists have offered alternative explanations for the causes of early modern wars, but Erik Ringmar has treated Swedish involvement in the Thirty Years War from this perspective by proposing a ‘narrative theory of action’.38 He argues that people use metaphors to give narrative meaning to their lives and actions, linking them together in a sequence as in a story plot. Intentions are explained with reference to the continuing story of each individual’s life. Yet: there are strict limits both to the courses of action open to us and the kinds of identities we can construct. We can neither do whatever we want to do, nor be whatever we want to be. What we can do, and can be, is instead ultimately determined by the reactions of the audiences to whom our stories are addressed. Contrary to what rational choice theory suggests, interests do not belong to individuals, groups or states, but ‘are properties of communication between individuals’. Since people seek recognition from a variety of different audiences, they tell their story differently each time. ‘We can always see ourselves in a multitude of ways, and depending on the context and circumstances, we may prefer one picture as more appealing than another’. Thus Sweden intervened in 1630, not to gain economic or political advantage, or to ward off imminent attack, but because its king and aristocratic counsellors sought recognition from their subjects and neighbours as legitimate rulers of a recently united country. As with all postmodernist explanations, this offers useful insights into how actions were legitimised, but it is not very helpful in explaining how they came about. War is detached from the distasteful business of blood and gore, and instead floats freely in the more agreeable world of literature and stories. Attempts to locate the causes of the Thirty Years War more firmly in material reality are primarily associated with the debate on the ‘General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’. Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian, first proposed an economic crisis associated with the long transition of the European economy from feudalism to capitalism between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. Hugh Trevor-Roper added a political crisis, thus linking the long-term underlying changes highlighted by Hobsbawm to the high incidence of revolts, civil strife and international conflict in the first half of the seventeenth century.39 The crisis was general since it affected all of western and central Europe, though it manifested itself in different ways with geographical 38. Ringmar, Identity, Interest and Action. The following quotations are from 79-80. 39. The key articles first appeared in Past and Present and were brought together in T. Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe, 1560-1660 (London, 1965). See also P. Kriedte, Peasants, Landlords and Merchant Capitalists. Europe and the World Economy 1500?1800 (Leamington Spa, 1983). T.K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1975) also sees the ‘resolution of the crisis as an age of absolutism after 1648. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 569 variations. These differences were attributed to the specific social and political structures and systems of religious belief in each location. The outcome also varied, depending on how far individual countries could benefit from the underlying structural changes shaping the transition to capitalist economics. These changes included the shift from land to sea powers with access to the Atlantic and hence to world markets, as well as the transition from reliance on grain production to more diversified activities such as stock farming and textiles. Meanwhile control of manufacturing slipped from the urban guilds as capitalist entrepreneurs coordinated rural cottage industry in a process that has been labelled ‘proto-industrialisation. All these developments accelerated the division of labour on the international, inter-regional and societal levels, boosting the exchange of goods across wider areas. Groups profiting from these developments sought to wrest political control from those associated with older forms of production, so they could shape social and legal arrangements to facilitate even faster growth. Thus the Dutch Revolt and British Civil Wars become ‘early bourgeois revolutions’ that created socio-political frameworks conducive to accelerated capitalist development. France and Sweden experienced an intermediary outcome, where the crown emerged stronger thanks to holding a balance between a rising bourgeoisie and a declining feudal aristocracy. Other countries could maintain their position in an increasingly competitive Europe only through political reaction: the crown forged a closer political alliance with the aristocracy at the expense of other social groups in a bid to coerce the population to provide the necessary resources. Continental Marxist historians took their cue more directly from Lenin’s analysis that ‘all wars are inseparable from the political systems that engender them’.40 Since states are seen as the ‘organising committees’ of the ruling class, their policies reflect those class interests, with war simply being an extension of that policy by another means. Lenin distinguished between revolutionary wars ‘arising from the class struggle’, and reactionary wars between states controlled by members of the same class. This prompted attempts to interpret the Bohemian Revolt and hence the entire war in class terms, with each belligerent aligned into ‘progressive’ or ‘reactionary’ camps depending on its level of economic development. The Czech historian Josef Polisensky provided the most complete expression of this theory by incorporating the British Marxist concept of a general crisis to present the Thirty Years War as a clash of two civilisations’. In the progressive camp were a group of states deriving their structures ‘from the legacy of Humanism, tinged with Protestantism and taking as [their] model the United Netherlands’. The opposing reactionary camp was a ‘Catholic-Habsburg 40. This and the following quote are from V.l. Lenin, Collected Works (14 vols., Moscow, 1964), xxiv. 399?400. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

570 THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 one which followed the example of Spain’.41 This represented a considerable modification of Lenin’s original class analysis, and indeed Polisensky explicitly rejected attempts to relate his two ‘civilisations’ to a struggle between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, arguing instead that the war had little to do with economic development which continued apace alongside the fighting. Polisensky’s ‘civilisations’ represented opposing forms of political organisation. The Bohemian confederation of 1619 constituted a ‘new Holland’. The Bohemian Revolt stemmed from the radicalisation of the lesser nobility, excluded on account of their Protestant faith from opportunities in the Habsburg monarchy at a time when their economic position was in decline. These disaffected nobles drew on local Hussite religious and political traditions at odds with the Catholic-Habsburg absolutist programme. Thus the two ‘civilisations’ still met Marxist criteria in that they had socio-economic roots, though the conflict between them was expressed in political and religious terms, with a largely Protestant order of Estates pitted against revived Catholic monarchical feudalism. Miroslav Hroch attempted to root his compatriot’s arguments more firmly in the orthodox Marxist ‘base-superstructure’ model by arguing that the long peace of the later sixteenth-century permitted the accumulation of resources and made prolonged war possible after 1618. In particular, the transition to monetary and credit systems enabled states to keep fighting even when their own resources were being depleted. On that analysis, the causes of the war lay not in economic crisis but in the consequences of economic growth.42 Boris Porshnev, the principal Soviet historian to study the Thirty Years War, arranged the belligerents in slightly different progressive and reactionary groups. Not surprisingly, given the strongly nationalist tone of Soviet historiography, Muscovy appears as an ally of the progressive Protestant camp, backed by France, facing a reactionary alliance of Poland-Lithuania and the Habsburgs.43 But well before the collapse of the Soviet Union, some Marxist historians pointed to the futility of trying to label one country as more ‘progressive’ than another. Polisensky also distanced himself in his later writing from some of his earlier remarks, disputing that there was a single crisis and rejecting attempts to depict Bohemia around 1600 as on the verge of an early bourgeois revolution.44 41. J.V. Polisensky, Anglie a BilA Hora (Prague, 1949); War and Society in Europe 1618?1648 (Cambridge, 1978); Tragic Triangle. The Netherlands, Spain and Bohemia 1617?21 (Prague, 1991); Quote from his The Thirty Years War (London, 1971), 9. Polisensky’s interpretation of two opposing civilisations has received explicit endorsement in H. Schilling, Konfessionalisierung und Staastsinteressen 1559?1660 (Paderborn, 2007), 398-9. 42. M. Hroch and J. Petran, Das 17 Jahrhundert?Krise der Feudalgesellschaft? (Hamburg, 1981). 43. This discussion was largely omitted from the English translation of B. Porshnev, Muscovy and Sweden in the Thirty Years War, 1630?5 (Cambridge, 1996). See also H. Langer, The Thirty Years War (Poole, 1980). 44. J. Kuczynski, Geschichte des Alltags des deutschen Volkes (2 vols., Cologne, 1982), i. 91-2; J.V. Polisensky and J. Kollmann, Wallenstein. Feldherr des Drei?igj?hrigen Krieges (Cologne, 1997), 9?11. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 571 Historians free from the fetters of state-imposed ideology pushed the theory of a General Crisis in more promising directions. Taking his cue from how seventeenth-century Europeans viewed their own time, Henry Kamen added consideration of environmental factors as well as economic and political problems: for most people this was a harsh ‘iron century’.45 Others fitted the General Crisis into a broader discussion of world development. The early seventeenth century now emerged as the second of four great inflationary ‘waves’ rocking human history. The first followed the population growth and expansion of the European economy in the twelfth century which triggered a slow but steady rise in prices from 1230 peaking in the fourteenth-century ‘crisis’: inclement weather, harvest failure and famine from 1314 were followed by epidemics culminating in the Black Death of 1347-51 which reduced the Continent’s population by at least a quarter. These economic and environmental changes were accompanied by widespread violence and disorder. A similar combination of factors are seen as creating the third wave around the time of the Napoleonic Wars and the fourth in the world Depression of the 1920s and 1930s. They are also behind the second inflationary period that set in during the later sixteenth century. The overall scale of inflation was less than during the fourteenth century, but the pace was much faster, fuelled again by demographic expansion as Europe’s population recovered from the Black Death. Population levels had been restored around 1470 and grew further from 1530 as the economy expanded with the exploitation of the New World and Indies. For example, the number of people living in Hessen grew by 35 per cent in the century after 1480, placing increased pressure on land and resources. The population of Lower Austria rose by a fifth between 1529 and 1618: the prices of wheat, wine and cattle nearly tripled, and those of rye, barley and oats doubled between 1550 and 1600 alone.46 Economic growth had been sustained by favourable climatic conditions between 1525 and 1565 that permitted high crop yields, but a Malthusian crisis set in as population growth forced diminishing returns. Land that had been abandoned following the Black Death had largely been resettled by the mid-sixteenth century. As the population continued to rise, existing land was subdivided into increasingly uneconomic plots, while the poor and less fortunate were forced into less productive areas that had not been cultivated before. Established legal arrangements and local customs inhibited experimentation and led to a reliance on existing farming methods that were often inefficient and leading to ecological exhaustion. Conditions became unsustainable with climatic changes that began with a bad winter in 1572-3 and deepened after 1591 into what has been 45- H. Kamen, European Society 1500?1700 (London, 1984) originally published in 1971 as The Iron Century. 46. K.J. MacHardy, ‘The Rise of Absolutism and Noble Rebellion in Early Modern Habsburg Austria, 1570 to 1620’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, xxxiv (1992), 407-38 at 411-12. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

572 THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 labelled the Little Ice Age lasting in the western hemisphere into the nineteenth century.47 Previously stable conditions became the exception as winters grew longer and colder, freezing rivers and causing the Alpine glaciers to advance into inhabited regions, in some cases burying entire communities. Spring arrived late and was followed by a cold, wet summer and a short autumn. The quality as well as the quantity of food production declined, leading to the continent-wide ‘great dearth’ of 1594-7, followed by further famine years. Meat consumption declined from an annual per capita average of 50 kg in the fifteenth century to half that or less.48 Even the modestly well off spent half their income on grain and for most people, food was meagre and monotonous. Malnutrition reduced female fertility and doubled infant mortality, contributing to the demographic crisis and leaving the bulk of the population susceptible to disease. Western European countries suffered major losses from plagues from the 1580s, while southern and Central Europe were badly affected in the later 1620s and 1630s. Crop failures meant that farmers defaulted on debts, disrupting trade and credit arrangements as well. Prices continued to fluctuate, notably in the ‘Kipper and Wipper’ era of the early 1620s, but the general trend was towards an end to the price revolution around 1600. Inflation already slowed in Spain, Italy and France after 1590, but continued in the Empire until the 1630s and in England and the Netherlands for a further decade. This coincided with the end to demographic growth in the wave of epidemics and the onset of war. Production also suffered from disruption through military operations, not least when the Dutch closed the Scheldt after 1590, blockading Antwerp that had been the hub of European trade during the preceding century. The escalating conflict after 1618 coincided with declining silver imports from the New World, prompting the recourse to coinage debasement that powerfully contributed to the hyperinflation of i62i-2.49The result was a continent wide trade slump and considerable unemployment; the latter no doubt assisted military recruitment at the start of the war. Prolonged conflict thereafter siphoned off capital through heavy taxation and contributed further to the economic slowdown. Widespread hardship was the result, as real wages fell, but the cost of food and fuel rose sharply, particularly in the 1590s and 1620s. The overall standard of living declined, and the discrepancies between rich and poor grew ever sharper. 47- Climate change is particularly emphasised by Geoffrey Parker’s modification of the General Crisis theory: Europe in Crisis 1598?1648 (London, 1979), and with L.M. Smith, eds., The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1997). 48. For an overview of the impact on Central Europe, see C. Dipper, Deutsche Geschichte 1648-1789 (Frankfurt and Main, 1991). 49. SJ and B.H. Stein, Silver, Trade and War. Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, 2000); C.P. Kindelberger, ‘The Economic Crisis of 1619 to 1623’, Journal of Economic History, li (1991), 149-75. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 573 The concept of a wider climatic, rather than purely economic or political, general crisis has found broad acceptance among social and cultural historians who regularly invoke it as the cause of moral panics and violence in seventeenth-century Europe. The anxiety caused by crop failures and the associated problems is said to be manifest through the heightened religious fervour of Counter Reformation Catholicism and of Calvinist and evangelical Protestant fundamentalism. Protestants, for example, responded by advocating modest, sober consumption throughout the year in place of the Catholic cycle of carnivalesque binges and fasts. Others sought solace in millennialist apocalyptic beliefs. Poems and sermons appeared calling on people to repent before it was too late. Governments issued decrees to curb excessive behaviour and encourage greater obedience and thrift through a system of surveillance and draconian punishments. Economic problems, dearth and conflict were blamed on sinful disobedience and the population was admonished that security and prosperity would only return if they toed the line. Many found these official explanations wholly unsatisfactory, preferring instead to attribute their misfortune to supernatural or magical causes. Such beliefs were shared by many in power, precipitating the European ‘witch craze’ that claimed its highest number of victims in the Empire between the 1580s and 1630s.50 At its fullest extent, the ‘iron century’ argument becomes a case for a world crisis in the seventeenth century. The evidence at first seems compelling. Problems in the agrarian economy contributed to a series of revolts in the Ottoman Empire from the 1590s that saw four sultans murdered or deposed between 1618 and 1648. The Ming dynasty in China collapsed amid widespread famine, disease and disorder as the last emperor hanged himself in 1644, ending nearly three centuries of unbroken rule. Bubonic plague reached India in 1616, and was followed by economic stagnation and demographic decline. Shah Jahan (r. 1628-58) fell into despair at the death of his wife, devoting himself to building the Taj Mahal and was deposed by his sons who then fought among themselves. The Mughal Empire was left weakened and vulnerable to the predatory ambitions of European colonial powers. The death of Shah Abbas (r. 1586-1628) reversed the previous expansion of the Persian Empire, while the Bornu and Mangding Empires in sub-Saharan Africa also collapsed around this time.51 All versions of the General Crisis rely on structural explanations. The Thirty Years War is on such analyses seen as arising from such worsening circumstances. The specific evidence is simply the coincidence of the outbreak of the Bohemian Revolt and the resumption of the Hispano-Dutch war with the peak of the trade, production and currency 50. For an attempt to correlate witchcraft prosecutions with years of high prices, see W Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria (Cambridge, 1997). 51. D.H. Fischer, The Great Wave. Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (Oxford, 1996). EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

574 THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 problems around 1618-21. Literary scholars are likely to take exception to David Fischer’s assertion that Shakespeare turned from comedies to writing tragedies after 1601 in response to an inflationary and environmental crisis.52 The case is circumstantial at best and pointedly ignores the ‘silver linings’ to the dark clouds of crisis. One power’s problems were another’s opportunity. The Ottoman Empire recovered from its period of internal revolts to profit from Persia’s crisis after 1628, regaining land lost previously to Shah Abbas. More fundamentally, the adverse climatic conditions continued to affect much of Europe until i860, without always being accompanied by war. Even in crisis years, like those of 1770-2, most of the continent was often at peace. Only the Marxist version of the crisis argument links structural factors to human agency through the concept of class. War enabled the social elite to secure control of the state and increase their share of surplus production.53 States were ‘captured’ by the controlling class and fought wars in the interests of that class. This argument relies on accepting seventeenth-century society as divided into classes with recognised interests. Most of the evidence for such an assertion stems from studies of the nobility and is largely circumstantial. It is easy to find nobles who benefited personally from warfare, since such people generally held positions of command in armies, navies and governments. Many more were, however, ruined through death, personal injury or the destruction of manors and other assets. Most tellingly, where nobles did act as a group, through their representation in Estates and other assemblies, they almost invariably opposed royal belligerence and insisted on peace. While seventeenth-century Europeans believed that trade, commerce and production were important, they saw them as means to other ends, rather than matters of immediate concern. Even those at the forefront of economic development, or at the heart of government, were only dimly aware of wider changes around them and often drew completely inaccurate conclusions from what they did know. What assumed far greater prominence were emotive issues of status, belief and sentiment.54 Any discussion of the Thirty Years War as a religious conflict immediately encounters problems of definition. Historians who are 52. Ibid., ioo-i. 53. For example in the debate over Swedish intervention A. Attman, Swedish Aspirations and the Russian Market during the ifh Century (G?teborg, 1985); M. Roberts, The Swedish Imperial Experience 1560?1718 (Cambridge, 1979); S. Troebst, ‘Debating the Mercentile Background to Early Modern Swedish Empire-Building: Michael Roberts versus Artur Attman’, European History Quarterly, xxiv (1994), 485-509; W Buchholz, ‘Der Eintritt Schwedens in den Drei?igj?hrigen Krieg in der schwedischen und deutschen Historiographie des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts’, Historische Zeitschrift, ccxliv (1987), 292-314. 54. See for example, P. Brightwell, ‘The Spanish System and the Twelve Year’s Truce’, ante, lxxxix (1974), 270?92 at 285-6, and the excellent case study by S. Haberer, Ott Heinrich Fugger (1592?1644). Biographische Analyse typologischer Handlungsgfelder in der Epoch des Dreissigj?hren Krieges (Augsburg, 2004). EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 575 themselves religious have tended to distinguish between holy and religious war.55 Holy war is characterised by a belief that God has demanded the use of force and promised assistance that will lead to victory against great odds. Such conflicts are fought at God’s behest and entail some revelation of his will. Religious war, as defined by church historians, is fought to defend or propagate the faith. Secular historians dispense with the category of holy war and instead subdivide religious war. Their ‘religious war’ is reserved for clashes between Christians and peoples of other faiths, chiefly Muslims. Relations were characterised by permanent hostility, since neither Christendom nor the House of Islam could recognise the other’s right to exist without calling into question its own claims to exclusive, universal truth. The added category of ‘confessional war’ is used for conflicts within Christendom stemming from the permanent schism following the Reformation. For many, the period 1517-1648 is an age of confessional wars, of which the Thirty Years War was the last and greatest.56 The literature recognises that these categories were never entirely distinct. Participants in confessional conflict borrowed some of the rhetoric of religious war to denigrate their opponents, usually by likening them to the Turks.57 Confessionalisation is a concept developed largely by German historians since the 1950s to escape from a sectarian bias when discussing religious change in early modern Europe.58 Broad similarities in organisation and tactics have been detected beneath the doctrinal disputes that divided the different Christian churches. All sought to define their theology more precisely through written statements of faith to which all believers were encouraged to subscribe. The assistance of the local secular authorities was sought for this project, particularly to help enforce doctrinal conformity, discourage dissent and generally advance the faith. The alliance of throne and altar produced distinct confessional identities that, while they did not entirely exclude ties to those of other faiths, nonetheless created separate spheres affecting matters like the choice of marriage partners, diet and daily routines. Each church intended its drive for confessional conformity to assist a return to Christian unity by clarifying what constituted ‘proper’ religious practice and doctrinal truth. But the effect was to deepen and multiply the divisions between Christians and provide additional sources of conflict. 55- R. Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years War (Cambridge, 2003), 61; H. Waldenfels, ‘Religionskriege im Blickwinkel der Weltreligionen’, in K. Garber et al., eds., Erfahrung und Deutung von Krieg und Frieden (Munich, 2001), 83-95. Both Bireley and Waidenfels are members of the Society of Jesus. 56. A. Schindling, ‘Das Strafgericht Gottes’, in M. Asche and A. Schindling, eds., Das Strafgericht Gottes (M?nster, 2002), 11-51 at 17-20. 57. M. Wrede, Das Reich und seine Feindbilder (Mainz, 2004); A. Cirakman, From ‘ Terror of the World to the ‘Sick Man of Europe’. European Images of Ottoman Empire and Society from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth (New York and Frankfurt, 2002). 58. See n. 37. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

576 THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 Interpretations of the Thirty Year War as a religious conflict diverge from a common conviction that it began as a struggle between competing Christian confessions. This initial conflict involved a tension between the ideals of unity and universal faith and the practicalities of plurality and territoriality. As the political majority within both Europe and the Empire, Catholics clung to the medieval vision of a single Christendom and sought to persuade or coerce Protestants to rejoin the true faith. As the political minority, Protestants were outnumbered within the institutions of the Empire, but Lutherans at least had secured considerable rights through the Peace of Augsburg. While some saw these as a platform for further gains, others regarded them more as an essential defence against those Catholics who felt that any toleration was licence to serve the devil. The desire to advance or defend the rights gained in 1555 drove some German Protestants to forge alliances with fellow-believers elsewhere in Europe. Religion could not be disassociated from politics: confessional disputes at once raised questions about the extent of political authority. In short, minorities, whether Protestant or Catholic, disputed the right of the ruling majority to decide which doctrine was correct. Historians who follow this interpretation argue that mounting confessional antagonism overrode political considerations as Germans allowed their religious disputes to paralyse the imperial constitution. A vicious circle set in as each party regarded the other with mounting suspicion, polarising politics into hostile confessional camps. Crusading Catholicism confronted Calvinist conspiratorial paranoia. From prince to peasant, each confession saw the world sharply divided into good and evil, with no room for doubt or compromise.59 The proponents of the confessional war approach diverge from their clerical colleagues at this point, arguing that the linkage of politics and religion stopped short of theocracy60 State and church remained distinct. Dynastic interest and secular reasons of state were never fully confessionalised, allowing scope for cross-confessional alliances such as that between Catholic France and Lutheran Sweden. Moreover the imperial constitution exerted constraints on the role of religion. Though it was rooted in medieval Christendom, imperial law developed as a web of agreements, compacts, rights and jurisdictions that was no longer exclusively Catholic. The religious settlement of 1555 was embedded in the secular public peace that both pre-dated the Reformation and continued to evolve after the schism began. Thus a considerable part of the constitution was confessionally neutral, since Lutherans and Catholics shared rights within it and both could appeal to it as a source of authority. Mounting tension impaired the constitution prior to 1618, but did not damage it 59- The unbridgeable divide is especially emphasised by A. Gotthard, ‘Der deutsche Konfessionskrieg seit 1619. Ein Resultat gest?rter politische Kommunikation’, Historische Jahrbuch, cxxii (2002), 141-72. 60. H. Schilling, ‘Confessionalisation in Europe’, in Bussmann and Schilling, eds., 1648: War and Peace, i. 219-28, and his Konfessionalisierung und Staatsinteressen, 346-70, 394-419, 507-38. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 577 irrevocably It remained an alternative to confessional alliances as an arena for common action, and, strikingly, all parties returned to it as the framework within which to negotiate the final Westphalian Settlement.61 Some clerical historians see an additional heightened element of holy war notably in the case of Emperor Ferdinand II and Duke, later Elector Maximilian I of Bavaria. Robert Bireley presents a distinctly Catholic interpretation by arguing that Ferdinand and Maximilian waged a defensive religious war against Protestant attempts to expand the privileges obtained in 1555. Catholic military preponderance by 1627 encouraged a shift to holy war, especially as Ferdinand sacrificed dynastic interest to pursue confessional objectives in the belief that God would help him overcome the mounting odds. The holy dimension ended when these Catholic objectives were abandoned in the compromise Peace of Prague in 1635. The religious element also progressively declined as the emperor battled Catholic France and Lutheran Sweden as foreign invaders.62 The differences between the religious and confessional war models point to the fundamental question of the place of faith in causing the war: was religion a motive for or a justification of action? Marxist historians have classified religion as part of the ideological ‘superstructure’, removing it as a cause and identifying it instead as part of the strategies deployed by the ruling elite to legitimise war making.63 Others have reached broadly similar conclusions by less doctrinaire deductions. In addition to the standard reference to the Franco-Swedish and other cross-confessional alliances, they point to other evidence like the mixed confessional character of the major armies.64 Relations between Lutherans and Calvinists were frequently less than cordial, and several leading Lutheran princes supported the Emperor throughout much of the war. No confession had a uniform approach to political questions, and all churches were divided internally over their own objectives. Indeed, serious objections can be raised against the entire idea of confessional parties. There is considerable evidence that the confessional project did not instil uniform outlook or identity. Some people outwardly conformed, while inwardly dissented. Others selected the beliefs and rituals they found most meaningful and useful in their daily lives, regardless of whether these were fully orthodox.65 6i. This line of argument is partly suggested by Schindling, ‘Das Strafgericht Gottes’, 27-44. 62. R. Bireley, ‘The Thirty Years War as Germany’s Religious War’, in K. Repgen, ed., Krieg und Politik 1618-1648 (Munich, 1988), 85-106. S.R. Gardiner, The Thirty Years War 1618-1648 (London, 1889) offers a more Protestant version of this narrative. 63. H. Langer, ‘Religion, Konfession und Kirche in der Epoche des ?bergangs von Feudalismus zum Kapitalismus’, Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft, xxxii (1984), 110-23. 64. K. Repgen, ‘What Is a “Religious War”‘, in E.I. Kouri andT Scott, eds., Politics and Society in Reformation Europe (Basingstoke, 1987), 311-28; M. Kaiser, ‘Cuius exercitus, eius religio? Konfession und Heerwesen im Zeitalter des Drei?igj?hrigen Krieges’, Archiv f?r Reformationsgeschichte, xci (2000), 316-53. 65. N. Grochowina, Indifferenz und Dissens in der Grafschaft Ostfriesland im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt and Main, 2003); M.R. Forster, Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque. Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550?1750 (Cambridge, 2001). EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

578 THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 While it is impossible to group seventeenth-century Europeans into clearly defined confessional parties, it is equally futile to separate religious and political motives. Religion provided a language that enabled people to understand their world. They were capable of distinguishing between secular and spiritual interests, but varied considerably in their willingness to do this.66 Here it is helpful to differentiate between overall aims and immediate objectives. The former always included the advancement of the faith with the hope that victory would restore the lost Christian unity, either by reforming Europe according to Protestantism or exterminating heresy and bringing God’s lost flock back within the Catholic fold. This religious goal was inseparably linked to more secular concerns for the public good, since spiritual matters were considered central to human welfare. Most people were sober, even pessimistic, in their assessment of the chances of achieving such long-term objectives, but this did not mean that they lost sight of them altogether. Material advantages loomed larger in more immediate aims, in the form of dynastic status, territorial aggrandisement and the neutralisation of threats. Such concerns were justified as preparatory stages towards achieving the overall goal, even when they appeared to contradict it. For example, Spain urged the emperor to make concessions to the German Protestants after 1622 so that he could be free to assist in Italy and against the Dutch. Such apparent contradictions were reconciled through the doctrine of the ‘lesser evil’; tactical concessions to avoid more serious problems that would derail the overall aim. The use of such tortuous logic suggests a secular, even cynical, outlook and that religious arguments were deployed merely to justify naked, material ambition. Yet few seventeenth-century Europeans were truly indifferent to religion. It was necessary to have an understanding of religious matters to have a sense of what was worth fighting for. Unwillingness to become involved was not necessarily a sign that religion did not matter. Equally, it was possible to be a fully confessionalised adherent of a church and still make compromises. Religious and political conditions were fluid, with one flowing into the other. Motives were always mixed, but it is nonetheless possible to distinguish between moderates and militants. Both were religious, but the latter were more prepared to sacrifice immediate objectives in the conviction that overall confessional goals were within their grasp. Thus for some participants and observers the Thirty Years War really was a religious, even a holy, war. It is important to recognise, however, that the factors that made it so were not exclusive to the early seventeenth 66. Examples include H. Angermeier, ‘Politik, Religion und Reich bei Kardinal Melchior Khlesl’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fur Rechtsgeschichte, Germanistische Abteilung, ex (1993), 249-330 and Axel Oxenstierna’s statements to the Swedish Council of State, quoted in N. Ahnlund, Gustavus Adolphus the Great (New York, 1999), 274, 282. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 579 century. Religious conflict had been present in medieval Europe, and for that matter exists in the world today. Seventeenth-century militants could draw upon the legacy of the crusades, millenialism, providentialism and eschatology in their bid to relate events to their beliefs.67 Such militants exercised an influence that was at times disproportionate to their numbers, but this does not mean that we should interpret the Thirty Years War through their eyes. War is different from brawling in that it is organised violence that requires some form of coordination to direct and sustain it over time and space. Political structures not only provide such a framework, but strategies to rationalise and legitimate human activity. In this respect, Burkhardt is right to draw our attention to the incomplete nature of early modern states, since it is here that we can understand the interplay of religion and politics. By shattering Catholic universalism, the Reformation unintentionally promoted state development. This was not a straightforward secular process involving the separation of church and state. On the contrary, in the absence of agreement among theologians, rulers sought to appropriate the right to decide which version of Christianity was correct. Coming on top of demands for taxes and growing interference in everyday life, this represented a massive growth in state power, heightening existing questions about its legitimacy.68 Yet such long-term changes did not necessarily entail major war. In explaining the causes of the Thirty Years War, we need to pay attention to the detail. Most of the interpretations reviewed so far generalise the causes by fitting the war into wider political, economic or religious changes. What should properly be called the Thirty Years War was a struggle over the political and religious order of Central Europe. It cannot be reduced to a ‘German war’, since Germany as such did not exist. It began with the Bohemian Revolt that had its origins in changes within the Habsburg lands that were not fully integrated, either together or within the Empire. The problems that provoked the Bohemian Revolt persisted throughout the Thirty Years War because each attempt to solve them failed to overcome continued opposition from within the Empire and from outside. But precisely because they persisted, and because efforts were made to deal with them in a variety of partial settlements and finally in the Treaty of Westphalia, these problems offer the historian an effective way of linking the different phases of the conflict. This becomes clearer when we examine the problems facing the Austrian Habsburgs; problems that explain both the initial Bohemian Revolt and the subsequent spread of the conflict. These difficulties stemmed from dynastic weakness following Charles V’s separation of the Spanish possessions and the later internal partition of the Austrian lands 67. N. Housely, Religious Warfare in Europe 1400?1536 (Oxford, 2002). 68. W te Brake, Shaping History. Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500-1700 (Berkeley, 1998). EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

580 THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 in 1564 into three branches. The partitions greatly reduced the resources available to the Emperor to sustain the possession of the imperial title and its associated mission, notably defence against the Ottomans. Devolution of authority to two junior branches in the Tirol and Styria alongside the imperial line in Austria exacerbated existing problems and contributed to a general loss of direction, both within the Empire and in the Habsburg hereditary lands. This situation was contained before 1576 by Emperor Maximilian’s relative ability and energetic cultivation of good relations with the leading German princes.69 Matters grew more serious with the accession of the mentally unstable Rudolph II in 1576. The removal of the imperial court to Prague and the emperor’s increasingly reclusive existence widened the gap between him and both his relations and the princes, creating a vacuum in the Austrian lands and the Empire. It is here that we can see the interplay between personality and formal structures. The imperial constitution left the emperor’s powers largely undefined. He held the initiative and most princes looked to him for leadership. Failure to provide this undermined faith in him rather than the constitution, but it still impaired the ability of formal institutions to resolve problems. Rudolph sincerely desired a peaceful settlement, but his inflated sense of majesty barred him from explaining his actions that consequently were left open to misinterpretation, wilful or otherwise. His interventions in the Donauw?rth dispute (1605-07) and the Jiilich crisis (1609-10) appeared erratic and deeply suspicious to many Protestants who joined the elector Palatine in accusing him of breaching the constitution. Rudolph lost the opportunity to rally majority opinion that still favoured the resolution of all problems through established constitutional means. The Saxons and other moderates were constrained from acting alone by their deference to the emperor whose incapacity left the field open to the militants.70 Rudolph’s inability to resolve the Empire’s problems alarmed his relations who felt he was endangering their collective interests. The damaging consequences of the 1564 partition became increasingly obvious, partly as the loss of economies of scale forced the archdukes to negotiate separate deals with their Estates. Fiscal weakness coincided with, and indeed facilitated, the spread of Protestantism within the Habsburg lands, since the archdukes were obliged to grant toleration to their nobility in return for grants of taxation and amortisation of debt.71 69. P.S. Fichtner, Emperor Maximilian //(New Haven, 2001); M. Lanzinner, Friedenssicherung und politische Einheit des Reiches unter Maximilian II. (1564-1576) (G?ttingen, 1993); A.P Luttenberger, Kurf?rsten, Kaiser und Reich. Politische F?hrung und Friedenssicherung unter Ferdinand I. und Maximilian II (Mainz, 1994). 70. D.M. Phelps, ‘Reich, Religion and Dynasty: The Formation of Saxon Policy 1555-1619’, (King’s College London Ph.D. thesis, 2005). 71. V Press, ‘The System of Estates in the Austrian Hereditary Lands and in the Holy Roman Empire’, in RJ.W Evans and TV Thomas, ed., Crown, Church and Estates (New York, 1991), 1-22; R. P?rtner, The Counter-Reformation in Central Europe: Styria 1580-1630 (Oxford, 2001). EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 581 The partition also raised expectations in the dynasty that were frustrated by the decision on Maximilian II’s death to forgo a further distribution of family assets among his sons. Rudolph’s refusal to marry raised the question of his succession, revealing one of Burkhardt’s structural deficits in the dangerous dependency of early modern states on dynasticism to guarantee political stability. Habsburg dynastic weakness also had international repercussions, given the location and extent of their hereditary lands and the Empire in the heart of Europe, and their association with the imperial title and nominal status as the secular head of Christendom. If the preconditions for an extensive war existed already in the 1590s, we should not jump forward to seeing its actual outbreak in 1618 as inevitable. Solutions to Habsburg and imperial problems were offered from several directions before then. The dynasty tried to resolve matters itself by linking a revival of its political authority to the enforcement of Catholic conformity among its own subjects. This programme was essentially worked out by 1579 and implemented with varying success by the archdukes thereafter. It linked the dynasty’s fortunes to those of a minority of militant Catholics who acquired wealth and influence by collaborating with particular archdukes during the 1590s. Their presence fostered an atmosphere of overconfidence, encouraging a dangerous overcommitment during the Long Turkish War of 1593-1606 in which Rudolph combined a crusade against the Ottomans with the violent re-Catholicisation of Hungary and Transylvania. Imperial prestige was severely diminished when Rudolph was forced to concede peace both to the sultan and to the Hungarian rebels. Rivalry within the dynasty escalated in violent clashes between the emperor and his brother Matthias, both of whom were in no position to fight without making further, far more extensive, concessions to their nobility in 1608. Crucially, these concessions weakened, rather than enhanced the Estates, since they entailed special rights granted to the Protestant majority that were not recognised by the Catholics. The Protestants were building parallel institutions, especially in Bohemia, that rested insecurely on concessions extorted from an unwilling ruler without firm foundation in the wider web of territorial laws. A similar process threatened in the Empire where the elector Palatine was trying to rally support for a militant Protestant solution to the constitutional problems by campaigning for special safeguards to offset the Catholic majority in imperial institutions. The Protestant Union of 1608 was an expression of this. It represented the elector’s failure to persuade Catholics and most Lutherans to accept constitutional change.72 The Catholic response was the formation of the League the 72. B.C. Pursell, The Winter King. Frederick V of the Palatinate and the Coming of the Thirty Years War (Aldershot, 2003), though Pursell misreads the implications of Palatine policy for the imperial constitution. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

582 THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 following year by Duke Maximilian of Bavaria. Both organisations were platforms for the dynastic ambitions of their founders who attached their prestige and interests to competing solutions to the Empire’s problems.73 Maximilian defended majority voting in imperial institutions, but nonetheless refused to defer entirely to the unreliable Habsburgs. He consistently blocked calls from Mainz and other moderates to admit either the emperor or the Saxons who also championed the status quo. Coinciding with the Jiilich dispute, these events look like a major crisis, but did not lead to general war. The persistence of peace was not simply the postponement of conflict until 1618 and cannot be attributed to the reluctance of other powers to start hostilities. To be sure, Spain, France and the Dutch had no interest in going to war over Jiilich and their involvement was limited to sabre rattling to bolster their international standing. France and the Protestant powers consistently refused closer involvement in the Union, not least because its increasingly radical and conspiratorial leadership was parting ways with the rest of the membership. The crisis broke before the League was fully formed and Bavaria remained on the sidelines. Maximilian courted Spanish and papal backing only to block potential Austrian membership which would have compromised the organisation’s purpose as an autonomous vehicle for Bavarian interests. Neither alliance incorporated the majority of its respective confessional adherents. The Union was hamstrung by persistent Saxon refusals to join. Most Protestants continued to put their faith in imperial institutions and hoped these could be revived. As the radicals seized on minor local religious disputes to challenge the authority of one imperial supreme court (the Reichskammergericht), the moderates simply transferred their problems to the other (the Reichshofrat).74 Several important principalities left the Union that was already in a process of self-dissolution by 1618. Meanwhile, Emperor Matthias neutralised the League by persuading it to accept Tirolean membership over Bavarian objections. Maximilian’s resignation was followed by the League’s dissolution in 1617. Serious problems persisted, but there were clear signs that tension was abating by 1618. The modest imperial revival was due to Matthias’ victory in the Habsburg ‘Brothers’ Quarrel’ by 1612 when his accession restored some vigour to imperial government.75 The long struggle to obtain power had by then exhausted Matthias who was clearly more interested in enjoying 73- T. Holz, Krummstab und Schwert. Die Liga und die geistlichen Reichsst?nde Schwabens 1609? 1635 (Leinfelden-Echterdingen, 2001); D. Albrecht, Maximilian I. von Bayern 1573-1651 (Munich, 1998). There is a good overview of both organisations by A. Gotthard, ‘Protestantische “Union” und katholische “Liga”, in V. Press, ed., Alternativen zur Reichsverfassung in der fr?hen Neuzeit? (Munich, 1995), 81-112. 74. S. Ehrenpreis, ‘Die T?tigkeit des Reichshofrats um 1600 in der protestantischen Kritik’, in W Sellert, ed., Reichshofrat und Reichskammergericht {Cologne, 1999), 27-46. 75. B. Rill, Kaiser Matthias. Bruderzwist und Glaubenskampf {Graz, 1999). EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 583 its trappings than in exercising it. More importantly, his lack of an heir prevented a satisfactory resolution of the underlying dynastic weakness. Growing Spanish interest in the Austrian succession introduced a new factor that ultimately left Archduke Ferdinand of the Styrian branch with the best cards after 1617.76 The year 1618 saw a renewed coincidence of problems in both the Empire and the Habsburg monarchy. Unlike those of 1608-09, these produced war. The foregoing suggests that this can only be explained through a closer examination of the circumstances in that year, rather than by reference to some supposed steady escalation of tensions over the longer term. The first event was the Bohemian Revolt which stemmed from the vulnerability of the local Protestant militants who were the chief beneficiaries of the crisis of 1608. Their new separate institutions lacked firm constitutional safeguards, making it difficult to challenge a Habsburg government which stuck to the strict, albeit Catholic, adherence of existing legal arrangements. Moreover Protestants were personally disadvantaged by the resumption of the earlier policy of restricting court and administrative posts to Catholics. Unable to obtain their goals through formal structures, the radical minority rebelled in 1618. Moderates refused to follow them precisely because they still hoped matters could be resolved peacefully through those structures.77 This explains both the Revolt’s radicalisation?and its ultimate failure. War followed because the Revolt became linked to discontent in the Empire. This factor was largely absent in 1608 when the Union leadership spurned overtures from the Habsburg malcontents. The failure to win more orthodox allies made rebellious nobles more acceptable partners by 1618. The rebels’ offer of the Bohemian crown to the elector Palatine appeared to improve the chances of international support by potentially making him a more attractive partner. In addition, it pandered to the elector’s royalist pretensions following his marriage to James I’s daughter in 1613. Millennialist and apocalyptic beliefs had also gained a firmer hold on the Palatine leadership, inclining them to underestimate the risks they were taking. Acceptance of the crown in 1619 represented a significant escalation of the conflict absent in 1608 when the malcontent nobility merely exploited Habsburg rivalry. By deposing Ferdinand as Bohemian king, the rebels challenged the dynasty’s domestic political power and its international standing. Already allied to the archduke by treaty from 1617, Spain intervened to support him over Bohemia. Yet the conflict still remained regional, rather than continental, owing to the considerable efforts that were made to defuse it. The Union and League agreed not to fight, raising hopes that violence could be restricted to the Habsburg hereditary lands. If the Elector of Saxony intervened in 76. M.S. S?nchez, A House Divided: Spain, Austria and the Bohemian and Hungarian Successions’, Sixteenth Century Journal, xxv (1994), 887-903. 77. K.J. MacHardy, War, Religion and Court Patronage in Habsburg Austria. The Social and Cultural Dimensions of Political Interaction, 1521?1622 (Basingstoke, 2003). EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

584 THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 Bohemia, he did so with the aims of limiting the conflict and of moderating the possible repercussions of a Habsburg victory.78 The emperor also wanted to contain the war, but was bound by his promises to Maximilian to compensate Bavaria at the expense of the outlawed elector Palatine. The conflict spread partly because the remnants of the rebel forces retreated westwards to the Lower Palatinate. More fundamentally, other powers continued to sponsor the defeated elector and what was trumpeted as the ‘Protestant Cause’. It is here that we can see how the Thirty Years War was related to other European conflicts while nonetheless remaining distinct from them. The resumption of Spain’s war against the Dutch in 1621 coincided with the shift of the fighting from Bohemia to the Rhine. Though Spanish forces were involved in both, war did not become general. The Dutch disengaged entirely from the Empire, while Spain reduced its presence to garrisons in the Lower Palatinate and Westphalia. Both had acted as auxiliaries rather than full belligerents and resolved on the resumption of their own quarrel largely independently from events in the Empire. Spain continued to support the emperor throughout the 1620s and 1630s, but primarily in the hope that this would enable him to defeat his opponents and free him to assist against the Dutch. Bavaria consistently opposed any extension of the war, and though the emperor did send contingents into the Netherlands, he refrained from openly committing himself to Spain’s problems.79 Other powers intervened largely to frustrate this possibility and to keep the emperor out of their own affairs. In each case, intervention was tailored to the Empire’s circumstances, justifying a foreign presence as defence of ‘German Liberty’ or the imperial constitution. The same relationship characterised the connections between the Thirty Years War and conflicts in northern and southern Europe. The former was affected by two long-running struggles, between Sweden and Denmark and between Sweden and Poland-Lithuania. While both Scandinavian kingdoms intervened in Germany, they did so after they had secured temporary superiority over each other in their own Baltic feud. Moreover Sweden delayed its intervention until it had forced Poland-Lithuania to sign a truce in 1629 and then renewed this in 1635 to keep the Catholic Vasas out of the remainder of the Central European war. Muscovy’s conflict with Poland 1632-4, while useful for Sweden in keeping the Commonwealth busy, had nothing to do with the problems troubling the Empire. Other, less extensive, conflicts in Italy were also distinct. There was a danger that the Thirty Years War might spread there, notably when the 78. F. M?ller, Kursachsen und der B?hmische Aufstand 1618-1622 (M?nster, 1997). 79. M. Kaiser, Politik und Kriegf?hrung. Maximilian von Bayern, Tilly und die Katholische Liga im Drei?igj?hrigen Krieg (M?nster, 1999); D. Parrott, ‘The Causes of the Franco-Spanish War of 1635-59’, m J- Black, ed., The Origins of War in Early Modern Europe (Edinburgh, 1987), 72-111; R.A. Stradling, ‘Olivares and the Origins of the Franco-Spanish War’, ante, ci (1986), 68-94. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE CAUSES OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR 1618-48 585 emperor intervened in the Franco-Spanish dispute over the Mantuan Succession, but only because the tensions there were directly linked to those north of the Alps. Northern Italy, including the lands of the maverick duke of Savoy, was still formally part of the Empire. The emperor’s actions south of the Alps had direct repercussions for the rest of imperial politics. Ferdinand Us decision to accept a compromise with France over Mantua in 1631 signalled his reluctance to widen the Central European war.80 Subsequent hostilities were either a direct result of the outbreak of the Franco-Spanish war in 1635, or stemmed from Italian disputes, such as papal ambitions in the Castro War of 1643. South-eastern Europe constituted another area of potential conflict, but one generally neglected, especially in British and American writing on this period. True, the area was largely quiet between the end of the Long Turkish War in 1606 and the outbreak of further fighting between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans over Transylvania around 1660. Yet that was the exception that proved the rule. There were long-running tensions along the fault line between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, but no major conflict occurred despite the carnage in Germany and elsewhere. The causes of these other conflicts did not apply here. Not only were both the emperor and the sultan distracted by other problems, but the Hungarians were satisfied with the concessions they had extracted from the Habsburgs in 1608 and saw no reason to put these at risk. The Habsburgs accepted this in order to avoid stirring troubles that might prompt Turkish intervention. Though Hungary contributed men and money to the Habsburg war effort, it was otherwise effectively neutral, restricting south-eastern intervention to Transylvania’s limited forays into the Thirty Years War.81 Each part of Europe had its own tensions which shared some things in common with those causing problems elsewhere, but which were sufficiently specific to prevent one regional struggle from merging fully with another. While several major wars coincided during the first half of the seventeenth century, they each had their own separate causes that led them to starting and finishing at different times. What has been defined here as the Thirty Years War had its causes in central Europe, specifically disputes over the religious and political balance in the Empire and the Habsburg hereditary lands. This did not make the conflict a ‘parochial’ affair. The sheer extent of the Empire ensured a large theatre of operations. More importantly, the outcome was vital to 80. D. Parrott, ‘The Mantuan Succession, 1627-31’, ante, cxvii (1997), 20-65; R-A- Stradling, ‘Prelude to Disaster; the Precipitation of the War of the Mantuan Succession, 1627-29’, Historical Journal, xxxiii (1990), 769-78. 81. H. Valentinitsch, ‘Die Steiermark, Ungarn und die Osmanen, 1606-1662’, Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins f?r Seiermark, xlv (1974), 93-128; G. Wagner, ‘?sterreich und die Osmanen im Dreissigj?hrigen Krieg. Hermann Graf Czernins Grossbotschaft nach Konstantinopel 1644/45’, Mitteilungen des Ober?sterreichischen Landesarchivs, xiv (1984), 325-92. EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

586 European development. The Westphalian settlement expressly related the imperial constitution to international peace in an attempt to secure lasting tranquillity by containing the Empire as a passive, non-aligned, factor in future relations. The results were partial, since the Habsburgs not only secured confirmation for their enhanced position within their hereditary lands but also managed to recover much of their influence in the Empire from the 1650s. Nonetheless it was impossible to return to pre-war conditions, and the Habsburgs increasingly used their imperial influence to support the development of their own dynastic Empire in Italy and the Balkans. University of Hull PETER H. WILSON EHR, cxxiii. 502 (June 2008)This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:24:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR: A NEW INTERPRETATION Author(s): S. H. Steinberg Source: History, SEPTEMBER, 1947, NEW SERIES, Vol. 32, No. 116 (SEPTEMBER, 1947), pp. 89-102 Published by: Wiley Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24402430JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/termsWiley is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to HistoryThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:35:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR : A NEW INTERPRETA TION The author of the most recent book on the ” Thirty Years’ War” sums up its causes and results as follows1. “The larger issue was that between the dynasties of Hapsburg and Bourbon. . . . But . . . the geography and politics of Germany alone give the key to the problem. The signal for war was given … in May, 1618, by revolt in Bohemia. There was no compulsion towards a conflict. . . . The war solved no problem. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its result, it is the out standing example in European history of meaningless conflict “. Apart from the first dozen words quoted here almost every word of this statement is debatable. However, Miss Wedgwood only voices what may be called the consensus gentium ; and it will take time and patience to uproot the prejudices and misconceptions of historians which have been strongly backed by playwrights, novelists and poets.2 To Miss Wedgwood’s version the following may be opposed. The various European wars fought between 1609 and 1660 decided the issue between the dynasties of Hapsburg and Bourbon. France’s need to break her encirclement gives the key to the problem. Open warfare ensued over the Hapsburg effort to strengthen their grip on France to the north and north-east (truce with the Netherlands and attempted seizure of Jülich-Cleve, April, 1609). The only alternative to armed conflict was tame submission to Hapsburg domination. The series of wars ending with the peace of the Pyrenees (1659) solved the out standing problem of Europe : the final overthrow of the Hapsburg hegemony established the principle of the balance of power, which henceforth would militate against every attempt 1 C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (1938), p. 31, 65, 526. 2 There can be no doubt that Schiller’s Geschichte des Dreissigj ährigen Krieges, first published in 1792, and his dramatic trilogy Wallenstein (1799) have crystallized and popularized the main features of the traditional concept.This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:35:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

90 HISTORY [SEPT. to set up a single-state rule over Europe. The immediate effects of most of the wars were negligible ; cumulatively and indirectly, they were momentous. Morally, the age of rational ism affirmed the equality of the Christian denominations and, implicitly, the freedom of worship and thought ; economically, the age of mercantilism rid Europe from the curse of the American gold which had wrecked the economics of the sixteenth century ; socially, the age of absolutism dissolved the feudal structure of society. It is the outstanding example in European history of an intrinsically successful settlement. The traditional concept of the Thirty Years’ War is based on two main groups of sources : deliberate official propaganda and unwittingly one-sided private records. The first reflect the opinions of the victorious powers—France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Brandenburg ; the second, those of the educated middle class which was hit hardest by the economic upheaval of the time. That these distortions should have gained credence may perhaps be ascribed to two failings of the nineteenth century schools of German historians : they consciously or unconsciously made the political interests of the Prussian monarchy the criterion by which they judged the course of German history ; and they preferred narrative sources and dispositive documents to administrative and business records. Now of the two German powers which gained most by the peace of Westphalia—Brandenburg and Bavaria—the latter lapsed into a state of indolence and complacency after the death of Maximilian I (1651), whereas in the former, Frederick William I, the Great Elector, pursued a vigorous policy of aggrandizement. He was a master of political propaganda, the first to put over the identification of Hohenzollern and German interests ; and he laid the foundations of the Prussian monarchy in the ideological sphere as well as in that of power politics. In Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-94) he secured as court historiographer a scholar and pamphleteer of European reputation who had already served the Dutch, Swedish and Palatine governments. Pufendorf’s interpretation of the Thirty Years’ War was taken up by Frederick the Great in his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la maison de Brande bourg, and has become part and parcel of the national-liberal historiography of the nineteenth century.This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:35:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

1947] THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR : NEW INTERPRETATION 91 The original ” atrocity ” propaganda emanating from Berlin had a double aim : for home consumption it was meant to accentuate the magnitude of the political, economic and cultural successes, real or alleged, of the Great Elector by painting the background as black as possible ; while at the same time the darker aspects of his policy—the abandonment of the peasantry to the tender mercies of the Junkers, the oppressive taxation of the poorer classes in general and of the townspeople in particular, the tax exemption of the Junkers, and the inordinate expenses for the standing army—could, to the more gullible, be justified as unavoidable consequences of the war. As an instrument of foreign policy, the Brandenburg version of the Thirty Years’ War—Brandenburg as the defender of the protestant religion and of the ” German liberties ” against Hapsburg interference and foreign aggression in general—was meant to serve the shifts and vagaries of the Great Elector’s policy : one aspect or another of this picture could always be turned against his pro tempore enemy—the emperor, Sweden, Poland, France, Denmark—and incidentally win for him the moral support of the German and Dutch Protestants or of the anti-Hapsburg German Catholic princes, or the latent German patriotism of the liberal professions. This picture of the Thirty Years’ War, born of the needs of the Brandenburg propaganda of 1650-90, more or less coincided with the historical preconceptions of nineteenth-century national liberalism. The current version of the Thirty Years’ War therefore largely reflects the Prusso-German attitude of Bismarck’s fight against the German middle states, Austria and France, the Kulturkampf against the Roman Church, and the cultural and economic expansionism of the Hohenzollern Empire. While the official records reflect the light in which the victorious party wished the nexus and causality of events to be seen, the private sources—chronicles, annals, diaries, letters—chiefly show the results of the war as experienced by those who lost most. These documents have been used to fill in the lurid details of famine and starvation, epidemics and cannibalism, ruin of town and country, decline of civiliza tion, extinction of large sections of the population and com plete pauperization of the remainder. It is not the purpose ofThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:35:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

92 HISTORY [SEPT. the present paper to glorify the Thirty Years’ War ; and much misery, brutality, cruelty and suffering no doubt added to the terror and slaughter of purely military actions. But nothing is gained by putting the Thirty Years’ War in a class by itself : its destructive aspects are common to every war—and were in any case smaller than those of ” total war ” in the twentieth century—and an impartial assessment of the facts will lead to the conclusion that some of the features most commonly attributed to it are unconnected with the war itself, while others have been generalized and exaggerated. The generaliza tion of isolated events, the exaggeration of facts and, above all, figures, the special pleading for a particular cause, lay the contemporary chroniclers and diarists less open to criticism than modern historians who have failed to recognise the distorted perspective from which these accounts have been written : for the compilers of town chronicles, parish registers, family albums and personal diaries, all belonged to the same class of educated, professional men—clerks, priests, officials, lawyers—who were hit by every vicissitude of the times, and always hit hardest. Whenever circumstances forced upon the treasury a cut in expenditure, it was the educational and cultural departments which were the first victims.3 The very term ” Thirty Years’ War ” is fraught with mis understanding. Seventeenth-century authors speak of the military events of the first half of the century as ” wars “, ” bella ” in the plural and clearly distinguish between the ” bellum Bohemicum “, ” bellum Suecicum ” and so forth. The figure ” thirty ” and the singular ” war ” seems to occur for the first time in Pufendorf’s De statu imperii Germanici (1667). One of the liveliest and still most readable pamphlets of seventeenth-century political science, its success was immediate and far-reaching : German, French, English and Dutch translations, popular adaptations and polemical treatises secured the rapid spread of its arguments throughout Europe. Here we have already all the well-known theses of later historians : the Bohemian revolt of 1618 as the beginning, the peace of Westphalia as the end of the war ; its character as a 3 To give an illustration : as a result of a general change in financial policy, the imperial city of Goslar, from 1625 to 1630, reduced its expenditure from 221,744 guilders to 54,342 guilders ; expenditure on defence dropped from 590 to 460 guilders, on schools from 102 to 4 guilders.This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:35:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

1947] THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR : NEW INTERPRETATION 93 religious conflict ; its extension over the whole of Germany ; the omission of its European setting ; the economic ruin and exhaustion ; and the insinuation that Austria is a foreign power like France and Turkey. From the political point of view the Thirty Years’ War offers two aspects : the general European, and the particular German one. Both issues can be traced to the foreign and home policies of the emperors Maximilian I and Charles V. In the European field, Maximilian started the antagonism between the houses of Hapsburg and Valois by claiming the inheritance of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and made it permanent by marrying his only son to the daughter and heiress of the Spanish world-monarchy. He thereby welded a ring of Hapsburg possessions round France which every French statesman was bound to try his utmost to break. In Germany, Maximilian deliberately wrecked the last prospect of equitable settlement of the constitutional dispute between centralism and federalism. As at the same time the imperial crown became hereditary in the house of Hapsburg, in all but legal prescription, he made this dynasty the perma nent champion of that centralism which had become un attainable and was therefore by force of circumstances re actionary ; so that any combination of forces, which for different reasons might be opposed to the Hapsburgs or the empire or centralisation, might appear as fighting for progress. Charles V, Maximilian’s grandson, intensified this develop ment. He completed the total encirclement of France by acquiring the duchy of Milan, subduing the papacy, and drawing Portugal, England, Denmark and Poland into the Hapsburg orbit. The very greatness of his successes made a reaction inevitable. The exploits of Elizabethan England, the secession of the Spanish Netherlands, the alliance between France and the German Protestants (1552), the pacification of France by the edict of Nantes (1598)—are all signs of the growing restiveness against Hapsburg universalism. In fact, during the fifty years following the death of Charles V (1558) all European powers were jockeying for position. France was obviously the rallying point of every opponent of Hapsburg domination throughout the whole of western Europe and the New World. The aggressive and expansionistThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:35:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

94 HISTORY [SEPT. policies of Louis XIV and Napoleon I have obliterated the fact that up to the death of Mazarin (1661) it was France which was the protagonist of the European balance of power against the domination of the continent by a single power. The political struggle was accompanied by an ideological struggle. The antagonism between the old and the new faith made itself felt in the early stages of the conflict, and religious catchwords and propaganda were meant as sincerely or in sincerely as were in more recent times the slogans of democracy and totalitarianism. The Hapsburgs, it is true, represented all the life-forces and the spirit of the reformed church of Rome ; and the defeat of the Hapsburgs undoubtedly benefited the Protestant powers of Sweden, the Netherlands, England and Brandenburg. But the victory was chiefly a victory of Catholic France, which during the war was successively led by two cardinals of the Roman church ; and the papacy itself had from 1523 to 1644 consistently opposed the Hapsburgs and even lent its support to the Protestant hero, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. France could become the ideological leader of Europe as well as its political protagonist as she herself had solved the fight between Protestantism and Catholicism in a tertium quid which transcended both these sixteenth-century points of argument. Because the French leaders—the Protestants Henry IV and Sully and the Catholics Richelieu and Mazarin alike—recognized that the absolute claims inherent in every religious system were irreconcilable, they replaced religious standards by the criterion of the raison d’état. This enabled France to destroy Protestantism within her own frontiers and to save Protestantism in Germany, Sweden and the Low Countries, to secure religious unity at home, and to perpetuate the split of western Christendom abroad. Catholic apologists tried in vain to counter this onslaught of secularism by elaborating a ragione delta chiesa ; it has never been a serious challenge to the raison d’état. Seen against this European background, German affairs are of minor importance. Germany, as such, i.e. the ” German section of the Holy Roman Empire”, was not at all involved in any of the European wars of the period. The individual German states entered and left one war or another as partisansThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:35:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

1947} THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR : NEW INTERPRETATION 95 of the European antagonists ; only the emperor was engaged in every conflict, not, however, as German king, but as the head of the Austrian branch of the house of Hapsburg. The German wars started in 1609 with the war of the Jülich-Cleve succession and ended in 1648 with the treaties of Münster and Osnabrück. They decided the political future of the empire, in that the last attempt to set up a centralistic government was defeated in favour of a loose confederation of virtually independent states. The concerted action by which the electors forced the emperor to dismiss his generalissimo Wallenstein in 1630 was their last achievement as a corporate body. They, too, who for centuries had represented the federal principle of the German con stitution, henceforth showed an ever diminishing concern with the affairs of the empire and were content to look after their own interests. However, the constitution agreed upon in 1648 proved its soundness in that it lasted for more than 200 years, until 1866, with the short interval of the Napoleonic settlement. The wars also decided the dynastic rivalries within the leading German houses—curiously, every time in favour of the younger branch : the Palatine Wittelsbachs, the Thuringian Wettiners and the Wolfenbüttel Guelphs had to give way to their cousins of Bavaria, Saxony and Hanover, who henceforth formed the leading group of German powers. The most far-reaching result, however, was the rise of the electorate of Brandenburg, before 1609 the least important of the bigger principalities ; it came to equal Bavaria and Saxony and was to outstrip them in the following century. The conception of the Thirty Years’ War as a ” war of religion ” has been abandoned to a large extent since it has been recognized that religious divisions coincided largely with political, constitutional and economic ones. It will always remain a matter of dispute which of these motives was decisive at a given moment. It does, however, seem that rational considerations of political and economic gains determined the policies of the cabinets to the same extent to which religious emotions held a strong sway over the masses, sufficient to whip up their passions in battle and to make them endure with fortitude their plight in adversity. The Swedes, under Gustavus, fought for the pure gospel, caring little for the ” dominium maris Baltici ” and knowing nothing of theThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:35:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

96 HISTORY [SEPT. French subsidies on which they subsisted ; while Tilly’s men were fired by an equal zeal for the Holy Virgin, with no stake in the power politics of the Wittelsbachs and ignorant of the pope’s support of the heretic Swede. Political and dynastic, religious and personal motives are inextricably mixed in the actions of the champions of the Protestant and Catholic causes. Both Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Maximilian of Bavaria were fervent devotees of their creeds. At the same time, the Lutheran establishment was also Gustavus’s strongest bulwark against the claims to the Swedish throne, made by his Catholic cousin, Sigismund of Poland ; and as the Palatine Wittelsbachs had assumed the leadership of the Protestant estates of the empire, the head of the Bavarian branch found safety and prospect of gain in rallying the Catholic princes under his standard. The struggle for the ” dominium maris Baltici ” set Gustavus in opposition to Protestant Denmark, Catholic Poland and Orthodox Russia. The occupation of the Hartz mines by the imperial forces (1624) endangered the Swedish copper market ; Wallenstein’s appoint ment as ” General of the Atlantic and Baltic Seas ” (1628) threatened Sweden’s maritime position : her vital interests demanded armed intervention against the Catholic Hapsburgs and alliance with Catholic France, and the edict of restitution (1629) only added religious zeal to the dictates of power politics. Likewise, political considerations brought Maximilian into conflict with the Lutheran imperial cities of Swabia and Franconia, Catholic Austria and Spain, and the Calvinistic Netherlands and Palatinate ; but after he had overawed the cities and. in alliance with Austria and Spain, crushed the elector Palatine, his interests as a prince of the empire and member of the college of electors made him turn against the Hapsburgs as his chief opponents. The reduction of the dominant position of the emperor and the removal of the Spaniards from the empire were from 1627 onward his over riding aims which, in co-operation with the pope, Catholic France and Lutheran Saxony, were brought to a successful consummation. The ruinous effect of the war years on German economic and cultural life has been very much exaggerated. War is by its very nature destructive, and the wars of the seventeenthThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:35:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

1947] THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR : NEW INTERPRETATION 97 century are no exceptions. But all the campaigns of the period 1609-1648 were of short duration and the armies themselves of a very small size.4 It was only the districts of primary strategic importance which had to bear the brunt of successive invasions in the seventeenth century, as they have been the focal points of every fight in central Europe, from Caesar’s to Eisenhower’s campaigns : the Rhine crossings of Breisach and Wesel, the Leipzig plain, the passes across the Black Forest and the roads to Regensburg and the Danube Valley. Other tracts of Germany were hardly affected at all, some only for a few weeks ; the majority of towns never saw an enemy inside their walls. From the middle of the thirteenth century the towns were the undisputed masters of German economics. Even agricul ture, if not brought under direct control of city financiers, was at least completely dependent upon the town markets for home consumption as well as exportation (with the notable exception of the Teutonic Order in Prussia, whose totalitarian economy comprised production as well as commerce and excluded the citizen middlemen). This whole system of German economics was breaking down in a series of disastrous events from the middle of the sixteenth century : the south German cities were ruined by the repeated bankruptcies of the Spanish crown (1557, 1575, 1596, 1607), in which they lost every financial gain accumulated in the preceding century. The Hanse towns of North Germany were equally hit by the sack of Antwerp (1585) and the closing of the London Steelyard (1598) which deprived them of the two western pillars of their trading system ; and even more by the separation of the Netherlands from Spain. The new republic vigorously asserted its inde pendence in the economic sphere, intruding into the Baltic trade, hitherto the jealously-guarded monopoly of the Hanse. About 1620 the German towns still presented an outward 4 The Catholic League had an effective strength of about 15,000 men ; Gustavus Adolphus landed in Germany with 15,000 men ; the imperial army under Wallenstein may have exceeded 20,000 men ; Bernhard of Weimar received French subsidies for 18,000 men—Richelieu had originally only bargained for 14,000 ; Condé’s army in 1645, the strongest French contingent to be employed in Germany, numbered 12,000 men. The numbers of ” regi ments “, ” squadrons”, ” standards ” etc. are meaningless in themselves : for instance, in the battle of Breitenfeld, the 15,000 troops of the League were organized in 10 regiments, the 15,000 imperialists in 28 regiments.This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:35:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

98 HISTORY [SEPT. picture of opulence and solidity—very much emphasized to the casual observer by the splendour of their architectural achievements, as shown in Mathias Merian’s topographical engravings published from 1640. Yet the foundations of their prosperity had gone, and the big inflation of the years 1619-23 only set the seal upon the utter ruin of German economics which had started some fifty years earlier. In reality, the crisis of the inflation was the fever which preceded the patient’s recovery. The contemporaries of the ” clippers and counterfeiters of coins ” {Kipper und Wipper) were altogether nonplussed by the upheaval of all standards of financial honesty and security, especially as the devaluation of currency was worst in the countries whose prolific output of silver had made them appear the very pillars of affluence and stability : the petty principality of Brunswick-Wolfenbiittel had thirty-two mints operating in 1622, and the emperor Ferdinand II lent his active support to a combine of racketeers who exploited Austria, Bohertiia and Moravia for three or four years. When by 1624 the currency was stabilized again, a violent and thorough-going transfer of property had occurred ; hardly any of the old firms of international repute survived, and successful speculators, army contractors and black marketeers took their place, many of them Jews and newly converted Roman Catholics, of whom Wallenstein was to become the most conspicuous. All through the following decades, this change-over of family and business fortunes continued : the proscription of Waflenstein and his lieutenants in 1634 threw the biggest and best estates of Bohemia and Silesia upon the market ; the new principles of the ” mercan tilist ” system of economics gave openings to fresh and quick brains, and the losses sustained by the one were counter balanced by the gains of the other. On the whole, the national income, productive power and standard of living were higher about 1650 than they had been fifty years earlier.5 6 Sumptuary laws show this very clearly if one disregards the moralizing introductions and looks at the factual clauses. A comparison of the sumptuary laws issued by the town council of Brunswick in 1579 and 1650 indicates the greater affluence of all classes in the latter year. New Clauses, not found in 1579, render punishable the wearing of more than four golden rings in addition to the wedding ring, and of coral and amber by servant girls : despite the ” difficult times ” and the ” rod of God’s wrath with which he has chastised our beloved fatherlandThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:35:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

1947] THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR : NEW INTERPRETATION 99 The part of the economic structure which was hit hardest by the immediate effects of the war was agriculture, especially for medium-sized and small farmers. To big land-owners, on the other hand, the war itself, the maintenance of troops over wide distances and the new methods of logistics and com missariat as introduced by Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus, offered fresh possibilities of enrichment. In fact, the seventeenth century is the period of the growth of the big latifundia of the Junkers at the smallholders’ expense. The eviction of peasants, and the sequestration of peasant land by the lord of the manor had started at the end of the sixteenth century, caused by the steady rise of corn prices which made large-scale farming and bulk selling more profitable. The depopulation of the countryside and the disappearance of whole villages were in full swing before the first shot of the ” Thirty Years’ War ” was fired, and went on long after the conclusion of the peace of Westphalia. On the other hand, the improved organization of the com missariat resulted in increasing the apparent burdens of occupied countries. Indiscriminate pillaging by a band of marauders may have done greater damage, but it appeared as a natural phenomenon, whereas the methodical requisitioning by quarter-masters was felt the more irksome as it was planned and therefore rigid, thorough and therefore inescapable, fixed in writing and therefore long remembered and resented. Ignorance of scientific demography and inability to visualize large figures account for the legend of the enormous loss of population, which is variously given as ranging from a third to half or more of the total. All these figures are purely imaginary. Such statistical surveys as were occasionally made were always designed to support some special pleading : to obtain a grant in aid, a reduction of payments, or an alleviation of services.6 The main sources, however, are contemporary reports and, rarely, records of deaths, to the virtual exclusion of registers of births. In view of the huge birthrate this neglect amounts to thirty to fifty per cent7 ; in other words, exactly * For example, the district of Militsch in Silesia in 1619 furnished the government in Breslau with a list of 976 men available for military service ; whereas at the actual census, 1,527 men had been recorded in this category. ‘ These percentages are based on eighteenth-century statistics (when the birthrate was already beginning to dechne) for Prussia and Saxony where the surplus of births over deaths was 30 per cent, and 50 per cent, respectively.This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:35:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

100 HISTORY [SEPT. that third or half by which the population is said to have been reduced. It is, of course, indisputable that the irregular move ments of troops, especially of ill-disciplined mercenaries, and the migration of refugees greatly contributed to the spreading of epidemics, such as the various kinds of typhoid (the greatest terror of the seventeenth century) or, to a lesser degree, of the plague and syphilis. On the other hand, the mortality of the urban population shows a surprising likeness in a place which was far remote from the European battlefields, and one which was right in their midst : it has been computed at seventy per mille for London in 1620-43, and at sixty-eight per mille for Frankfurt in 1600-50. What actually happened was an extensive inner migration chiefly from the agrarian countryside into the industrial town, and from the economically retrograde town to the prosperous one. As with the ownership of movable and immovable property, so with regard to the population it is more appropriate to speak of redistribution than of destruction.8 The net result is that of an all-round, though very limited increase. This almost imperceptible rise, and over long periods, virtual stagnation, is characteristic of every community of a predominantly agricultural type. Keeping in mind the vague ness of the term ” Germany,” it seems safe to assume a popula tion of fifteen to seventeen million in 1600. A loss of five to eight million by 1650 could not possibly have been made good by 1700, for which year a population of seventeen to twenty million is fairly well documented. The legend of cultural exhaustion and desolation as a concomitant and result of the ” Thirty Years’ War ” is perhaps easiest to refute. It is solely due to the aesthetic standards of nineteenth-century criticism in literature, art, architecture and music. The culture of the seventeenth century is essentially baroque ; and ” baroque ” was anathema to the critics of the nineteenth century, as ” gothic ” had been to those of the 8 Between 1594 and 1637 more than a hundred of the richest merchants of Cologne, whose trade and industry was declining, settled in Frankfurt. There was a considerable emigration from the Altmark to Hamburg, Holstein, Saxony and Poland in 1640-50, and at the same time a remarkable immigra tion from Bremen, Holstein and East Frisia. In three Thuringian counties the population decreased between 1631 and 1659 by 66 per cent., 73 per cent, and 87 per cent., while in three others it increased by 78 per cent., 89 per cent, and 125 per cent.This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:35:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

1947] THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR : NEW INTERPRETATION 101 eighteenth. The revaluation which has taken place within the last thirty years or so makes unnecessary a defence of the writers, architects and musicians of the period of the ” Thirty Years’ War.” The war itself had little, and certainly no detrimental influence upon the cultural life of Germany. The lowest ebb of intellectual and artistic activities was the last third of the sixteenth century. A fresh tide set in at the turn of the century. Kepler’s De proportione coelestium orbium (1596) and Scultetus’s Medulla Theologiae Patrum (1598) herald the reawakening of science and learning ; Althusius’s Politica Methodice Digesta (1603) and Johann Arnd’s Vom wahren Christentum (1605) break the sterility of political science and sectarian dogmatics ; Jacob Boehme’s Aurora (1612) and Heinrich Schütz’s appointment as court composer at Dresden (1614) are milestones in German philosophy and music. The foundation of the ” Früchtbringende Gesellschaft ” in Weimar (1617) and of the ” Naturwissenschaftliche Gesell schaft ” in Rostock (1622) gave fresh impetus to the advance ment of literature and science. Lyrical poetry reached new heights with Georg Rudolf Weckherlin (better known to English historians as an English under-secretary of state), Simon Dach, Paulus Gerhardt, Friedrich von Spee, and Friedrich von Logau. Martin Opitz’s Buch von der teutschen Poeterey (1624), Schottel’s Deutsche Sprachkunst (1641) stan dardized New High German poetics and grammar, which the many learned societies and poetical associations were assidu ously cultivating. The plays of Andreas Gryphius9, the novels of Philipp von Zesen and Philipp Moscherosch, the educational treatises of Amos Comenius, the translations from the Italian, Spanish, French—all show a flourishing literary life, eager to keep abreast of the general trend of European letters and thought. The situation as regards painting, sculpture and architecture is different only in degree and quality. As German painting since the death of Dürer (1528) and German sculpture since the death of Riemenschneider (1531) have been of no account in European art, the ” Thirty Years’ War ” neither improved • His Carolus Stuardus, written and produced in the year of the king’s execution (1649), is remarkable as one of the first European plays dealing with a topical political subject.This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:35:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

102 HISTORY [SEPT. nor impaired the position. In architecture the period after c. 1620 is of no great aesthetic importance ; but the reason is to be found in the mania for building during the preceding period : the sixteenth-century palaces and patrician houses, town halls and churches needed no replacement and little enlarging. It is only newcomers in church and state who were not yet provided for, and they certainly did not leave architects unemployed : Wallenstein erected his spacious palaces in Jicin, Sagan, Prague and elsewhere ; Maximilian of Bavaria built Schleissheim Palace and rebuilt the Munich Residenz ; Prince Eggenberg, the emperor’s favourite, laid out his magnifi cent castle near Graz ; and all the new religious orders of the counter-Reformation were busy everywhere to outrival the older foundations in every Roman Catholic part of Germany. Protestant churches in Emden, Rudolstadt, Regensburg, Hanau, Hamburg, and elsewhere, though less numerous, show that Lutherans and Calvinists, too, had the will and money to build when necessary, regardless of political circumstances. As regards private buildings, their comparative insignificance from the artistic standpoint has prevented them from being given prominence in the handbooks of architecture ; and large numbers of them have, of course, been destroyed by fire or pulled down to make room for later buildings. Yet that there was no lack of enterprise during and after the war years, is best shown by the large number of textbooks for the instruction of builders and masons : Rüdiger Kossmann of Cologne brought out a textbook of architecture in 1630, of which revised editions appeared in 1644 and 1653. Josef Furtenbach, of Ulm, published an Architectura Civilis in 1628, followed by an Architectura Recreationis (1640) and Architectura Privata (1641). G. A. Böckler’s writings, from 1648, dominated the post-war reconstruction period, culminating in his first German edition of Palladio. The Thirty Years’ War, put in its proper perspective, was therefore not such a catastrophe as popular historians have made out. Perhaps the one irreparable damage Germany sustained in the first half of the seventeenth century was that German civilization and German politics parted company. This separation may be the greatest misfortune of German history. S. H. Steinberg. S. H. Steinberg.This content downloaded from 132.174.255.86 on Fri, 26 May 2023 04:35:43 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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