Europe in Flames

The Crisis of the Thirty Years War

John Matusiak

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780750989695
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del Renacimiento europeo

The Thirty Years War claimed more lives proportionately than either the First or Second World Wars – not only from battle and the endemic violence of marauding armies, but also from famine and plague. The bitter struggle encompassed the entire political and religious future of Europe and involved all the major players of the Continent. As the turmoil unfolded, vast mercenary armies exacted an incalculable toll upon helpless civilian populations, while their commanders and the men who equipped them frequently grew rich on the profits, leaving rulers perched on the brink of catastrophe. When peace came in 1648, the underlying tensions were far from wholly resolved. In Europe in Flames John Matusiak provides a compelling account of this most tumultuous time, exploring the causes, course and outcomes of a conflict that not only produced one of the greatest manmade calamities of its kind, but changed the direction of European history forever.

1

THE CRUCIBLE

[Germany] is now become a Golgotha, a place of dead mens skuls; and an Acaldama, a field of blood. Some nations are chastised with the sword, others with famine, others with the man-destroying plague. But poor Germany hath been sorely whipped with all these three iron whips at the same time and that for above twenty yeers space.

Edmund Calamy, England’s Looking Glass (1641)

In the spring of 1648, the Augustinian abbess Clara Staiger surveyed the devastation at her convent of Marienstein just outside the Bavarian city of Eichstätt, and lamented the loss with a deep sense of gloom and foreboding that mirrored the sentiments of so many survivors of the shipwreck of the previous thirty years. ‘May God come to our aid like a father,’ she wrote, ‘and send us some means so we can build again.’ In this particular case, the perpetrators had been the Swedish-French armies of Generals Wrangel and Turenne, but before them countless other soldiers had been visited upon the abbess’s homeland from the four corners of the Continent – Spanish, French, Swedish, Danish, Italian, Croat, Scottish; Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist; conscripts, mercenaries and freebooters alike – all bringing plague, poverty and destruction in their wake and spawning a death toll that the most reliable estimates now set at some 8 million souls. One soldier alone, Peter Hagendorf, had marched more than 15,000 miles over the course of his service, travelling with his family in tow and enduring not only robbers, foul weather, gunshot wounds, scant food and scarcer pay for his trouble, but also the deaths of his first spouse and children. ‘At this time my wife went into labour,’ he wrote after he had been ordered to Stade, downriver of Hamburg, early in 1628, ‘but the child was not yet ready to be born and so shortly died. God grant him a joyous resurrection.’ Three daughters – Anna Maria, Elisabeth and Barbara – would also be entrusted to the consolations of a merciful Creator over the next five years before their mother, Anna Stadlerin of Traunstein, herself succumbed in Munich, some days after the birth of Barbara.

Clara Staiger’s own hopes for divine deliverance, meanwhile, were hardly gratified promptly, if an account produced two decades later by the Lutheran theologian Joachim Betke is any guide:

How miserable is now the state of the large cities! Where in former times there were a thousand lanes, today there are no more than a hundred. How wretched is the state of the small and open market towns! There they lie, burnt, decayed, destroyed, so that you see neither roofs nor rafters, doors or windows. Think of how they treated nunneries, churches, priories and temples: They have burnt them, carried the bells away, turned them into cesspits, stables, sutlerships and brothels … Oh God, how pitiable is the state of the villages …! You travel ten, twenty or forty miles without seeing a single human being, no livestock, not one sparrow, if there are not some few places where you find one or two old men or women or a child.

Not all areas, it is true, had been continuously occupied or callously ravaged and destroyed like tragic Magdeburg, for example, where the population had fallen from 25,000 in 1618 to only 2,464 a quarter of a century later, and where one resident, Otto von Guericke, spoke of the packed corpses floating horribly at the city’s Water Gate long after its sack in 1631 – ‘some with their heads out of the water, others reaching out their hands towards heaven, giving onlookers a quite horrible spectacle’. Certain places, indeed, which lay outside the most intense killing fields stretching from Pomerania in the Baltic to the Black Forest, had remained untouched by the conflict. Ulm, for instance, where the shoemaker Hans Heberle had kept his Zeytregister, or chronicle, of events, was spared serious inconvenience during the early years at least, while Staiger’s Marienstein actually appears to have fallen into what may best be considered the middle category of privation. But even Ulm at its most peaceful did not escape the resulting economic upheaval, for on 15 March 1623, as Heberle recorded, ‘no more than four sacks of grain entered the granary’ and ‘spelt went for forty-two and rye as much as forty gulden’, as a result of ‘bad money’. Two years later, moreover, the nearby towns of Langenau, Öllingen, Setzingen, Nerenstetten and Wettingen had suffered ‘great plagues’ and ‘all kinds of maliciousness’ at the hands of enemy troops. ‘The men,’ wrote Heberle, ‘were badly beaten, and many women were raped’ – all of which, the shoemaker tells us, ‘continued for nine days’.

Yet at the dawn of the same century, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, as it was formally known, had betrayed few outward signs of the looming crisis that was already threatening to consume both it and the continent to which it belonged. A multi-ethnic, multilingual and multi-confessional state, governed since 1438 by an elected Habsburg emperor in conjunction with a motley assortment of dukes, counts, margraves, lords, archbishops, ‘prince-bishops’, ‘Imperial Knights’ and urban oligarchs representing some eighty or so ‘Imperial Free Cities’, it was as vast in extent as it was variable in complexion, stretching from the Alps in the south to the Baltic in the north, and from the more prosperous southern and western territories of Bavaria, Alsace and the Palatinate to the fertile agricultural plains of the east, and the starkly contrasting regions of the north-west, whose barren heaths and wastelands had become prey to ravaging armies operating in the war-torn Netherlands where Spanish troops were embroiled in a bloody struggle against Dutch independence. In its full compass, the Empire comprised, indeed, not only modern Germany and Austria, but Slovenia, Hungary, Luxembourg and the Czech Republic, as well as parts of eastern France, southern Denmark, northern Italy, western Poland and – technically at least – the modern Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland, though the latter had long since functioned separately.

There could be no doubt, of course, that the task of administering this vast mosaic was made all the more formidable by the existence of some 1,000 separate autonomous units within its jurisdiction – all varying considerably in size and stature and all jealously protective of their ‘liberties’. Organised since the early sixteenth century into ten regional bodies known as Kreise or ‘Circles’, responsible for local defence, public peace and monetary and economic matters, the Empire included not only territories like Saxony, Brandenburg and Bavaria – all with a population of over a million and worthy of consideration as unified and discreet ‘states’ in their own right – but also micro-princedoms like Anhalt, only a little larger than Essex, and divided between no less than four rulers. Hesse, Trier and Württemberg, meanwhile – each with populations of 400,000 – had undergone similar fragmentation as a result of ingrained antipathy to the principle of primogeniture, and even the Palatinate – another of the major Imperial princedoms with a population of perhaps 600,000 – was itself divided into two major components: the ‘Lower’ Palatinate, a rich wine-growing district between the rivers Mosel, Saar and the Rhine, which had previously belonged to Bavaria and in which Calvinism had more recently gained control, and its so-called ‘Upper’ counterpart, a formerly Lutheran and relatively poor agricultural area between the Danube and Bohemia.

Bohemia itself, moreover, had been held by the Habsburg dynasty only since 1526 – along with its dependencies of Moravia, Lusatia and Silesia – and remained an autonomous kingdom within the Empire, with a population of some 1.4 million, no less distinctively proud of their traditions, idiosyncracies and ‘liberties’ than their German counterparts whose passion for independent action seemed, at every turn, to stifle the ongoing Habsburg quest for more effective central control or, as many feared, absolute hegemony. When Protestant authors even balked at the Empire’s official designation, rejecting the term ‘Holy’ and questioning the expression ‘of the German nation’, there seemed hardly more scope for unity of purpose than that unity of faith which had been so decisively shattered by Martin Luther a hundred years earlier. And while jurists quibbled over endless other technicalities, the more practical problems generated in particular by the nature of the Imperial Circles continued to hamstring the day-to-day processes of government. Swabia, for example, covered an area more or less equal in size to modern Switzerland, but included no less than sixty-eight secular and forty spiritual lords, as well as thirty-two Imperial Free Cities. All were represented in the Kreistag or Circle Assembly, which met sixty-four times between 1555 and 1599, and each was a direct vassal of the emperor. But they ranged in importance from the compact duchy of Württemberg, covering 9,200 square kilometres, down to the paltry lands of individual Imperial Knights, some of whom owned only one part of one village. More significantly still, over half of the members of the Swabian Circle, and almost half its population were Catholic, while the rest were either Lutheran or Calvinist, providing a perfect formula for paralysis, or much worse still bloody conflict, which was equally the case in most of the Circles of south and west Germany.

Under such circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the potential for successful co-operation both between and within the Circles should have proven so limited. Their inability, on the one hand, to maintain local defence had been conclusively demonstrated by the invasion of Westphalia in 1599 when the entire Spanish field army of the Netherlands had gone in search of winter quarters, only to be met by mutinous troops from the Rhenish and Westphalian Circle who had been vainly raised to resist them. And attempts at inter-Circle co-operation on the economic front had been no more fruitful either. For just as the weaving regulations, common currencies and grain controls agreed during 1564–72 between the Swabian, Bavarian and Franconian Circles proved exceptional and impermanent, so attempts even at establishing a coherent system of boundary markers between territories had proved all but impossible in places other than the Palatinate where a network of specially-erected columns provided welcome guidance to otherwise bemused visitors. Elsewhere, travellers frequently experienced difficulty in establishing where they were, notwithstanding the existence of numerous customs posts on both land and water, which were, of course, no less niggling a symptom of localism in their own right. On the Elbe between Hamburg and Prague, indeed, there were as many as thirty toll stations, and between Mainz and Cologne on the Rhine no less than eleven, each equipped with a small cannon to sink ships attempting to avoid payment.

To the Hessian, it has been said, ‘fatherland’ was Hesse and ‘abroad’ was Bavaria, and as the ultimate testament to its disunity, the Empire likewise employed two principal coins whose precious metal content, and therefore value, varied in accordance with where and when they had been minted. The south, west and hereditary Habsburg lands, on the one hand, used the florin, which was divided into 60 Kreuzer – each worth 4 pfennigs (pennies) – while the subdivision of the thaler used in the north and east varied from 24 to 36 smaller coins of different names, depending upon the territory concerned. Where attempts at rationalisation occurred, as in 1551 and 1559, they had encountered a variety pitfalls, so that by 1571 responsibility for currency matters had been passed to three associations of Circles who were requested to ‘correspond’ on the matter. And if the Emperor’s subjects had difficulty in deciphering the contents of their purses, their lot was no more enviable, it seems, when it came to determining the date, since the Gregorian calendar used by Catholic Europe had not been welcomed by Protestants who retained the Julian Old Style, which lagged behind by all of ten days.

For some foreign observers, naturally enough, it was a source of no inconsiderable relief that the Holy Roman Empire remained a confusion within a complexity, a name rather than a nation. ‘If it were entirely subject to one monarchy,’ wrote Sir Thomas Overbury in 1609, ‘it would be terrible to all the rest.’ Yet for all its diversity and divisions, its anomalies, complexities, quirks and contrasts, this self-same sprawling entity, governed traditionally from its Habsburg nerve centre in Vienna, had not only extricated itself from the protracted civil wars of religion that had bedevilled a kingdom like France, and avoided the bitter fighting engendered by the Dutch War of Independence, but achieved a degree of comparative economic prosperity – particularly in the area formally designated its ‘German section’ and known more popularly as ‘the Germanies’ – that made it the envy of many. In the preface to the Topographia Germaniae, the Frankfurt publisher Mathäus Merian lauded the numerous cities, castles, fortresses, villages and hamlets of his native land, which were, he claimed, as favourably situated as almost any in Europe. And if Merian’s musings may well have been gilded by an understandable hankering for the happier days of peace that had by the 1640s become such a distant memory, they were more than amply matched by many other commentators of his day, both German and foreign alike. For Martin Zeiller, author of the Topographia, Lower Austria was home to a sociable, hospitable people, lushly served with everything to equip them for long and happy lives, while visitors, likewise, were equally impressed by the fertile coastal districts of the North, the ‘Börder’ areas of Central Germany, large areas of Lower Bavaria, the densely populated Vogtland, and above all, the beauty and harmony of the Rhenish Palatinate and Alsace. When the Englishman Thomas Coryat journeyed from Basel to Mainz on his way back from a visit to Venice in 1608, he was able to do so alone, on foot and unimpeded, encountering soldiers only once along the way. And though he found it prudent to sail down the Rhine below Mainz on a passenger barge, since the roads in that area were reputed to be infested with outlaws, Coryat nevertheless commented altogether favourably upon the orderliness, peace and prosperity of the Upper Rhine Valley, where bread and vegetables were so cheap that one could have a nourishing meal for a farthing and buy a year’s supply of grain for £2.

Nor was this last claim an exaggeration, for by 1600 both Prussia and Pomerania, soon to be decimated by marauding armies, had become major suppliers of grain to the whole of western Europe, generating vast trade with the great markets of Amsterdam, Hamburg and London via the ports of Danzig, Königsberg, Riga and Stettin. And though the condition of the peasantry, which made up some 85 per cent of the Empire’s population, varied markedly with location, for many their lot was more than tolerable. Both Upper and Lower Austria had been shaken by a violent rural uprising from 1594 to 1597, caused by heavy financial burdens and services resulting from war with the Turks, and such outbursts were not untypical of episodes elsewhere: in the ecclesiastical principality of Augsburg; in the Bavarian county of Haag; in the small territory of Rettenberg to the south of Kempten; and among the Sorb population of Upper Lusatia and Silesia. In the eastern lands of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Silesia and Prussia, furthermore, the east German ‘Junker’ nobility, prompted by the prospect of rich profits from the export of grain, had deliberately set out to annex the peasants’ holdings and raise their labour services accordingly – in Mecklenburg from three-and-a-half days a year in 1500 to three days a week in 1600.

In what German land [asked a writer in 1598] does the German peasant enjoy his old rights? Where does he have any use or profit of the common fields, meadows or forests? Where is there any limit to the number of feudal services or dues? Where has the peasant his own tribunal? God have pity on him.

Yet in south-west Germany where small farms predominated and were usually leased on a lifetime basis, services and dues remained both fixed and generally reasonable, while west of the Elbe the circumstances of the peasantry had shown no appreciable deterioration at all during the 1500s. Indeed, north-west Germany was largely a land of free, small-scale peasant-holders who had progressively acquired full rights of inheritance, and even in those places where serfdom still existed, it was rarely deemed an unnatural or insufferable burden.

While peace obtained, therefore, the doughty German peasant had no more cause for complaint than his counterparts elsewhere. And for much of the Empire, too, the buoyancy of handicrafts and industrial production in the half century or so up to 1618 likewise gave no appreciable hint of crisis or approaching catastrophe. Silesia, Westphalia, the Lower Rhine and Swabia were known for their knitting and weaving, north-west Germany for its copper and brassware, central Germany for pottery and glass, and south Germany for products of wood and precious metals. The merchants of southern Westphalia, in their turn, had ignored the opposition of urban guilds to develop large-scale manufacture of scythes, sickles and ploughshares, while their counterparts to the north established a flourishing linen industry, with Osnabrück as its centre. It was Westphalian merchants too, who, along with their Saxon counterparts, exploited the expanding market for coarse cloths, resulting from the large labour force of Negro slaves in the Spanish colonies, and Nuremberg merchants who extended the production of cheap linen for this purpose to Bohemia, which by the beginning of the seventeenth century had become one of central Europe’s foremost producers of textiles. Even more profitable were the mining centres located in the Harz mountains, Tyrol and Styria, the Siegerland and Lahn-Dill areas and the Upper Palatinate, along with Bohemia and Moravia’s tin-producing zones, which alone accounted for as much as two-thirds of the continent’s entire supply.

Saxony, moreover, was not only the greatest mining area of all, but the richest place in Germany, abounding in natural resources and boasting a flourishing agriculture and textile industry, which had helped gain international recognition for the twice-yearly fairs held every March and September at Leipzig. ‘The riches I observed at this Mart were infinite,’ wrote Thomas Coryat, who reserved a particular note of admiration for the ‘incredible’ wealth of the goldsmiths in attendance. And although the notoriously bibulous Duke John George I, ruler of Saxony from 1611 to 1656, would spend much of his time immersed in an alcoholic haze, he was neither typical of his more industrious subjects nor representative, for that matter, of at least a few of his more enterprising peers and predecessors. Indeed, his grandfather, Augustus I, had been shrewd enough to acquire shares in a mining company that allowed him to grow rich by means of influencing the price movements of iron and copper ore, as well as vitriol, alum, cobalt and coal. And just as Augustus went on to encourage new mining techniques and improve the stamping and iron mills of his duchy, so his contemporary, Duke Julius of Brunswick, another princely entrepreneur of some considerable stature, had not only employed his factories and workshops to produce everything from brass boxes to garden ornaments and chess sets, but gone on to renew the decaying iron pits and forges at the northern and eastern slopes of the Harz mountains, which turned out excellent thin steel for the export of culverin and arquebuses, as well as cannonballs, produced from the sullage, that would soon be shattering city walls and soldiers’ bones alike.

For even in times of peace and comparative prosperity, it seems, the instruments of death and destruction could still be used to turn a tidy profit, notwithstanding nobler princely enthusiasms, extending well beyond the needs of war, that had made many Imperial cities among the most delightful centres of their kind in all Europe – adorned with extravagant buildings and boasting some of the Continent’s foremost artists and musicians like Dresden’s Heinrich Schulz, and the renowned Orlando di Lasso, who, before his death in 1594, had been awarded the Order of the Golden Spur by Pope Gregory XIII. Munich’s renowned ‘Antiquarium’, which was begun in 1570 to house the art collection of Duke Albrecht V, was said, with its Italianate and neo-Roman frescoes, to rival even the Vatican, while Ferdinand II of Tyrol was prepared to lavish similarly vast sums on ambitious building projects like Ambras near Innsbruck, where he housed his magnificent art collection, and the Star Castle not far from Prague in which he salted away his secret wife Philippine in pampered splendour. Comparable edifices arose, in fact, all over the Empire – at Dresden, Wismar, Heidelberg, Salzburg, Prague and other places – so that even the Margrave of Ansbach-Bayreuth, one of the poorest principalities in the Empire, was nevertheless prepared to lavish 237,000 florins on his Plassenburg Palace, while the imperial residence in Vienna – the Amalienburg, built by Rudolf II in 1575 – came to excel anything else of its kind in other contemporary capitals, making it small wonder, perhaps, that this particular emperor was no less ready than other princes of his territories to employ alchemists in the hope of meeting his immense expenses.

The artefacts in such majestic dwellings – like the exquisite kunstschrank or art cupboard delivered to Duke Philip II of Pomerania in 1617, which had been ordered from Philipp Hainhofer of Augsburg five years earlier, with the intention that it should contain a complete survey of art and science to that date – were also altogether more suggestive of high culture and fine living than th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 The Crucible
• 2 Crisis of Emperors
• 3 ‘The Start of Our Destruction’
• 4 ‘Fatal Conflagration’
• 5 Crisis of Empires
• 6 ‘Soldier under Saturn’
• 7 Crisis of a Continent
• 8 ‘Lion of the North’
• 9 Magdeburg and Breitenfeld
• 10 The Plenitude of Power
• 11 War without Limit, War without End
• 12 The Crisis of the Peace
• Acknowledgements
• Picture Section