The Ashgate Research Companion to the Thirty Years' War

Olaf Asbach, Peter Schröder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317041344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) remains a puzzling and complex subject for students and scholars alike. This is hardly surprising since it is often contested among historians whether it is actually appropriate to speak of a single war or a series of conflicts. Similarly emphasis is also put on the different motives for going to war, as conflicting religious and political interests were involved. This research companion brings together leading scholars in the field to synthesize the range of existing research on the war, which is still fragmented and divided along national historical lines, and to further explore the complexities of the conflict using an innovative comparative approach. The companion is designed to provide scholars and graduate students with a comprehensive and authoritative overview of research on one of the most destructive conflicts in European history.

PART I
The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation

1
Imperial Politics 1555–1618

Joachim Whaley

Did Germany slide into war in 1618? Many historians have certainly thought so. The period 1555–1618 has rarely been studied in its own right but rather as an adjunct to two larger narratives. Some have viewed it as little more than an extended prelude to war. Others have described a dismal phase in the story of the decline of the Holy Roman Empire, characterised by the triumph of the princes and the establishment of narrow provincialist confessional regimes, the prelude to the dominance of foreign powers over Germany after the Peace of Westphalia.¹

The old nationalist master narrative of German history typically characterised the period after the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 as one of hopeless division and of growing tension and conflict that finally erupted in the Thirty Years’ War. In 1855 Johann Gustav Droysen wrote that the Reformation had concluded Germany’s national history.² The triumph of princely liberty in 1555, he declared, created an ‘impossible situation, a political chaos’. The price the Germans paid for religious peace was ‘complete political bankruptcy’. Parity between Catholics and Protestants paralysed the empire; the ‘thoughts [of the Germans] became base and [their] hearts narrow’. In 1869, Heinrich von Treitschke echoed the ‘manly tone of anger and contempt’ with which Droysen had denounced the ‘unspeakable humiliation’ that resulted from the ‘voluntary self-mutilation of a great, rich, martial nation’ in agreeing to the terms of the Peace of Augsburg. This, he wrote, was Germany’s ‘darkest era’. He later conceded that the Peace had at least secured the future of Protestantism and ‘freedom of thought’, the foundations for Germany’s Protestant destiny. Yet Treitschke insisted nonetheless that these decades constituted the ‘ugliest period of German history.’³

Subsequent scholars generally followed this line. Moriz Ritter’s three-volume study of German History in the Age of the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years War – still the most detailed account of the period – presented the Peace of Augsburg as the prelude to the ‘dissolution of the imperial constitution 1586–1608’.⁴ The Catholic historian Johannes Janssen concurred when he repeatedly used words such as ‘decay’ and ‘ruin’ to characterise the development of German politics in this period.⁵

The caesura of 1945 undermined the old Prussian-German narrative of German history. Yet its rudiments were translated into the new narratives formulated by historians after 1945. Ironically, the old narrative translated quite easily into the new Marxist historiography of the former GDR. The triumph of the princes was equated with the resurgence of feudalism in a period of national decline. The activities of the confessional agents of the princes, the Protestant clergy and the Jesuits, seemed also to fit into this view.⁶ In the Federal Republic, by contrast, the triumph of the princes was viewed as the prelude to the formation of confessional churches, which Ernst Walter Zeeden saw as the key feature of this period.⁷ Strongly influenced by contemporary political developments in the 1950s, Zeeden presented the history of the empire after 1555 as the history of a divided Germany torn apart by the European religious conflict which led to the establishment of the new confessional regimes in the German territories.

This view was further developed by Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard as the confessionalisation thesis, which focused on the significance of the development of both Catholicism and Protestantism, on the establishment of new social norms and their internalisation in educational systems, and on the imposition of a new social discipline on German society. While Schilling emphasised the significance of confessionalisation for the formation of the territorial state and Reinhard was more concerned with its social impact, both scholars argued that confessionalisation was linked to a modernisation process in European society. Contemporaries did not intend this outcome. For Reinhard, modernisation was an incidental by-product of the growth of state power and of the imposition of social discipline. For Schilling, the growing tension that exploded in 1618 and its tragic and bloody aftermath was a historically necessary systemic crisis that was the prelude to progress and modernisation in the longer term: the sheer intensity of the disaster of the war led Europeans to eliminate religion from politics after 1648.⁸

Even some of the alternatives to the powerful confessionalisation narratives have failed to liberate themselves from the underlying master narrative. Winfried Schulze has criticised the exclusive emphasis on religion and sees evidence of secularisation in politics and thought in the later sixteenth century.⁹ Yet his argument still focuses on the formation of the territorial state. Martin Heckel has focused on the fact that the settlement of 1555 left the empire without a generally accepted body of imperial law. He too therefore argues that these decades saw an escalating and inevitable conflict which naturally exploded in war after 1618 and led to the secularisation of German imperial law in 1648.¹⁰

The old narrative explained the failure of the empire in terms of culpability, weakness, moral failure and lack of conviction. The new narrative suggests that the empire’s failure to solve its problems and to overcome the consequences of the religious division was simply the German equivalent of the kind of development that occurred elsewhere in Europe in the later sixteenth century.

The problem with all of the grand confessionalisation narratives is their foundation on theoretical models of secularisation or modernisation. These often fail to do justice to the openness and uncertainty of outcome that attended German political life at this time. An alternative to this approach is provided by more recent studies that focus on the way that the empire functioned increasingly effectively during this period. The publication of the papers relating to the Augsburg diet in 1566, for example, shed new light on politics after 1555 and contradicted older perceptions of an early breakdown caused by confessional differences.¹¹ Georg Schmidt’s study of the early modern empire published in 1999 also encouraged a new preoccupation with the state-like qualities (Staatlichkeit) of the empire, with the relationship between empire and territories as complementary aspects of a single system, and with the patriotic values that united both Catholics and Protestants in a German nation.¹² Despite fierce criticism from the leading exponents of the confessionalisation thesis, Schmidt’s arguments have contributed to the emergence of a new picture of the early modern empire as a functioning polity.

There were certainly divisions and tensions. The most important of these were religious in origin or generated by other issues that were exacerbated increasingly from the 1570s by the confessional divisions between Catholics and Protestants but also between Protestants themselves. Yet the approach of all parties to the problems that arose indicates a strong desire to resolve differences peacefully.

Fundamentally, the issues that arose after 1555 revolved around the constitutional and governance issues that had preoccupied the empire since the 1490s. At the Worms Diet in 1495 Maximilian I had requested finance to fund campaigns against the French, the Turks, and Venice. The German estates declined to provide money for any offensive wars and strictly resisted any attempt to impose imperial taxation. At the same time, the estates also asserted their own position as co-regents with the emperor. Above all they succeeded in focusing attention on the problems of the empire. This resulted in agreement on four major measures: a perpetual peace; the means of maintaining that peace (including regular meetings of the diet); the establishment of a high court, the Reichskammergericht, to settle disputes between estates, complaints against them by subjects, and appeals against judgments handed down by territorial courts; and, finally, the institution of an imperial tax, the Gemeiner Pfennig.

Neither the imperial tax nor the imperial administrative body subsequently agreed at Augsburg in 1500 survived. The tax was soon abandoned because it failed to raise the sums anticipated and because the princes insisted on retaining the right to levy their own taxes. The imperial administration (Reichsregiment) was initially envisaged by the estates as a mechanism for controlling the emperor but its first incarnation in 1500–02 achieved little and its second incarnation in 1521–30 soon ran up against the resistance of the princes, who suspected Charles V and his regent Ferdinand of attempting to use it as an instrument of imperial government.¹³

By contrast, the regional associations (Reichskreise or circles) that were envisaged as adjuncts of the central administrative body took root. This was because they were unambiguously under the control of the estates and because they came to play a vital role in the implementation of legislation agreed between emperor and estates and in the execution of the judgments of the Reichskammergericht. As a sign of the determination of the estates to keep the crown within the bounds of what had been agreed in 1495–1500, the limitation of royal power was further reinforced in 1519 when it was resolved that Charles V should sign an electoral capitulation (Wahlkapitulation) before his coronation.

This equilibrium was challenged in various ways by the Reformation and by Charles V. The first crisis arose over Charles V’s early attempt to stamp out the Lutheran heresy. The Edict of Worms 1521 aimed to deal with Luther swiftly. However, the refusal of the elector of Saxony followed by others to implement it rendered it ineffective. In the following years, the estates were unanimous in their desire to quell the unrest generated by the religious movement and they moved swiftly to deal with the Peasants War in 1525. Yet they insisted that, pending a general council of the Church or a German national Church council, they alone had the right to determine religious matters in their own territory. Their ability to assert this position was aided by Charles V’s absence from the empire throughout the 1520s and between 1532 and 1540. By the time Charles V returned his attention to German affairs in 1543, it was too late. His attempt to impose his will on Germany rapidly led to war. While it seemed that by 1548 the Emperor had triumphed, the princes soon led to a successful reaction against him. The Treaty of Passau 1552 was the first step to the Peace of Augsburg. This both reaffirmed the constitutional balance established around 1500 and provided answers to the religious questions thrown up by the intervening decades.

The Augsburg settlement extended the perpetual peace to matters concerning religion.¹⁴ Rulers, including the councils of imperial cities and even the imperial knights, were now empowered to impose their religion on their subjects. The only proviso was that they were obliged to allow anyone who dissented the right to emigrate. Some questions were left unclear: the status of those ecclesiastical territories that had already been secularised (further secularisations were explicitly prohibited by the reservatum ecclesiasticum, which was itself challenged from the early 1580s) and the rights of Protestant nobles and towns in the Catholic ecclesiastical territories. But these things became contentious much later.

More important, though often neglected by traditional scholarship, was the way that the Augsburg settlement made the agreements of 1495–1500 truly workable for the first time. Furthermore, after decades of uncertainty and the bitter experience of war in the 1540s, there was a general will to participate and to make the Peace work. This was evident at several levels: in the attitudes of the emperors who succeeded Charles V, in the response of the German princes, and in the way that the institutions of the empire now operated.

Unlike Charles V, Ferdinand I (r. 1558–64) and Maximilian I...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• The Thirty Years' War – An Introduction
• Part I: The Holy Roman Empire of The German Nation
• Part II: The Great Powers, Coalitions and Conflicting Interests
• Part III: Different Stages and Theatres of The War
• Part IV: Religion and Politics
• Part V: Experience and Praxis of War
• Index