The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618

Geoff Mortimer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137543851
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia moderna

As the 400th anniversary of the outbreak of the Thirty Years War approaches, Geoff Mortimer provides a timely re-assessment of its origins. These lie mainly neither in religious tensions in Germany nor in the conflicts between Spain, France and the Dutch, but in the revolt in Bohemia and the famous defenestration of Prague.

1

The Origins of the Thirty Years War?

The Thirty Years War was not only long, but also extremely complicated. Hence almost all modern histories of the war (with one recent exception¹) have sought to confine their accounts of the circumstances and events prior to the revolt in Bohemia to their first substantive chapter. Although there are differences in detail the overall approach is generally similar, outlining the increasing tensions and the specific incidents which by 1618 had created a critical situation in which a rebellion in Prague could lead to a prolonged and widespread conflict. English-speaking historians tend to stress the international context rather more than their German colleagues, even those who espouse the modern European view of the war, but this is a matter of emphasis rather than a difference of principle. Consequently this book too will set out a summary of the background to the war as Chapter 1, firstly in order to present the relevant facts conveniently and concisely, but secondly as the basis for a discussion in Chapter 2 of the validity of the standard interpretation.

Arndt describes the Thirty Years War as ‘a European war, but one which took place predominantly on the soil of the Holy Roman Empire’.² The latter part of this observation is certainly true in a literal sense, as at that time the Empire still theoretically included not only Germany, Austria and the lands of the Bohemian crown, but also much of northern Italy, together with Franche-Comté, Alsace, Lorraine and the Spanish Netherlands, as well as the United Provinces (Dutch Republic) and indeed the Swiss Cantons, notwithstanding that both the latter territories had long since established their practical independence. Nevertheless the term ‘Empire’ was by then commonly used in a more limited sense, excluding not only the Swiss and the Dutch, but also the areas under Spanish and French control or influence, while the status of the lands of the Bohemian crown had long been decidedly ambiguous. Thus defined, the Empire comprised principally Germany and Austria, and indeed contemporaries, including many in Austria itself, often used ‘Empire’ loosely to mean simply Germany, as distinct from the Habsburg lands. This is relevant because much of the discussion of the background to the Thirty Years War concerns events in the Empire in this narrower but more meaningful sense.

The term ‘Thirty Years War’ is itself still not absolutely clear. Steinberg’s thesis that the war is a construct invented by historians has long since been discredited, but accounts are nevertheless not always precise about the extent to which conflicts outside the core of the Empire were part of the war, or were only peripheral events which impinged upon it from time to time.³ Gustavus Adolphus contended in 1628 that all the wars taking place in Europe, from La Rochelle in south-western France to his own involvement in Poland, had become parts of a single whole, but this was even then an extreme view, while in the years around 1618 any such unity is much harder to perceive.⁴ Shortly before the Bohemian revolt the later Emperor Ferdinand II, then archduke of Styria, was fighting Venice in the Uzkok war, while the duke of Savoy was fighting the Spanish in northern Italy in the second stage of the Mantuan War of Succession, and Gustavus Adolphus was already fighting the Poles in Livonia. Between 1619 and 1621, during the war in Bohemia, there was civil war in France, Poland was skirmishing with the Turks and with Bethlen Gabor, prince of Transylvania, who was himself fighting the emperor, and the Spanish were occupying the Valtelline in the Swiss canton of Graubünden. Particularly problematic in this context is the status of the war between Spain and the United Provinces, which commenced in 1568 after the initial revolt in the Spanish Netherlands two years earlier, but which was in abeyance, at least on land in Europe, during a truce from 1609 to 1621. The years leading up to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War were thus also the years leading up to the widely expected resumption of war in the Netherlands, but whether these were separate issues or different facets of the same one posed interpretational problems for contemporaries and subsequent historians alike.

The international situation

The rivalry between France and Spain was the most important single aspect of international relations in Europe throughout most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This rivalry had its own history, but even longer established and more intense had been the rivalry between the French monarchy and the dukes of Burgundy. The two issues became entwined, together with the Habsburg connection, through a series of inheritances, some sought-after and others accidental, in the latter years of the fifteenth and early years of the sixteenth centuries. In 1477 Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy died at Nancy in the last battle of the Burgundian Wars with France, following which the French seized Burgundy itself, but his Netherlands possessions, principally modern Belgium and Holland, passed to his only surviving child, the 19-year-old Mary. She promptly married the Habsburg Archduke Maximilian of Austria, the later Emperor Maximilian I, and after her own early death in a riding accident their son, known as Philip the Handsome, inherited the Netherlands, becoming ruler when he reached the age of 16 in 1494. Two years later Philip married a Spanish princess, Joanna of Castile, a good but not spectacular marriage, as she was only the third child of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, but following two unexpected deaths and much political in-fighting she inherited Castile in 1506 and Aragon in 1516. By then Philip was already dead, having predeceased his father the emperor, and as Joanna was deemed to be mad their 16-year-old son became co-ruler and regent, as well as inheriting Habsburg Austria and being elected emperor as Charles V soon afterwards, in 1519.

Thus instead of rival but separate powers on its borders France was suddenly faced with Habsburg Spain to the south, the Habsburg Netherlands to the north, and the Habsburg-led Empire to the east, all under a single powerful and able ruler. The resulting perception of Habsburg encirclement became the enduring central feature of French foreign policy, and it was particularly significant both in the approach to and in the course of the Thirty Years War. France had already crossed swords with Spain under Ferdinand II of Aragon in the first phase of the Italian wars, which commenced in 1494. These were a complicated series of conflicts extending over more than sixty years and involving many minor principalities and various outsiders, but in which rivalry for influence between France and Spain played a significant part. In the latter respect Spain under Charles V was the clear winner, securing the major territories of Naples and Milan, and emerging at the high point of its power.

Charles proved to be the first and last head of the vast combined inheritances of Habsburg Austria, the Burgundian Netherlands and the crowns of Castile and Aragon, as when he retired in 1556 he passed the Habsburg inheritance, and with it the family candidacy for the Imperial crown, to his younger brother Ferdinand. Thus his son Philip II inherited only the Spanish, Italian and Netherlands possessions, which he ruled for 42 years until his death in 1598, when he was succeeded by his 20-year-old son Philip III. By the early years of the seventeenth century this separation of the Spanish and Austrian branches of the family and their respective territories was long established, but they nevertheless all remained Habsburgs, a fact reinforced by repeated intermarriage. This gave rise to an ambiguity in respect of the Empire, in that Spain was in one sense an outsider, a foreign power, but in another sense an insider and part of the establishment, not only having substantial lands in modern France and Italy which were nominally within the Empire, but also being so closely bound to the Austrian and Imperial ruling family that many contemporaries, particularly opponents, tended to see them as one and the same thing.

France came clearly into this latter category, but in contrast to Spain the country was split internally by political and religious rivalries, aggravated by the accidental death of the king in a tournament in 1559, followed by the death of his 15-year-old son and successor a year later. The old king’s widow became regent on behalf of her second son, but growing confessional tensions quickly developed into the wars of religion which racked France for the rest of the century, although aristocratic feuding played an equally significant part. Both sides had their extremists, Calvinists and ultra-Catholics respectively, and among the many executions, assassinations and atrocities the most notorious event was the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Huguenots (Protestants) in 1572. Spain provided assistance to the Catholic party, but in 1589 the Catholic King Henri III was assassinated by a Catholic monk, a deed which had the perverse effect of entitling a Calvinist, King Henri of Navarre, to the French succession. The latter was already in the field leading Protestant forces holding the south and west of the country, and his army went on to win important battles, but also to lay siege unsuccessfully to Paris and Rouen, rebuffs to which the participation of Spanish troops contributed significantly. Eventually Henri converted to Catholicism, allegedly commenting that Paris was well worth a Mass, and he was crowned as Henri IV in 1594. Not everyone was convinced by his conversion, however, and ultra-Catholic resistance continued with Spanish support, leading to open war with Spain from 1595 to 1598. Peace in the latter year was accompanied by an internal settlement, Henri IV’s Edict of Nantes, a decree which made concessions to the Protestants although not satisfying extremists on either side. The tensions remained, and they increased after Henri’s assassination in 1610, so that a Huguenot rebellion broke out in 1620 and troubles continued up to Richelieu’s siege of Huguenot La Rochelle in 1627 and 1628.

Although the rivalry between France and Spain continued throughout, it nevertheless receded into the background for much of the time during which France was wrestling with its internal problems, while Spain’s energies and resources were taken up by the war with the Dutch. Hence this latter long-running struggle became a central feature of the international situation during the crucial years leading up to the Thirty Years War. By the beginning of the seventeenth century Spain was still a great power, indeed the greatest power in Europe, but past its peak and facing the classic problem of having too many commitments but insufficient resources. This was most apparent in Philip II’s inability to suppress the revolt in the Netherlands quickly, or at all, and in the spectacular failure of his armada sent against England in 1588, but equally symptomatic were the four state bankruptcies in the fifty years from 1557 to 1607. The twelve-year truce agreed in 1609 was a reflection of Spanish weakness, as the terms were decidedly unfavourable, allowing the Dutch to go on harassing Spain’s overseas colonies and trade, and to keep the Scheldt estuary closed, thereby maintaining the blockade of Antwerp, the most important commercial centre in the Spanish Netherlands. The Dutch had used their de facto independence to good effect in the fields of trade and industry, which together with French subsidies was how they were able to finance the continuing war, but a considerable part of their progress had been at the expense of outmoded and inefficient Spanish competition. The revolt had initially centred around religion, but in the intervening years political and especially economic issues had become increasingly significant, to the extent that by the time the question of renewing or ending the truce came to be considered religious questions were, as Asch notes, ‘ultimately of secondary importance’.⁵ The truce had shown the Spanish that even if they could barely afford to fight the Dutch they could certainly not afford to allow them the commercial freedom which would accompany peace.

The tensions between Spain and France also had a bearing on the war in the Netherlands, aggravating the former’s problems with the so-called Spanish road. To sustain their war effort the Spanish needed to send men, military supplies and money to the Netherlands, but because the Dutch had clear superiority at sea this had to be done mainly over land. The shortest route, directly across France, was out of the question, so the delivery columns had to start from the Spanish possessions in northern Italy, which meant crossing the Alps, making the process slow, arduous and expensive. The main Swiss passes were barred to the Spanish by the determinedly neutral cantons of the confederation, so the original road ran west from Milan, through the duchy of Savoy and into the Spanish-held Franche Comté, then via the duchy of Lorraine into Luxembourg and the Spanish Netherlands. This route had been established and first used following the original rebellion in the 1560s, but it ran uncomfortably close to French borders and territories, as well as being vulnerable to the changeable polices of the independent duchies through which it passed. By the early 1600s the ambitious, assertive and generally anti-Habsburg Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy posed a particular problem in this respect, so that an alternative had to be found. This led north from Milan to the head of Lake Como, and then east through the Valtelline and over the Stelvio pass into the Habsburg territory of Tyrol, before turning west through southern Germany to the Rhine. The Valtelline is now in northern Italy, but it was then in the territory of Graubünden, a Protestant-controlled independent canton, although the population of the valley itself was both Catholic and rebellious. In 1603 the Spanish fortified their end of the valley, and after disturbances and repression in 1618, followed by a Habsburg-encouraged Catholic uprising in 1620, they occupied it completely, albeit only temporarily, as they were forced by French-led pressure to withdraw in 1623.⁶

Elsewhere in Europe there were also conflicts in which religion and politics were intermingled. In England in 1605 Catholic plotters attempted to blow up the Protestant King James I, together with his parliament, despite which, and regardless of anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic opposition at home, James later sought unsuccessfully for almost a decade to marry his son and heir to a Spanish infanta, although by then he had already married his daughter to the Calvinist elector of the Palatinate.

The circumstances leading up to Sweden’s major involvement in the Thirty Years War date back to 1587, when the Catholic Sigismund inherited the crown of the predominantly Lutheran country and in the same year was elected to the throne of his mother’s native Poland. In 1600 he was deposed in Sweden by his Protestant uncle, who became Charles IX, although Roberts comments that in the early years of the Counter-Reformation ‘it was not difficult for Charles to beat the Protestant drum and represent what was really a struggle for power as essentially a religious issue’.⁷ Charles promptly invaded Livonia, a territory recently secured by Poland against Russian claims, and adjacent to Estonia, which had been extracted from Russia by Sweden at around the same time. The subsequent long-running although intermittent war between Sweden and Poland thus had both a territorial and a dynastic basis, as Sigismund did not give up his claims to the Swedish crown, and Russia was also involved. To further complicate the situation Charles managed to provoke Denmark, under its new young King Christian IV, who declared war in 1611, but Charles died soon afterwards, leaving the problems to his young son, the barely seventeen-year-old Gustavus II Adolphus. The war was lost, and the price of peace was a huge indemnity to be paid to Denmark, which was raised through heavy taxation and borrowing until the last instalment was paid in 1619, leaving Gustavus free to turn once again to Poland and to war in Livonia.

Europe, and the Habsburg lands in particular, had long been under pressure from the Turks in the south east. During the hundred years from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries the Ottoman Empire expanded in several directions, particularly round the Mediterranean, but also into the Balkans and beyond.⁸ In one respect the Habsburgs were beneficiaries, as Ferdinand, Charles V’s younger brother and later his successor as emperor, managed to gain election to the crown of the Bohemian lands when the last Jagiellon king fell at the battle of Mohács in 1526, during Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent’s advance into Hungary. The crown of Hungary was also elective, but in the aftermath of the defeat two contenders both secured a form of election. One of these was Ferdinand, who was only able to take possession of a strip of the northern and western parts of the country, while his rival sought Ottoman protection and controlled much of the rest. In the wars which followed Suleyman dramatically but unsuccessfully besieged Vienna itself in 1529, as well as invading Austria a second time in 1532, while in 1541 Ferdinand made his own incursion into the Ottoman part of Hungary. This was a failure, as a result of which the Habsburgs had to accept a truce on humiliating terms, including payment of an annual tribute to the sultan for their part of Hungary. In 1568, two years after Suleyman’s death, a more permanent treaty was agreed, although the tribute continued, as did the split of Hungary into three parts, one Habsburg, one Ottoman, and the third the principality of Transylvania, a nominally independent but tributary buffer state supported by the Ottomans to keep the Habsburgs away from their own borders. Although relative peace then lasted for 25 years until the Long Turkish War of 1593 to 1606 there were numerous incidents, and the need to maintain defences against the Turks was a constant drain on Austrian finances. The wider ramifications of what Murphey calls ‘the complex matrix of intersecting spheres of Ottoman and Habsburg influence’ is well illustrated by the unlikely sounding alliance between Catholic France and the Muslim Ottoman Empire, which was agreed under Suleyman in 1536 and lasted in substance until the French Revolution.⁹ Even the distant Netherlands felt the effect, as hostilities between Spain and the Turks in the Mediterranean deprived Philip II of the naval and other resources he needed to be able to suppress the Dutch revolt quickly in the 1560s.

Imperial institutions

Before discussing events in the Empire it is necessary to outline certain aspects of its structure and institutions which have a significant bearing on them. Two important measures formalised the framework and led the move out of the Middle Ages, the Golden Bull of 1356, which established the seven electors for the offices of king of Rome (effectively emperor designate) and emperor, and the Ewiger Landfriede (Permanent Peace) of 1495, which abolished the practice of feuding and placed the threat of the Imperial ban (outlawing) over anyone who resorted to arms in furtherance of a dispute within the Empire. During the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries a process of reform established the principal institutions of the Empire and the procedures of the Reichstag (Imperial Diet), the highest assembly and law-making body, resulting in a significant shift in the balance of power away from the emperor in favour of the estates in respect of taxation, lawmaking and the administration of justice. During this period the estates also gained a practical role in the administration of the Empire, as the lack of an effective executive had been a major weakness in the past. Thus in the early sixteenth century the ten Imperial circles were created, those for Bavaria and Austria effectively dominated by a single member each, whereas at the other extreme the Swabian Circle had over a hundred members, while the lands of the Bohemian crown and Imperial Italy were not included in the system at all.

The circles provided at least some help in organising the large number of constituents of the Empire, which may have approached or even exceeded 1800 at times as territories split or merged due to inheritances and marriages. In principle these included all entities whose ruler or ruling body owed fealty directly to the emperor, and these ranged from a few substantial principalities such as Bavaria, Brandenburg and Saxony, down to a large number of Imperial knights whose possessions might have amounted to little more than a village and its fields. Alongside them were...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Images
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Origins of the Thirty Years War?
• 2. An Inevitable War?
• 3. The Bohemian Context
• 4. Counter-Reformation
• 5. The Habsburg Brothers’ Feud
• 6. Matthias’s Reign, Ferdinand’s Succession
• 7. Insurrection
• 8. No Way Back
• 9. The Search for Allies
• 10. The Revolt Defeated
• 11. From Bohemia to the Thirty Years War
• 12. Epilogue
• References
• Bibliography
• Index