Historians have been divided over the scope and the nature of the Thirty Years War. Some have argued that events in Germany must be seen as part of a much longer and wider struggle. The German Thirty Years War, some have suggested, was part of an eighty-year war in which the key issue was the position of the Habsburgs in Europe. The most important elements in this longer conflict were the rebellion of the Netherlands against Spanish rule from 1568 and the rivalry between Spain and France that culminated in prolonged military confrontation between 1635 and 1659.
However, contemporaries soon referred to the problems in the Reich as the `German war’. By its conclusion, many were already referring to `the thirty years German war’, thereby both denoting its duration and distinguishing it from the Schmalkaldic War of the previous century. Of course, the German war could not help but be related to other conflicts of the time. Numerous German princes, starting with the Habsburgs themselves, had relatives and interests outside the Reich, which shaped their perception of their own position and interests as the political and military situation evolved. Equally, neighbouring powers, such as the rulers of France, Poland, and Sweden, could not ignore the crisis of the Reich and built their assessment of it into their own calculations.
French hostility to continuing Habsburg domination in Europe, and the fear of being caught in a Spanish-Austrian pincer, was a key underlying factor in the first half of the seventeenth century, as it had been for much of the sixteenth. On the other hand, Louis XIII initially sympathized with Ferdinand’s predicament, since for much of the 1620s, he faced a similar threat of a Dutch-style secession of the Huguenots in south-western France. 3 Once that problem was solved by the destruction of the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle in 1628, French policy focused more consistently on the problem of the Habsburg pincer, with Spain as much a target as the Austrian territories in the Reich. The Dutch rebellion, too, continued to reverberate in the Reich. Indeed, legally, the Dutch provinces only ceased to be part of the Reich in 1648. The imminent end of the Twelve Years’ Truce concluded between Spain and the Dutch in 1609 was very much in the minds of politicians on all sides as the terminal date loomed.
In northern Italy, hostile forces also continued to threaten the position of the Habsburgs, notably Venice and Savoy, with France always in the background and the papacy an unreliable ally. Furthermore, the Italian situation assumed a new significance as the Twelve Years’ Truce approached its end and in the context of the understanding reached between the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs in the Oñate treaty in 1617.Spanish troops needed to be able to reach the Tyrol, both to assist in Austria and to move from there up to the Low Countries. Austrian troops needed to be able to reach Lombardy.
The key lay in the Valtelline which ran between Lake Como and the Inn, a predominantly Catholic dependency of the staunchly Protestant canton of Graubünden (the Grisons). The savage repression of a Catholic rebellion there in 1618 served as the pretext for Habsburg intervention in 1620, which was temporarily secured at the cost of much Protestant blood. But Italy remained fraught with danger: France was poised to intervene on behalf of Graubünden and there were continuing uncertainties over the Mantuan succession, in which both France and the Habsburgs had an interest. The Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs had reached a rare level of understanding of their separate and mutual interests by 1617 and a determination to collaborate in promoting them. Had they succeeded in all their objectives, their power in Europe would have been immense. However, that did not mean that there was anything like a plan to create a Habsburg universal monarchy, as some of their enemies alleged.
New potential fields of conflict had also opened up in the Baltic region. The Catholic Vasa dynasty in Poland maintained its claim to the Swedish crown. Sigismund III, the emperor’s brother-in-law, had acquired the Swedish throne in 1592 but had been deposed there by his uncle, Duke Charles. The latter’s son, the Lutheran Gustavus Adolphus, was ambitious both to secure his throne against any possible assault from Poland and to extend its footprint across the Baltic. That, in turn, posed a challenge to Denmark.
The Danes had fought two major wars against Sweden in 1563-70 and 1611-13 in order to preserve their hegemony in Scandinavia and their supremacy over the Baltic. Following the second war, Christian IV (r. 1588-1648) had entered into a defensive alliance with the Dutch. He was also directly involved in German affairs for, as Duke of Holstein, he was himself a prince of the Reich. Christian IV was endowed with a substantial treasury, swollen with the vast profits derived from the Sound Dues and with the indemnity of one million thaler extracted from Sweden in 1613. His predecessor Frederik II (r. 1559-88) had played a cautious game, acting as a Protestant éminence grise and building up a reputation as a power to be reckoned with but, wisely, never actually committing himself to any of the numerous schemes for the defence of European Protestantism put to him by French, Dutch, English, and German emissaries. Christian IV thought less about the wider situation of Western European Protestantism, but was fully alive to the pursuit of his own political, territorial, and dynastic interests in a regional theatre that he was convinced he could dominate.
The fact that a large number of interlocking conflicts played into the Thirty Years War has also generated debates over what the war was actually about. The answer no doubt differs for different actors. Many did indeed see the conflict as a struggle against the Habsburgs in Europe. German Protestant propaganda frequently underlined the international implications of the German struggle against Habsburg authority by juxtaposing `teutsche Libertet’ with `spanische Servitut’, suggesting, as their predecessors had done in the 1580s, that Spain was the real enemy. A variation on that theme was the assertion that the conflict was a European-wide struggle against the Jesuits and Catholicism, a struggle for the survival of Protestantism everywhere. Ferdinand II himself, from time to time, believed that he was fighting a holy war. However, in his instructions to Wallenstein, Ferdinand urged his general to use the `praetextum der Religion’ as frequently as possible, just as his enemies had done to great effect.
Religion was never the sole motivating force. The Protestant Union dissolved soon after the war started without fighting a single battle. Indeed, the war was not a straightforward conflict between Catholic and Protestant. The Protestants were divided and many Lutherans were just as suspicious of the Reformed or Calvinist activists as they were of the more activist Catholics. The Lutheran Elector of Saxony was, for a time, one of the emperor’s most important allies. Some moderate Reformed rulers had more in common with the Lutheran loyalists than they did with those who identified openly as Calvinists with their counterparts in the Netherlands and France. Some Lutherans, in turn, jibbed at the authority of the Saxon Elector and for that reason supported the Palatine Elector. Equally, not all Catholics were blindly committed to a struggle against Protestantism. Duke Maximilian of Bavaria was pursuing his own dynastic and territorial interests in supporting the emperor. Later, those same interests led him to oppose the crown.
Even the Jesuits, consistently vilified in much Protestant propaganda as a single force fanatically devoted to an exclusively religious end, were in reality quite flexible. Jesuit policy differed from region to region. Jesuit confessors and advisers were well aware of the worldly interests of their princely and royal masters; harmonizing their own spiritual concerns with those interests often meant counselling compromise rather than confrontation. The advice given by the Jesuit confessors Wilhelm Lamormaini (1570-1648) and Adam Contzen in Vienna and Munich, respectively firmly supported the pursuit of militant Counter- Reformation. Yet their aim was not total victory but to restore the position that Catholicism had enjoyed in 1555 under the Peace of Augsburg. By the 1630s, it seemed unlikely that could be achieved and after 1635 their successors, Johann Gans (1591-after 1648) in Vienna and Johannes Vervaux (1585-1661) in Munich, advocated a more accommodating attitude and the abandonment of any idea of a providential mission. Their counterparts in France and Spain took different lines as well: in Madrid, Francisco Aguado viewed the war as an essentially secular conflict in which Spain’s real enemies were the Dutch and the French, rather than the German Protestants. The Jesuit superior general, Muzio Vitelleschi (1563- 1645), did not preside over a monolithic organization. Rather, he attempted to steer a course between the various regions, each with its own distinct perspectives.
The conflict was a religious one to the extent that any conflict in the Reich almost inevitably involved religion. The rights of German princes in matters of ecclesiastical jurisdiction were, after all, among their most fundamental prerogatives. Disputes over the ambiguities of the (religious) Peace of Augsburg had been at the root of the growing constitutional crisis of the Reich. In particular, questions relating to the lands of the Church had never been definitively resolved. The conflict that began in 1618 was, in that sense, an armed continuation of the political and legal conflict that had animated the Reich for decades. If at first the war was fought essentially to restore Habsburg control in Austria and Bohemia, it soon turned into a wider struggle that revolved around the question of the German bishoprics and around the question of imperial authority. Indeed, the emperor’s treatment of Friedrich V itself became a key issue, since it raised important questions concerning the customs and laws of the Reich and the powers of the emperor.
Finally, in two respects the war was a rather different conflict to any previously. First, it was accompanied by more propaganda than ever before. That partly reflected the steady development of printing over the previous century. Pamphlets and flysheets became an integral part of any political discourse. By the early seventeenth century, regular news sheets and the first newspapers had begun to appear. Around 1600, moreover, the formal separation of the Spanish postal service based in Brussels from the imperial service led to the establishment of an increasingly efficient Reichspost run by the Taxis family as a highly profitable commercial enterprise which hugely accelerated the transmission and exchange of information. Furthermore, the absence of an effective central government in the Reich meant that the German system was subject neither to the Inquisition nor to the governmental constraints that limited the private use of equivalent systems in France and England into the 1620s.
The German war was the first war fought out in the context of the communications revolution that both created an appetite for news and, increasingly, began to create the news itself. The Frankfurt postmaster Johann von der Birghden, appointed in 1615 by the Generaloberpostmeister Lamoral von Taxis to direct the newly established Frankfurt postal station, soon extended the network to Nuremberg, Leipzig, Hamburg, and other centres, and supplied it with his own newspaper, the Frankfurter kaiserliche Reichsoberpostamtszeitung. It was said that his reports, and-just as important-his false reports, were worth the equivalent of an army. As a Lutheran, he inevitably became suspect to the Catholic imperial authorities and he was sacked for alleged political agitation in 1626 (though immediately reinstated by the Swedish occupation of Frankfurt 1631-5).
The vicissitudes of the war eventually ruined many printers, but, initially, many profited from a printing boom. In 1618 alone, the Bohemian crisis generated over eighteen hundred pamphlets and several hundred flysheets. That level of production was not reached again, though the years 1629-33, 1635, and 1643-8 saw further peaks of propagandistic and literary activity. Two other forms of publication remained consistently important throughout. The first was the plethora of opinions commissioned by German rulers at every stage from legal and other experts at their own or other `friendly’ universities. In a period when imperial institutions did not function and there were no meetings of the Reichstag until 1640, the princes communicated their reactions by means of pamphlets and position papers known as Denkschriften. The academics, especially the exponents of the new field of public law, were more than happy to oblige. Linked with that activity was the practice of publishing captured enemy documents that exposed alleged perfidy and illuminated the ramifications of convoluted conspiracies. For those who published them, such as Ferdinand II after the capture of the Winter King’s Prague archive, the aim was clearly to claim the moral and legal high ground, but also to warn minor players, whose activities had been exposed, against any further seditious acts.
The other novel feature of the German war was the way in which it came to be conducted militarily. Most parties in the Reich were woefully ill-prepared for any prolonged conflict. The militias that German rulers had raised over the preceding decades proved next to useless in the struggles of the 1620s. At the same time, raising mercenary forces strained the resources of all but a small minority. By the early 1620s, even before any serious fighting, many German territories were already in financial crisis. By 1625, the sheer scale of the war already far surpassed any previous conflict, and over the next decade more than a quarter of a million troops served in the Reich.
Traditional methods of raising money for military purposes often proved inadequate. Foreign subsidies became essential on both sides, but so too did ever more elaborate and onerous ways of allowing armies to live off the land as they fought. Various kinds of `contributions’ became routine. One involved simple marauding to provide troops with whatever they needed in the way of food, horses, and other goods. Another involved the formal designation of particular areas to support a garrison or other force, with all regular taxes and dues being dedicated to this purpose for the duration of the hostilities. An early example of this was the grant by the emperor to Duke Maximilian in 1620 of the right to occupy and tax the lands of the Upper Palatinate and Upper Austria. The confiscation or temporary forfeit of `rebel’ property became one of the main instruments of imperial war financing, but simultaneously a further bone of contention between the emperor and his critics in the Reich.
This was also true of the boldest attempt to create an effective imperial force by the Bohemian commander Albrecht Wallenstein during the 1620s. Wallenstein was not so much an innovator as an entrepreneur who developed the contribution system to its fullest extent. To circumvent the effects of the delayed payment of contributions, he organized a credit line through his banker Hans de Witte. The latter was a refugee from Flanders who formally became a Calvinist on settling in Prague in 1603, where he used his international contacts to build up a flourishing banking business which counted the imperial court among its clients. Despite his religion, de Witte had no truck with the Calvinist regime in Prague after 1618; he preferred to compromise his faith rather than tolerate the corruption and incompetence of the Bohemian Estates.
Wallenstein’s motives have been subject to much speculation. He later claimed that he merely wished to raise an army, rather than maintain his own private force on a permanent basis. A Bohemian nobleman of modest origins and a convert to Catholicism at the age of twenty, Wallenstein had served as colonel to the Moravian Estates from 1615. He had raised a modest mercenary force to fight on Ferdinand’s behalf against Venice and he then fought for Ferdinand’s victory in Bohemia, from which he profited by buying the lordships of Friedland and Reichenberg. That territorial base formed the core of what soon became an expanding and consolidated territory that Ferdinand elevated to a duchy in 1624. Marriage to the daughter of Count Harrach in 1623, meanwhile, had cemented Wallenstein’s relationship to some of the most influential members of Ferdinand’s court. His military enterprise also expanded apace as the business of raising new regiments was subcontracted to others who, in turn, subcontracted the recruitment of companies to form them. Unlike other mercenary commanders of the period, Wallenstein issued recruiting patents in his own name, rather than that of his employer.
If Wallenstein’s first moves revealed him to be an arriviste, supporting the emperor in order to secure his own gains, the relationship was soon reversed. The emperor came to be dependent upon him, or rather his ability to raise and sustain a substantial force of 24,000 men and to loan Ferdinand some eight million gulden. The creation of the Duchy of Friedland was the first part of his reward. In 1627, he was given the Silesian principality of Sagan and other confiscated properties. The following year, he was granted the Duchy of Mecklenburg, and a secret contract of 1632 hinted that he might have the Electorate of Brandenburg if he could conquer it.
Such powers aroused envy, hostility, and alarm. Catholic princes such as the Duke of Bavaria resented being sidelined by the enterprising upstart. Even the emperor’s closest advisers became alarmed at how powerful Wallenstein had become and at the signs that he might begin to operate as an independent quasisovereign power in the interests of his own growing state within a state, rather than in the interests of the Habsburgs. Hence Wallenstein was dismissed in June 1630 at the insistence of the Electors. In 1632, he was recalled to deal with the Swedes after Maximilian of Bavaria had lost both his territory and his military commander Jean Tserclaes de Tilly. By the end of the year, he had raised and armed 120,000 men. However, Wallenstein’s failure to follow through his victory over Gustavus Adolphus at Lützen on 16 November 1632 aroused suspicions in Vienna. In February 1634, the emperor’s decree depriving him of his command and ordering his imprisonment, or execution if that proved impossible, resulted in his murder.
Wallenstein was the most spectacular example of a military enterpriser. However, on the other side, admittedly on a lesser scale, Count Ernst von Mansfeld (until his death in 1626) and Duke Bernhard of Saxony-Weimar in the 1630s operated in much the same way. Such enterprises were able to flourish in the Reich after 1618 because the rules that governed its normal operations were suspended with the paralysis of its political and legal institutions. They gave hope alternately to either side that they might force a resolution. For much of the first decade or so of the war, the emperor and the Catholics had more grounds for optimism.
