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The Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648, was mainly fought on the territory of today's Germany, and involved most of the major European continental powers. Although it seemed a religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics, the rivalry between the Habsburg dynasty and other powers was also a central motive. Catholic France supported the Protestant side, showing that the motive was purely power--and anti-Hapsburg sentiment.

The impact of the Thirty Years' War and related episodes of famine and disease was devastating. The war may have lasted for 30 years, but the conflicts that triggered it continued unresolved for a much longer time. The war ended with the Treaty of Westphalia.

Europe had expected that the struggle between Catholic and Protestant would be renewed in 1621, when the truce between Spain and the northern provinces of the Netherlands came to an end. But it began in the Empire several years earlier and gradually most of Europe became involved. Since Charles V, backed by the power of Spain, had been unable either to strengthen his authority at the expense of the territorial princes or to wipe out Protestantism, it was natural that his immediate successors preferred to leave the constitutional and religious issues alone. Ferdinand I (1556-1564) and Maximilian II (1564-1576) devoted most of their energy to fighting the Turks, while Rudolf II (1576-1612) preferred to dabble in astrology and to search for the philosopher's stone to turn base metals into gold. During their reigns, however, the Catholic revival was gathering momentum, and it remained only for Ferdinand II (1619-1637 ) to put the new Catholic fervor into action.

Origins of the War

The Peace of Augsburg (1555), hastily signed by Charles V, confirmed the result of the 1526 Diet of Speyer and ended the violence between the Lutherans and the Catholics in Germany and it stated that:

• The 225 German Princes could choose Lutheranism or Catholicism for their realms according to their conscience.
• 
  Lutherans living under the control of a bishop could remain Lutherans.
• 
  Lutherans could keep the territory that they had captured from the Catholic Church since the Peace of Passau (1552).
• 
  The ecclesiastical leaders of the Catholic Church that converted to Lutheranism had to give up their territory.
• 
  Those living within a state that had officially chosen either Lutheranism or Catholicism, were not allowed to practice a different religon.

Although the Peace created a temporary end to hostilities, it did not solve the underlying reasons of the religious conflict. Both parties interpreted it at their convenience, and Calvinism spread quickly throughout Germany, adding a third major Christian worldview to the region.

Political and economic tensions grew among many of the powerful nations of Europe in the early 17th century.

Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia. He urgedthe Council of Trent to approve Communion in Both kinds for German and Bohemian Catholics

Spain wanted the German states.

France felt threatened by two surrounding Habsburg states (Spain and the Holy Roman Empire), and wanted to exert its power against the weaker German states.

Sweden and Denmark wanted the northern German states bordering the Baltic Sea.

Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia issued a charter of religious freedom to Bohemian Protestants in 1609.

The Holy Roman Empire (Germany and most of the surrounding lands) was a fragmented collection of independent states oncluding superpowers like the Austrian House of Habsburg (including also Bohemia and Hungary, with eight million subjects); national states like Bavaria, Electoral Saxony, the Margravate of Brandenburg, the Palatinate, Hesse, the Archbishopric of Trier and Württemberg (500,000 to one million inhabitants); to a wide series of minor independent duchies, free cities, abbeys, bishoprics, down to petty lords whose authority extended to no more than a single village.

Religious tensions continued to grow throughout the second half of the 16th century as well. The Peace of Augsburg was unraveling as some converted bishops had not given up their bishoprics, and as certain Catholic rulers in Spain and Eastern Europe tried to restore the power of Catholicism in the region. The Lutherans also saw the defection of the lords of Palatinate (1560), Nassau (1578), Hesse-Kassel (1603) and Brandenburg (1613), who all converted to Calvinism.

So, this was the picture at the beginning of the 17th century:
-- the Rhine lands and those south to the Danube were largely Catholic
-- the Lutherans were the majority in the north
-- the Calvinists were predominant in some areas such as west-central Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

There were some rulers who allowed religious freedoms: the Habsburg emperors who followed Charles V (especially Ferdinand I and Maximilian II, but also Rudolf II, and his successor Matthias) were supportive towards their subjects' religious choices.

1609 - Religious tensions broke into violence in the German free city of Donauwörth in 1606: the Lutheran majority prevented the Catholic residents from holding a procession and tgis resulted in a riot. This prompted foreign intervention by Duke Maximilian of Bavaria (1573–1651) on behalf of the Catholics. After the violence ceased, the Calvinists in Germany (who were still in a minority) felt the most threatened.

1619 - Then Matthias, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, died without heirs in 1619. His lands went to his nearest male relative, his cousin Ferdinand of Styria, who became Ferdinand II, King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor. Ferdinand, having been educated by the Jesuits, was a staunch Catholic who wanted to restore Catholicism to his lands. This made him highly unpopular in primarily Hussite Bohemia. The rejection of Ferdinand is what launched the Thirty Years' War.

The red-haired, red-faced, good-natured Ferdinand was not a great man, but he possessed more virtues than most kings. He was both a devoted husband and father and a conscientious ruler interested in the welfare of his people. It was said with exaggeration no doubt that when he was Duke of Styria, he knew the names of all his subjects and that he provided free legal service for the poorest of their number. Above all else, however, he was a Habsburg: he was dedicated to the twofold task of restoring the authority of the emperor in the Empire and of re-establishing Catholicism in central Europe.

The War can be divided into four major phases: the Bohemian Revolt, the Danish intervention, the Swedish intervention, and the French intervention.

The Bohemian Revolt
Period: 1618–1625

Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia. His firm Catholicism was the proximate cause of the war.

Without descendants Emperor Matthias arranged to have the fiercely Catholic, Ferdinand of Styria, later Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor elected to the separate royal thrones of Bohemia and Hungary.

Some of the Protestant leaders of Bohemia preferred the Protestant Frederick V, elector of the Palatinate (successor of Frederick IV, the creator of the League of Evangelical Union).

However, other Protestants supported the position taken by the Catholics and so in 1617 Ferdinand was duly elected by the Bohemian Estates to become the Crown Prince, and automatically upon the death of Matthias, the next King of Bohemia. The king-elect then sent two Catholic councilors (Wilhelm Grav Slavata and Jaroslav Borzita Graf Von Martinicz) as his representatives to Hradčany castle in Prague in May 1618. Ferdinand had wanted them to administer the government in his absence. Suddenly, the Bohemian Hussites seized them, subjected them to a mock trial, and threw them out of the palace window which was some 70 feet off the ground. The Catholic version of the story claims that angels appeared and carried them to safety, while the Protestant version says that they landed in a pile of manure which saved their lives.

This event, known as the Second Defenestration of Prague, is what started the Bohemian Revolt. Soon after the Bohemian conflict erupted in the entirety of Greater Bohemia which was effectively Bohemia, Silesia, Lusatia and Moravia. Moravia was already dealing with a conflict between Catholics and Protestants. This conflict was to find many facets and mirrors across the continent of Europe and eventually involved France and Sweden, among others.

Had the Bohemian rebellion remained a local conflict, the war could have been over in a couple of years. However the death of Emperor Matthias in 1619 emboldened the rebellious Protestant leaders who had been on the verge of a settlement. The weaknesses of both Ferdinand (now officially on the throne after the death of Emperor Matthias) and of the Bohemians themselves led to the spread of the war to Western Germany. Ferdinand was compelled to call on his nephew, King Philip IV of Spain for assistance.

Frederick V, Elector Palatine as King of Bohemia, painted by Gerrit von Honthorst in 1634, two years after the subject's death. Frederick is called the "Winter King" of Bohemia because he reigned for less than three months in 1620 after he was installed by a rebellious faction

The rebellion initially favored the Bohemians. They were joined in the revolt by much of Upper Austria whose nobility was Lutheran and Calvinist (a fact that would swiftly change in the coming years). Lower Austria revolted soon after and in 1619, Count Thurn led an army to the walls of Vienna itself. In the East, the Protestant Prince of Transylvania, Gabriel Bethlen, led a campaign into Hungary with the blessings of the Turkish Sultan. The Emperor, who had been preoccupied with the Uzkok War, hurried to reform an army to stop the Bohemians and their allies from entirely overwhelming his country. Count Bucquoy, the commander of the Imperial army, defeated the forces of the Protestant Union led by Count Mansfeld at the Battle of Sablat, on 10 June 1619. This cut off Count Thurn's communications with Prague, and he was forced to abandon his siege of Vienna.

In spite of Sablat, Count Thurn's army continued to exist as an effective force, and Mansfeld managed to reform his army further north in Bohemia. The Estates of Upper and Lower Austria, still in revolt, signed an alliance with the Bohemians in early August. On August 17 1619 Ferdinand was officially deposed as King of Bohemia and was replaced by the Palatine Elector Frederick V. In Hungary, the Transylvanians succeeded in driving the Emperor's armies from that country by 1620.

Johan Tzerclaes, Count of Tilly, commander of the Bavarian and Imperial armies.

The Spanish sent an army from Brussels under Ambrosio Spinola to support the Emperor. Also the Spanish ambassador to Vienna, Don Iñigo Vélez de Oñate, persuaded Protestant Saxony to intervene against Bohemia in exchange for control over Lusatia. Under the command of General Tilly, the Catholic Leagues' army pacified Upper Austria, while the Emperor's forces pacified Lower Austria. The two armies united and moved north into Bohemia. Ferdinand II decisively defeated Frederick V at the Battle of White Mountain, near Prague on 8 November 1620. In addition to becoming Catholic, Bohemia would remain in Habsburg hands for nearly three hundred years.

This defeat caused the destruction of Frederick V's holdings. Frederick V was outlawed from the Holy Roman Empire and his territories, the Rhenish Palatinate, were given to Catholic nobles. His title of elector of the Palatinate was given to his distant cousin Duke Maximilian of Bavaria. Frederick V, now landless, made himself a prominent exile abroad and tried to get support for his cause in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden.

This was also a serious blow to Protestant ambitions in the region. As the rebellion collapsed the widespread confiscations of property and suppression of the Bohemian nobility ensured that the country would return to the Catholic fold after more than two centuries of Hussite and other religious dissent. The Spanish, seeking to outflank the Dutch in preparation for the soon-to-be-renewed Eighty Years' War, took Frederick's lands, the Rhine Palatinate. The first phase of the war in Eastern Germany ended when Gabriel Bethlen of Transylvania signed the Peace of Nikolsburg with the Emperor on December 31, 1621 which gave the Transylvanians a number of territories in Royal Hungary.

Some historians regard the period from 1621–1625 as a separate phase of the Thirty Years' War, calling it the Palatinate phase. The catastrophic defeat of the Protestant army at White Mountain and the departure of Gabriel Bethlen meant that greater Bohemia was pacified. However, the war in the Palatinate consisted of much smaller battles that were mostly sieges while the Bohemian and Hungarian campaigns were much larger. Mannheim and Heidelberg fell in 1622, and Frankenthal in 1623. Finally, the Palatinate was in the hands of the Spanish.

Danish intervention
Period: 1625–1629

King Christian IV of Denmark. Grneral of the Lutheran army.

The Danish Period began when the Lutheran Christian IV of Denmark (1577–1648), King of Denmark, helped the Lutheran rulers of neighboring Lower Saxony by leading an army against the Holy Roman Empire. Denmark had feared that her sovereignty as a Protestant nation was being threatened. In 1621 Hamburg had been forced to accept Danish sovereignty and Christian's second son was made bishop of Bremen. As an administrator, Christian IV had done remarkably well. He had obtained for his kingdom a level of stability and wealth that was virtually unmatched elsewhere in Europe. The only country in Europe with a comparably strong financial position was, ironically, Bavaria. It also helped that the French First Minister Cardinal Richelieu, together with the English, had agreed that they would help subsidize the war. Christian had himself appointed war leader of the Lower Saxon Circle and raised a mercenary army of 20,000 men.

Catholic general Albrecht von Wallenstein.

To fight him off, Ferdinand II employed the military help of Albrecht von Wallenstein, a Bohemian nobleman who had made himself rich from the confiscated estates of his countrymen. Wallenstein pledged his army of between 30,000 and 100,000 soldiers to Ferdinand II in return for the right to plunder the captured territories. Wallenstein defeated Mansfeld's army at the Battle of Dessau Bridge (1626) and General Tilly defeated the Danes at the Battle of Lutter (1626). Mansfeld died some months later of illness, in Dalmatia, exhausted and ashamed that this one battle had cost him half his army.

Wallenstein's army marched north, occupying Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and ultimately Jutland itself. However, he was unable to take the Danish capital on the island of Zealand. Wallenstein was without a fleet and neither the Hanseatic ports nor the Poles would allow an Imperial fleet to be built in the Baltic.

1629 - This led to the Treaty of Lübeck in (1629). The Treaty stated that Christian IV would abandon his support for the Protestants so that he could keep control over Denmark. Thus, in the following two years more land was subjugated by the Catholic powers.

At this point, the war should have been over. However the Catholic League persuaded Ferdinand II to take back the Lutheran holdings that were, according to the Peace of Augsburg, rightfully the possession of the Catholic Church. These were two Archbishoprics, sixteen bishoprics, and hundreds of monasteries.

Swedish intervention

Gustavus II Adolphus at the Battle at Breitenfeld (1631) The death of King Gustavus II Adolphus on 6 November 1632 at the Battle of LützenPeriod: 1630–1635

Some within Ferdinand II's court believed that Wallenstein wanted to take control of the German Princes to gain influence over the Emperor. Ferdinand II dismissed Wallenstein in 1630, but recalled him when the Swedes, led by King Gustaf II Adolf (Gustavus Adolphus), attacked the Empire.

Gustavus Adolphus, like Christian IV before him, came to aid the German Lutherans, and to obtain economic influence in the German states around the Baltic Sea. In addition, Gustavus was concerned about the growing power of the Holy Roman Empire. Also like Christian IV, Gustavus Adolphus was subsidized by Richelieu, the Chief Minister of King Louis XIII of France, and by the Dutch. From 1630–1634, they drove the Catholic forces back and regained much of the occupied Protestant lands.

After he dismissed Albrecht von Wallenstein in 1630, Ferdinand II depended on the Catholic League. France and Bavaria signed the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau (1631), but this was nullified by Swedish attacks against Bavaria. At the Battle of Breitenfeld (1631), Gustavus Adolphus' forces defeated the Catholic League led by General Tilly. A year later, they met again, and this time General Tilly was killed (1632). The upper hand had now switched from the league to the union, led by Sweden.

With General Tilly dead, Ferdinand II turned to the aid of Wallenstein and his large army.

1632 - Wallenstein marched up to the south, threatening Gustavus Adolphus' supply chain. Gustavus Adolphus knew that Wallenstein was waiting for the attack and was prepared, but there was no other option. Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus clashed in the Battle of Lützen (1632), where the Swedes prevailed, but Gustavus Adolphus was killed. In 1634 the Protestant forces, minus the leadership of Gustavus Adolphus, were defeated at the First Battle of Nördlingen.

1634 - Wallenstein attempted to arbitrate the differences between the Catholic and Protestant sides. Ferdinand II may have feared that Wallenstein would switch sides and arranged for his arrest after removing him from command. One of Wallenstein's soldiers, Captain Devereux, killed Wallenstein as he attempted to contact the Swedes in the town hall of Eger (Cheb) (February 25, 1634).

After that, the two sides met for negotiations, and they ended the Swedish Period with the Peace of Prague (1635), which:

• Delayed enforcement of the Edict of Restitution for 40 years and allowed Protestant rulers to retain secularized bishoprics held by them in 1627. This protected the Lutheran rulers of northeastern Germany at the expense of those in the south and west (whose lands had been occupied by the Imperial or League armies well before 1627)
• United the army of the emperor and the armies of the German states into one army of the Holy Roman Empire (although Johann Georg of Saxony and Maximillian of Bavaria kept, as a practical matter, independent command of their forces, now nominally components of the "Imperial" army).
• Forbade German princes to have alliances between them or with foreign powers.
  Gave amnesty to any ruler who took up arms against the Emperor after the arrival of the Swedes in 1630.
• This treaty failed, however, to satisfy France, because of the renewed strength it granted the Habsburgs. France then launched the last period of the Thirty Years' War.
  

French intervention

Although a Catholic clergyman himself, Cardinal Richelieu allied France with the Protestants.

Catholic France was a rival of the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, and now entered the war on the Protestant side. Cardinal Richelieu, the Chief Minister of King Louis XIII of France, felt that the Habsburgs were still too powerful, since they held a number of territories on France's eastern border and had influence in the Netherlands.

Although a Catholic clergyman himself, Cardinal Richelieu allied France with the Protestants. The Imperial general Johann von Werth and Spanish commander Cardinal Ferdinand Habsburg ravaged the French provinces of Champagne and Burgundy and even threatened Paris in 1636 before being repulsed by Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. Bernhard's victory in the Battle of Compiegne pushed the Habsburg armies back towards the borders of France. Widespread fighting ensued, with neither side gaining an advantage. In 1642, Cardinal Richelieu died. A year later, Louis XIII died, leaving his five-year-old son Louis XIV on the throne. His chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, began to work for peace.

In 1645, the Swedish marshal Lennart Torstensson defeated the Imperial army at the Battle of Jankau near Prague, and Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé defeated the Bavarian army in the Second Battle of Nördlingen. The last talented commander of the Catholics, Count Franz von Mercy, died in the battle.

On March 14, 1647 Bavaria, Cologne, France and Sweden signed the Truce of Ulm.

The Battle of Lens, 1648

In 1648 the Swedes (commanded by Marshal Carl Gustaf Wrangel) and the French (led by Turenne and Conde) defeated the Imperial army at the Battle of Zusmarshausen and Lens. These results left only the Imperial territories of Austria safely in Habsburg hands.

The Peace of Westphalia 1648

French General Louis II de Bourbon, 4th Prince de Condé, Duc d'Enghien, The Great Condé defeated the Spanish at the Battle of Rocroi in 1643, which led to negotiations. At them were Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, the Swiss, the Swedes, the Portuguese and representatives of the Pope. The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 was the result.

Casualties and Disease

The devastation caused by the war has long been a subject of controversy among historians. Estimates of civilian casualties of up to thirty percent of the population of Germany are now treated with caution. The mortality rate was perhaps closer to 15 to 20 percent, with deaths due to armed conflict, famine and disease. Much of the destruction of civilian lives and property was caused by the cruelty and greed of mercenary soldiers. It is certain that the war caused serious dislocation to both the economy and population of central Europe, but may have done no more than seriously exacerbate changes that had begun earlier.

Pestilence of several kinds raged among combatants and civilians in Germany and surrounding lands from 1618 to 1648. Many features of the war spread disease. These included troop movements, the influx of soldiers from foreign countries, and the shifting locations of battle fronts. In addition, the displacement of civilian populations and the overcrowding of refugees into cities led to both disease and famine. Information about numerous epidemics is generally found in local chronicles, such as parish registers and tax records, that are often incomplete and may be exaggerated. The chronicles do show that epidemic disease was not a condition exclusive to war time, but was present in many parts of Germany for several decades prior to 1618.

However, when the Danish and imperial armies met in Saxony and Thuringia during 1625 and 1626, disease and infection in local communities increased. Local chronicles repeatedly referred to "head disease," "Hungarian disease," and a "spotted" disease identified as typhus. After the Mantuan War, between France and the Habsburgs in Italy, the northern half of the Italian peninsula was in the throes of a bubonic plague epidemic. During the unsuccessful siege of Nuremberg, in 1632, civilians and soldiers in both the Swedish and imperial armies succumbed to typhus and scurvy. Two years later, as the imperial army pursued the defeated Swedes into southwest Germany, deaths from epidemics were high along the Rhine River. Bubonic plague continued to be a factor in the war. Beginning in 1634, Dresden, Munich, and smaller German communities such as Oberammergau recorded large number of plague casualties. In the last decades of the war, both typhus and dysentery had become endemic in Germany.

As usual, however, it was the common man, the ordinary citizen that suffered the most.

Political Consequences

Germany was divided among many territories which significantly hampered the power of the Holy Roman Empire and decentralized German power. It has been speculated that this weakness was a long-term underlying cause of later militant German Romantic nationalism.

The Thirty Years' War rearranged the previous structure of power. Spain's military and declined visible. While Spain was preoccupied with fighting in France, Portugal acclaimed John IV of Braganza as king in 1640, and the House of Braganza became the new dynasty of Portugal. Meanwhile, Spain was finally forced to accept the independence of the Dutch Republic in 1648, ending the Eighty Years' War. With Spain weakening and Germany fractured and bled dry, France became the dominant power in Europe.

This defeat for Spain and imperial forces also marked the decline of Habsburg power and allowed the emergence of Bourbon dominance.

From 1643–45, during the last years of the Thirty Years' War, Sweden and Denmark fought in the Torstenson War. This helped establish post-war Sweden as a force in Europe.

The edicts agreed upon during the signing of the Peace of Westphalia were instrumental in laying the foundations for the basic tenets of the sovereign nation-state. The Peace of Westphalia changed the relationship of subjects to their rulers. In earlier times, people had tended to have overlapping political and religious loyalties. Now, it was agreed that the citizenry of a respective nation were subjected first and foremost to the laws and whims of their own respective government rather than to those of neighboring powers, be they religious or secular.

The war had a few other, more subtle consequences:

The Thirty Years' War marked the last major religious war in mainland Europe. There were still religious conflicts but no great wars.

The destruction caused by mercenary soldiers defied description. The war did much to end the age of mercenaries that had begun with the first landsknechts, and ushered in the age of well-disciplined national armies.

References
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