I Think I Am Finally Beginning to Understand the Thirty Years War
On one of the most notoriously complex wars in history
I think I am finally beginning to understand the Thirty Years War.
Even after teaching it for many years, the Thirty Years War is notoriously complex, both at a superficial level, and at a much deeper one. There are several levels of “good enough, but not really accurate” narratives about the war, and the deeper you go, the more each one starts to break down.
It doesn’t help that the Thirty Years War is a huge and foundational event in the formation of Modern Europe, which means that its legacy has been fought over and contested by each wave of historiography. Almost every historical school and ideological movement in the last four centuries has a narrative for the Thirty Years War, and making sense of them all is just as complicated and multifaceted as the original conflict.
Before the war, Germany was one of the richest and most developed regions of Europe, with an extraordinary medieval network of towns and trade networks that had grown up throughout the Middle Ages, and a convoluted constitutional system that defies explanation (then or now), but which actually worked better than is generally credited. But the Thirty Years War devastated large parts of the country so badly that, in German cultural memory, the 17th century is nearly as dark as the 20th.
It’s the war that tore Germany apart, and laid the seeds for later German national history, with all its accompanying baggage. But it also played a pivotal role in the nationalist histories of Germany, France, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands. For the Enlightenment, it was the war that delegitimized Christendom and allowed science and reason to supplant religion. American religious freedom, pluralism, and toleration, have long been contrasted with the devastation of Europe’s wars of religion.
For military historians, the Thirty Years War has been the war that crystallized the military revolution and the rise of the fiscal-military state. International Relations theorists still describe the modern world as Westphalian, referring to the Peace of Westphalia that ended the war and established a system of sovereign states as the default international order. Catholic and Protestant historiographies naturally championed their respective sides, and all the major figures of the war have long been cast as heroes or villains according to whoever held the pen. The history of the Thirty Years War has been fought over and contested almost as much as the war itself.
Stripping all that away, you can maybe say that the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) began as a civil war between Catholic Southern and Northern Protestant Germany, which then spilled out across Europe, becoming a great power conflict pulling in almost every major continental power. However, the initial confessional lines of the conflict quickly become muddied, and lose their salience. And then, so does everything else.
Even the basic “German civil war” frame breaks down once you recall that the Bohemians, who started the war by defenestrating imperial Catholic officials, were predominantly Czech instead of German. And that Bohemia wasn’t part of Germany, even though it was one of the most important electoral provinces in the Holy Roman Empire.
The famous middle period of the war involves the French Catholic Cardinal Richelieu subsidizing Gustavus Adolphus, the Lutheran king of Sweden, in his invasion of Germany against the Catholic Habsburgs in Austria. Even more confusingly, the final third of the war becomes more of a direct contest between Spain and France, but fought primarily along the Rhine, for control over the famous Spanish Road, which doesn’t run from Spain, but from Italy up to the Spanish Netherlands, which is actually modern Belgium.
The Peace of Westphalia didn’t just end the Thirty Years War. It also ended the 80 Years War, which was Spain’s attempt to regain the Netherlands from the Dutch. Because the richest and mightiest empire in Europe, which dug literal mountains of gold and silver up out of the ground in the New World, exhausted itself financially and declared bankruptcy multiple times while trying and failing to reconquer a tiny waterlogged nation of freebooters, merchants, and Calvinists, who happened to invent many of the major modern tools of central banking and debt-financing. Good Dutch debt defeated bad Spanish debt.
As you go down another level, the war becomes even more confusing. The French supported Gustavus Adolphus in Sweden against the Austrian Habsburgs, but not against Maximilian of Bavaria, who was Catholic and fielded the best imperial army in Germany, but who also secretly wanted to be allies with France and wanted the Spanish Habsburgs out of Germany, but who also needed Austrian Habsburg backing to become one of the seven electors of the Empire. Despite being one of the most important and wealthy provinces in Germany (Ferdinand of Austria owed Maximilian over 15 million florins at one point), Bavaria was not originally an electoral province, while Bohemia was.
Then there was John George, Elector of Saxony, who was Lutheran, but feared the Calvinists even more than the Catholics. John George initially supported the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II in Bohemia against the Calvinists, before allying with the Swedish Lutherans against the Habsburgs, only to regret his decision, all while vainly attempting to uphold something called “the party of the German Liberties,” which, the more you read about it, sounds like a very real German constitutional tradition that could, in another timeline, have rivaled Magna Carta. But it didn’t. Instead, modern Germany was hammered into shape by Prussia, Napoleon, and Destruction. Or maybe it was hammered out of shape.
There is also an entire period of the war known as the Danish Intervention, which featured the King of Denmark invading Germany on behalf of the Protestants, only to lose twice. This makes the Danish role seem like a footnote in the conflict to modern audiences, yet the Danes at the start of the war were seen as one of the great powers of Europe, and King Christian IV of Denmark remains one of Denmark’s most famous and popular sovereigns down to this day.
Also, the war which was ostensibly the greatest and last of the Catholic vs. Protestant wars of religion featured the Papacy refusing to fully back the Habsburgs and Jesuits, and choosing instead to scrape the Habsburgs and French against each other in order to maintain Papal independence and autonomy. Meanwhile, the Habsburgs and the Jesuits represented the heights of the Counter-Reformation’s attempt to reform Catholicism and roll back Protestantism, which they achieved in Bohemia and Austria, leading to one of the most successful re-Catholicization programs anywhere.
The Papacy wasn’t the only power playing both sides. Across the channel, James I of England (James VI when he was in Scotland) married his daughter Elizabeth to Frederick V of the Palatinate and diplomatically supported the Protestant cause, but also pursued the “Spanish Match” for his son Charles, courting an alliance with the Habsburgs that ultimately failed. In perhaps an early version of having no friends or enemies, but only interests, England was willing to simultaneously support the Protestants in Germany, while at the same time balancing the Spanish against the Dutch, who were fast becoming commercial rivals with London. All of this happened within living memory of England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada, and would go on to be within living memory of the Glorious Revolution, in which the English invited in a Dutch king. During the Thirty Years War itself, English and Scottish mercenaries were heavily represented in Protestant and Swedish armies, taking military lessons back to England just in time for the English Civil War. English Puritans would succeed in regicide where German Calvinists had failed.
If you want a further bizarre irony that seems to crown the absurdity of the whole conflict, one of the final sticking points that took the longest to solve at the Peace of Westphalia was the problem of raising enough money by all parties in order to demobilize the massive armies that had ravaged central Europe for a generation. This was one of Sweden’s biggest demands at the conference: getting the Catholic parties to agree to pay Sweden to demobilize its own army in Germany, because the Swedes couldn’t pay for it themselves. This was a real problem, because 17th century armies were notoriously underpaid and poorly supplied, and constantly resorted to looting and plundering the civilian populace and threatening mutiny against their own officers in the face of chronic pay arrears. The Thirty Years War ended with the armies that every major dynasty had assembled at great cost and destruction, needing to be bought off by their own erstwhile masters. The bill came due.
And the butcher’s bill was enormous. In keeping with the horrific nature of the war, the cost was most steeply paid by the civilian populace, and not the armies or rulers which orchestrated and then lost control of the conflict. By later standards, decisive battles and sieges were comparatively rare given the scale of misery. Instead, year after year saw widespread devastation as armies passed over and through central Europe, repeatedly plundering enemy (and friendly) territories. Armies often moved simply because they had exhausted a locale and needed to keep feeding themselves upon the life of the countryside elsewhere. Several years saw bad weather and poor harvests, and many good harvests trampled and cut down by passing troops, who spent far more of their time foraging, scrounging, and pillaging than they did actually fighting. When they weren’t mutinying against their officers for lack of food and pay.
Some of the worst atrocities you will ever read about happened during the Thirty Years War, mostly directed at peasants and townsfolk suspected of hiding food and valuables (such as their daughters). In their wake, the soldiers brought starvation and disease, leading to (contested) reports of cannibalism, as well as wave after wave of bubonic plague. In the aftermath of the war, no estimate of the death toll was too high, leading 18th and 19th century accounts to claim that the population of Germany dropped by over half. Modern estimates are closer to a quarter or third.
Armies on the move started, as in the late Roman Empire, to resemble miniature communities unto themselves. Women were forcibly (or voluntarily) taken as camp followers, and their children, along with ever-present orphans, were raised in the ranks. At the onset of peace, soldiers complained of knowing no other life to return to. Continuing the upside-down nature of the conflict, it was plausible for some late-war armies to have more women and children in them than soldiers, and camp followers could be just as ruthless in extorting and torturing peasants.
Soldiers increasingly became a social class unto themselves, distinguished not by allegiance, confession, or even nationality. Gustavus Adolphus’ famous proto-national Swedish army was, for the latter half of the war, composed mostly of German mercenaries. Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar’s “Bernhardine” army of Germans fought for the Swedes and then the French. Protestants and Catholics could be found in all armies, as generals couldn’t afford to be picky. Surrendering soldiers frequently switched sides and enlisted alongside their captors, who couldn’t afford to imprison them even if they didn’t need the manpower.
Even the old neat and tidy teleological arguments about “inevitable” developments in war start to fall away. Musket volleys and linear tactics are remembered as superior innovations on the road to modern professional armies, and yet a major driver in the Dutch and Swedish innovations in tactics came from necessity, and classical Roman authors such as Vegetius. Throughout the war, generals still prized and paid their pikemen well, who were seen as the most disciplined and veteran units. The Thirty Years War supposedly sounded the death knell of the Spanish tercio as a lumbering old behemoth past its prime, just like the Spanish Empire. Yet throughout the war, Spanish armies were highly feared, and even at Rocroi, where Spanish military glory finally broke, the tercios were not tactically defeated, but fought on while the rest of their army died around them.
At least all can agree that, by the 1600s, the days of the old medieval armored knight were long gone. Except they weren’t, as cavalry units still heavily recruited from the nobility fancied themselves the decisive arm, and the heaviest cavalry rode into battle wearing the final evolution of articulated plate armor. Of course, even the heavy cuirassiers and reiters now carried pistols. One of the strangest true anachronisms in history is that for the last 150 years of their existence, “knights in shining armor” fought with guns. Meanwhile, in Poland, some of the deadliest lancers in history were still a half-century away from the greatest cavalry charge of all time.
The longer you stare at it, the more the Thirty Years War becomes a roiling cauldron that bubbled over and melted down almost everything it touched, even as it also simultaneously helped build the modern nation-state, international law and politics, and laid the foundations for the Enlightenment. Much of the 18th century’s obsession with reason and science was already prevalent in the elaborate theories of order and discipline needed to form armies, build geometric fortifications, and bureaucratize state administration in the 17th.
However, burgeoning rationalism simultaneously coexisted with a fervent belief in the divine and supernatural, contrary to what later philosophes might claim about “medieval superstition.” The 17th century was also an age of astrology, witchcraft trials, and biblical prophecy. Many of the Protestant figures around Frederick V of the Palatinate, who accepted the Bohemian crown, believed that the defeat of the Habsburgs was foretold in the Book of Daniel. After Frederick’s defeat, Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion King of the North, became the biblically-foretold champion. Meanwhile, the Habsburg court of Rudolf II was by no means the only European court where astronomy and astrology were both consulted. Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler both used horoscopes, and Newton himself had a background in alchemy. Wallenstein, the famous mercenary general who became so indispensable to the Habsburgs that they finally had no other choice but to kill him, was both a master organizer and logistician, as well as a supremely credulous believer in astrology. It turns out that a deep faith in a cosmic order, hierarchy, and the supernatural, is actually much closer to 18th century deism and faith in triumphant rationalism than the Enlightenment cared to admit. Across the Atlantic, Harvard Fellow Cotton Mather sincerely believed that his investigation of witchcraft at Salem would yield empirical (scientific) findings about demonic powers.
Cynics might congratulate themselves in seeing through religious piety and spiritualism as an opiate for the masses while hard-nosed kings and ministers played realpolitik, but it was actually the armies of all sides that lost first their confessional identities, and then (contrary to 19th century nationalist historiographies) even their national ones. Meanwhile, the private records and lives of almost all the major political leaders of the Thirty Years War show extraordinary levels of personal piety and spiritual zeal. Ferdinand II of Austria heard two masses every morning, and frequently woke in the middle of the night to pray by his bedside. Maximilian of Bavaria founded the Catholic League, bankrolled the imperial cause, and dedicated himself to the Virgin Mary in a vow written in his own blood. John George of Saxony was usually drunk, but he was always a devout Lutheran. Frederick V was a faithful Calvinist, and his advisor Christian of Anhalt (who was only just bright enough to be catastrophic to his own cause) fervently believed in the millennial end-times prophecies which aligned the Habsburgs with the Book of Revelation. Gustavus Adolphus’ utterly reckless bravery was motivated by his ironclad faith that he was an instrument of God’s will. Even the arch-machiavellian Richelieu had an intense personal devotion, and seems to have been genuinely convinced that separate kingdoms were part of the divinely appointed cosmic order, which meant that France had a role to play in checking Habsburg universalism. Somehow, Richelieu seems at the same time to both hearken back to Augustine’s vision of politics in City of God, and forward to the modern world of nation-states and national interest.
The more you stare at the Thirty Years War, the more human it seems in its ability to reflect back human frailty and myopia, and inhuman in the horrors and misery it produced. Like a fire, the Thirty Years War consumed everything it touched, and like a fire, it is easy to lose yourself in contemplation as you stare at it. Narratives and interpretations flicker in the light, constantly changing and going up in smoke. It is the end of the Middle Ages, even after the Middle Ages were supposedly over, and the beginning of the Modern world, before the Modern world supposedly came into being.
I think I still don’t understand the Thirty Years War.
Excellent article! And you are right, the Thirty Years' War is a complex and difficult to untangle subject. I learned about it from what was in my time considered the classic history of it, C.V. Wedgwood's *The Thirty Years War*.
Additional fun fact, which I consider one of the more hilarious moments in history: the Papal comment on the Peace of Westphalia. In *Zelo Domus Dei*, Pope Innocent X described it as "null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time."
...But how did you *really* feel, Innocent ?!? :-)
Modern politics began when Catholic France realized it wasn't prudent to let Catholic Austria win.
“The most important result of the Thirty Years War was it taught Europeans never to try it again.” -- van Loon, The Story of Mankind