War in Germany, Lecture 2: The Thirty Years War

1. War in Germany, Lecture 2: The Thirty Years War

2. In 1639 the vicar of the Lutheran churches of Calw in Swabia took stock: Of his 1046 communicants in 1630 only 338 remained alive. In the last five years 518 had been killed. 5 of his closest friends, 33 other friends, 20 family members and 41 clerical colleagues. “I have to weep for them” he recorded in his autobiographical notes “because I remain here so impotent and alone. Out of my whole life I am left with scarcely 15 person alive with whom I can claim some trace of friendship.”

4. War began with Bohemian rebellion in 1618 and continued until Treaties of Westfalia (Osnabrück and Münster) in 1648 • The Thirty Years War as German tragedy 2. The Thirty Years War as a triumph of protestant modernity 3. The Thirty Years War as the product of and incubator of a violent and ambiguous modernity

5. The Holy Roman Empire: conferred on Charlemagne by Pope Leo in 800 Rudolf I first Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor 1273-1291

6. Germany is divided by reformation. Twice divided: Lutheranism and then Calvinism. Peace of Augsburg 1555  permits local sovereigns to dictate religion.

7. Habsburgs based in Vienna routinely elected Emperor Regional princes playing for position – Lutherans in Saxony and Catholics in Bavaria Calvinists in Palatinate with friends and connections in Netherlands and England, both of whom have been in violent conflict with Spanish

8. … balance is fragile: Catholic counter-reformation is menacing to protestants. Personified by the next Habsburg up as Holy Roman Emperor, the Future Ferdinand II who between 1617 and 1619 inherited the possessions of his childless cousin Matthias. Ferdinand was trained by Jesuits and had suppressed Protestants in his lands, using treaty of Augsburg provisions to the full.

9. Confessional balance was highly unstable in mixed areas  Defenestration at Prague 23 May 1618: Imperial ambassador tossed out of the window by indignant Bohemian protestants

11. The Calvinist axis of the early war Palatinate linked to Netherlands and Puritans in England Apart from trouble at the top (1) and rebellion from below (2), third factor in the mix is outside intervention.

12. Narrative 1 German civil war protracted and turned to national martyrdom by foreign Intervention Act 1: Calvinist Rebellion v. Catholic Habsburgs 1618-1622

13. Protestant rebels: Frederick V of Palatinate/Bohemia and his English wife Elizabeth Stuart are chosen to become new king and queen of rebel Bohemia Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly 1559-1632 zealous Jesuit-trained, monk in armor, victorious commander of Catholic League armies 1616-1632

14. 7-8 November 1620 Battle of White Mountain, near Prague – Pieter Snayers There were 11,000-foot soldiers, 10,000 cavalry, and 10 cannon on the Protestant side. The Imperial army numbered 23,000 in total with 12 cannons

15. Act 2: Danish Lutheran intervention 1625-1629 • Fiasco of the Bohemian-Palatinate Protestant rebellion  intervention by the Lutheran monarchy of Denmark. • Albrecht von Wallenstein (1583-1634): son of Bohemian protestant gentry  calls for Vienna to create its own massive imperial army to lead war rather than Tilly and the Catholic League. • 1625-1630 Catholic/Imperial forces invade Northern protestant Germany to drive the Danes out. •  But fear of Wallenstein’s personal ambition and shifting power balance in Holy Roman Empire towards Vienna  Wallenstein deposed following the meeting of the electors of the Holy Roman Empire in summer of 1630

16. Act 3 Gustavus Adolphus, the Protestant Savior Arrives in Pomerania June 1630

18. The Lion of the North at Breitenfeld, 17 Sep 1631 The largest and bloodiest battle of the war: 25,000 Swedes and 18300 Saxons v. Tilly’s Imperial and League army of 32,000  destruction of Tilly’s army

20. So desperate did the situation of the Catholic League and the Empire become that Wallenstein is recalled  hit and run campaign between Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein 1631-1632

21. 16 November 1632 Gustavus Adolphus killed in defeat at Battle of Lützen

23. The Swedes consolidated their position in Northern Germany. Wallenstein could not pay his armies.  he is in favor of peace before the French intervene. His independence is resented and talk of peace is seen as treason. 25 February 1634 Wallenstein former Imperial commander in chief assassinated.

24. 6 September 1634 Imperials win a great victory at Nördlingen tilting balance of power decisively P. MEULEN.. 1635 Capture of Swedish commander Gustav Horn at Nördlingen

25. Act 4 1636-1648 French intervention Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642):the architect of France‘s non-confessional, realist anti-Habsburg intervention in the Thirty Years War

26. Battle of Rocroi: French army finally prevails against Spanish army of the Netherlands 19 May 1643 – last stand for the famous Spanish spear formation the tercio

27. With Habsburg armies pressed on all sides, the war ends where it began the Swedish siege of Prague 1648

28. Germany is Europe’s victim = image entrenched particularly in 19th century historiography and deeply etched down to the 1930s. Gustav Freytag’s immensely popular 19th century history of Germany Günther Franz – Nazi Historian who updated statistical estimates of German losses

29. But it clearly isn’t a German drama only ‘Protestantism struggled for life alike in Germany and in New England … With the constitution of Plymouth, which was signed in Cape Cod habor, it triumphed in New England in the same month (November 1620) in which it was struck down on the White Mountain in Bohemia. … The day Winthrop sailed into Boston harbor (June 1630), Gustavus Adolphus was landing fifteen thousand men in Pomerania. The thoughts of Germany and of the new people in America ran together: one and the same element of life animated them all. The congregations of Massachusetts, too feeble to send succor to their European brethren, poured out their soul for them in prayer.’ George Bancroft, History of the United States (1876)

30. Narrative 2: Anti-Empire – the Thirty Years War as the Triumph of Protestant Pluralistic Modernity – China avoided

31. Unified “reconquered” catholic Spain One hundred years earlier Charles V hits the dynastic jackpot Holy Roman Empire

32. The price of all those dynastic lineages …. ? Or anti -Habsburg propaganda?

33. Charles V in his pomp, the universal monarch

35. Henry VIII of England submits to Charles V and Pope Leo He was married to Charles’s sister and Henry’s daughter Mary married his son Phillip.

36. “the Empire on which the sun never sets”

37. Countervailing tendency 1: Habsburgs v. France v. Ottomans 16th century

38. Enemies of Habsburg Empire: Francois I of France and Suleiman the Magnificient c. 1530

39. Countervailing tendency 2: Charles V and the Pope confront Martin Luther at Diet of Worms c. 4 pm 18 April 1521: “Here I stand for I can do no other”

40. Worms: another view Charles V “closely” following the “argument between monks”

41. Dutch revolt 1568-1648: centrifugal force 3 – capitalism Dutch naval power crushing Spanish galleys 1602 Dutch army of the 1580s is the first to give priority to firearms

42. “The Lion of the North” and champion of protestant modernity: Gustavus Adolphus at Breitenfeld September 1631 crushing the Jesuit Tilly

43. West Point Military History Museum’s rendition of Breitenfeld with commentary: “Some 300 years later, during the Thirty Years was, the Swedish King Gustavus Alolphus soundly defeated the Imperial Catholic Army commanded by Count Tilly at the Battle of Breitenfeld in 1631. Gustavus employed a modern combined arms approach to warfare, making greater use of mobile light artillery working in close support of swift-firing musketeers and hard-hitting cavalry columns. Against the more static, densely-packed masses of Tilly's pikemen and smaller number of musketeers, Gustavus' tactics proved highly successful.”

44. Empire = stagnation a la chinoise Pluralistic competition is the “killer app” of western civ It’s a secularized version of a story that once went like this …

45. Lineage of Protestant warrior heroes: William of Orange (1533-1584), Gustavus Adolphus (1594-1632), Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) paves the way for …

46. China und Ming 1388-1644 And Qing 1644-1912 dynasties became the image of long-run stagnation at high level of sophistication Source: Voigtländer, Nico, and Hans-Joachim Voth. "The three horsemen of riches: Plague, war, and urbanization in early modern Europe." Review of Economic Studies 80.2 (2012): 774-811. Economic historians will turn even spectacular mortality into a bonus!

47. Narrative 3 The Thirty Years War as the opening to a catastrophic modernity

48. Parker, Geoffrey. "Crisis and catastrophe: The global crisis of the seventeenth century reconsidered." The American Historical Review 113.4 (2008): 1053-1079.

49. Reformation and counterreformation ideological escalation Protestant propaganda massively exaggerates scale of Catholic threat in the early 1600s.  War starts as a clash between radicalized minorities. Crudely put crusading Calvinists and crusading Jesuits.

50. Ideological polarization is compounded by a media revolution: First newspaper was the dutch/protestant Nieuwe Tijdinghe appearing in 1605 in Antwerp