Thirty Years' War

• 1. A Village Ledger

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  The Thirty Years' War, fought mainly in Central Europe between 1618 and 1648, left some of its starkest evidence in a single Swedish parish record. Between 1621 and 1639, 230 men were conscripted from the village of Bygdeå. Of those men, 215 are recorded as dead or missing. Another five came home crippled.

  Bygdeå lay far from the German battlefields, yet its ledger shows how far the war reached. Behind it stood a struggle that pulled in Habsburg emperors, French cardinals, Swedish and Danish kings, and the Dutch Republic.

  How did a quarrel over who should wear one kingdom's crown grow into a contest across a whole continent? Why did armies on every side spend so much effort searching for food and money? And what kind of Europe was left when the soldiers finally went home?

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• 2. A Fractured Empire

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  The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 tried to settle the religious quarrel inside the Holy Roman Empire with a simple rule. Cuius regio, eius religio meant that a ruler's faith decided the faith of his state. Each state was classed as either Catholic or Lutheran, then the most common form of Protestantism. The deal also protected large religious minorities in cities such as Donauwörth. It confirmed Lutheran ownership of church property taken since 1552, the year the Peace of Passau had ended open fighting.

  The settlement had a gap. Calvinism, a Protestant doctrine that Lutherans and Catholics both regarded with hostility, spread into Catholic areas after 1555 and fell outside the bargain. Augsburg also handed individual rulers more independence, so larger states chased goals that clashed with the emperor or with foreign powers. Faith was not always the point. Protestant Saxony and Brandenburg competed with Denmark-Norway and Sweden over the profitable Baltic trade.

  The Empire contained 300 imperial estates, scattered across Germany, the Low Countries, northern Italy and present-day France. They ranged from the seven prince-electors who voted for the emperor down to prince-bishoprics and imperial cities such as Hamburg. Each estate also belonged to an Imperial Circle, a regional grouping chiefly concerned with defence that acted on its own. Above them sat the Imperial Diet, which met rarely and mostly talked rather than passed laws.

  Since 1440, the emperor had come from the House of Habsburg, the largest single landowner in the Empire. Their own subjects numbered eight million, in lands including Austria, Bohemia and Hungary. The family also ruled the Spanish Empire until 1556, when Charles V divided his possessions among different branches. Marriages kept the branches close, and Spain still held imperial territory in the Spanish Netherlands, Milan and Franche-Comté.

  Yet the two courts rarely planned together. Spain was a maritime superpower stretching from Europe to the Philippines and the Americas. Austria was a land power, focused on Germany and on guarding its eastern border against the Ottoman Empire. Spain sent large subsidies to Vienna, and when those stopped after 1640, the imperial side was badly weakened.

  Before the Reformation, a shared faith had partly covered for weak imperial institutions. After 1556, Lutheran Saxony and Catholic Bavaria used the rising tension to build up their own power. France looked at Habsburg lands on its borders to the north, south and along the Pyrenees. Because some foreign rulers also held imperial titles, quarrels inside the Empire could drag them in. Christian IV of Denmark joined the war in 1625 for exactly that reason, as Duke of Holstein-Gottorp.

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• 3. Defenestration in Prague

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  In 1606, riots broke out in Donauwörth in an episode called the Battle of the Flags. The Lutheran majority had blocked a Catholic religious procession. Emperor Rudolf approved intervention by Maximilian of Bavaria, who was allowed to annex the town. Following the Augsburg rule, its official religion changed from Lutheran to Catholic.

  When the Imperial Diet opened in February 1608, Lutherans and Calvinists both asked for the Augsburg settlement to be confirmed again. Archduke Ferdinand, the Habsburg heir, answered by demanding that all church property taken since 1555 be returned at once, rather than judged case by case. The demand threatened every Protestant, froze the Diet, and destroyed any belief that the emperor was neutral. Towns and rulers began strengthening fortifications and armies, and foreign travellers remarked on the militarisation of Germany. That same year Frederick IV, Elector Palatine, formed the Protestant Union. Maximilian answered with the Catholic League in July 1609.

  Spain had a separate worry in 1609, when the Twelve Years' Truce paused its Eighty Years' War against the Dutch Republic. Ambrosio Spinola, commander in the Spanish Netherlands, wanted to secure the Spanish Road before fighting resumed. This overland route linked Habsburg possessions in Italy to Flanders, so troops and supplies could avoid seas where the Dutch navy ruled. By 1618, the one stretch outside Spanish control ran through the Electoral Palatinate.

  In July 1617, Philip III of Spain agreed to back Ferdinand as king of Bohemia and Hungary, since Emperor Matthias had no surviving children. Ferdinand paid with concessions in northern Italy and Alsace, and with a promise to support Spain against the Dutch. Bohemia's mostly Protestant nobility distrusted him. When he took over Styria in 1595, he had wiped out Protestantism there in less than 18 months, in a region that had been a Reformation stronghold.

  In May 1618, Protestant nobles led by Count Thurn met two of Ferdinand's Catholic representatives, Vilem Slavata and Jaroslav Borzita, in Prague Castle. Both men were thrown out of the windows, along with their secretary Filip Fabricius. All three survived. The incident became known as the Third Defenestration of Prague. Thurn then set up a Protestant-dominated government, and unrest spread into Silesia and into Lower and Upper Austria.

  Emperor Matthias died in March 1619. On the 19th of August, the Bohemian Estates cancelled Ferdinand's 1617 election and, a week later, offered the crown to Frederick V, the Calvinist Elector Palatine. Frederick had married Elizabeth, daughter of James I of England, in 1613. On the 28th of August, Ferdinand was elected Holy Roman Emperor. Most of Frederick's advisers urged him to refuse, as did the Duke of Savoy and James himself. Christian of Anhalt urged acceptance, and so did Maurice of Orange, who saw a German war as a way to divert Spanish resources from the Netherlands.

  Frederick entered Prague in October 1619, but his support drained away. In July 1620, the Protestant Union declared its neutrality. John George of Saxony backed Ferdinand in return for Lusatia and a guarantee of Lutheran rights in Bohemia. Maximilian funded an army under Count Tilly and the Count de Bucquoy. After the Battle of White Mountain in November 1620, the Bohemian army disintegrated and Frederick fled.

  Losing Bohemia did not end Frederick's troubles. At the Diet of February 1623, Ferdinand forced through the transfer of Frederick's titles, lands and electoral vote to Maximilian. Sir Horace Vere's small English garrison surrendered Frankenthal in March, and Tilly's victory over Christian of Brunswick at Stadtlohn in August finished the campaign. Frederick spent the rest of his life in The Hague, where he died in November 1632. In the north, the Lutheran John George of Saxony and the Calvinist George William of Brandenburg were now finding common cause.

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• 4. Hired Armies in the North

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  In early 1625, Tilly returned church properties at Halberstadt that had been Protestant since 1566. Protestant rulers saw proof that Ferdinand meant to reclaim former Catholic bishoprics. Christian IV of Denmark had his own stakes. His economy relied on the Baltic trade and on tolls from shipping through the Øresund. In 1621, Hamburg accepted Danish supervision, and his son Frederick became joint administrator of Lübeck, Bremen and Verden. That gave Denmark control of the Elbe and Weser rivers. In May 1625, the Lower Saxon Circle elected Christian its military commander.

  Ferdinand answered with a general who raised his own forces. Albrecht von Wallenstein had already been paid for backing Ferdinand against Frederick with estates confiscated from Bohemian rebels. Now he was contracted to conquer the north on the same terms. On the other side, the Treaty of The Hague in December 1625 committed the Dutch and English to finance the Danes. Few of those subsidies were ever paid.

  Christian's three-part campaign plan fell apart within months. Mansfeld was beaten at Dessau Bridge in April 1626. Christian of Brunswick retreated to Wolfenbüttel and died of disease soon after. In August, the Danes were comprehensively beaten at Lutter. Charles I of England allowed up to 9,000 Scottish mercenaries to be recruited, but they arrived slowly and could not stop Wallenstein. By the end of 1627, he held Mecklenburg, Pomerania and Jutland, and was planning a fleet to challenge Danish control of the Baltic.

  On the 13th of May 1628, Wallenstein's deputy von Arnim besieged Stralsund, the only port with facilities large enough to build that fleet. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden sent several thousand Scots under Alexander Leslie, who was also made governor. Von Arnim abandoned the siege on the 4th of August. After another defeat at Wolgast, Christian began talks with Wallenstein, who was wary of Swedish intervention and eager for peace. The Treaty of Lübeck in June 1629 let Denmark keep Schleswig and Holstein, which it held until 1864. In return it gave up Bremen and Verden and dropped its support for the German Protestants. Denmark's time as a major Baltic power was effectively over.

  The methods behind that victory explain why peace did not follow. Ferdinand was short of money, so Wallenstein demanded ransoms from towns while his men plundered allies and enemies alike. In early 1628, Ferdinand deposed the hereditary Duke of Mecklenburg and installed Wallenstein, which united German princes of every faith in opposition. Then, in March 1629, he issued the Edict of Restitution. It ordered the return of all lands taken from the Catholic Church after 1555. That would have redrawn nearly every state boundary in north and central Germany, and denied that Calvinism existed. Ferdinand chose an imperial edict, once more claiming the right to change law without consultation.

  Gustavus landed in Pomerania in June 1630 with nearly 18,000 troops. From 1626 to 1629 he had fought Poland-Lithuania, ruled by his Catholic cousin Sigismund, and Richelieu helped arrange the Truce of Altmark in September 1629 to free him. Gustavus wanted to support fellow Protestants and also to widen his share of the Baltic trade that supplied much of Sweden's income. German backing was thin. By the end of 1630, his only new ally was Christian William, Administrator of Magdeburg, whose city Tilly was besieging.

  The Sack of Magdeburg in May 1631 warned other princes what imperial victory could mean. In the 1631 Treaty of Bärwalde, Richelieu agreed to fund Sweden and several smaller states. The payments came to 400,000 Reichstaler a year, or one million livres, enough to support 36,000 Swedish troops. With that army Gustavus won at Breitenfeld in September 1631 and at Rain in April 1632, where Tilly was killed.

  In late August 1632, Wallenstein sat at Fürth across the Swedish supply lines to the Baltic. A failed Swedish assault on his camp at the Alte Veste was bloodily repulsed, arguably the greatest blunder of Gustavus in Germany. Two months later the armies met at Lützen. Both sides took heavy casualties, and some Swedish units lost over 60% of their men. Gustavus was killed. Wallenstein retreated at dusk, abandoning his artillery and wounded. Most commentators call it a Swedish victory, though the result is still disputed.

  Wallenstein's own fall came next. After a Bavarian army was defeated at Oldendorf in July 1633, critics blamed his failure to support it, and rumours spread that he planned to switch sides. Ferdinand II ordered his arrest in February 1634, and his own officers assassinated him in Cheb. Without Wallenstein and his organisation, the emperor depended on Spain, whose chief concern was reopening the Spanish Road.

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• 5. France Takes Over

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  On the 2nd of September 1634, at Donauwörth, 15,000 imperial troops met an army of 18,000 raised in Italy. Its leader was Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria, the new Governor of the Spanish Netherlands. Four days later, the combined force defeated Horn and Bernard at Nördlingen. Sweden lost control of southern Germany.

  The defeat widened the war instead of ending it. Richelieu gave the Swedes new subsidies, hired Bernard of Saxe-Weimar's mercenaries for a Rhineland offensive, and in May 1635 began the Franco-Spanish War. A few days later, the German states and Ferdinand agreed the Peace of Prague. In exchange for withdrawing the Edict of Restitution, the Heilbronn and Catholic Leagues dissolved their forces in favour of a single imperial army. Saxony and Bavaria still kept control of their own troops. From this point the war was no longer chiefly a German religious conflict.

  France's own start was rough. Its invasion of the Spanish Netherlands in May 1635 collapsed with the loss of 17,000 men. In March 1636, France joined the Thirty Years' War as an ally of Sweden. The Spanish invaded northern France and caused panic in Paris before shortages forced them to retreat.

  Ferdinand II died in February 1637, and his son Ferdinand III inherited a precarious position. In December 1638, Bernard captured Breisach, which cut the Spanish Road. Madrid had to supply its armies in Flanders by sea, and in October 1639 the Dutch fleet under Maarten Tromp beat the Spanish at the Downs.

  Madrid's troubles multiplied in 1640. Tax increases to pay for the war set off revolts in Portugal and Catalonia, both backed by France. In January 1641, Catalan rebels proclaimed a republic. On the 26th, a French-Catalan force routed a larger Spanish army at Montjuïc and secured Barcelona. France's capture of Perpignan and Roussillon set the present Franco-Spanish border in the Pyrenees. The Catalan revolt ended in 1651, when Madrid recaptured Barcelona.

  Northern Italy mattered because it held long sections of the Spanish Road. When the Duke of Mantua died in December 1627, France and Spain backed rival claimants in the War of the Mantuan Succession. Pope Urban VIII feared Habsburg expansion in Italy, and his opposition split the Catholic powers. That made it acceptable for France to use Protestant allies against Austria. Then plague struck. Between 1629 and 1631, over 60,000 people died in Milan and 46,000 in Venice. The 1639 Siege of Turin became one of the most famous military events of the 17th century, because at one stage three different armies were besieging each other.

  Richelieu died in December 1642, and Louis XIII followed in May 1643, leaving the five-year-old Louis XIV as king. Cardinal Mazarin carried on Richelieu's policies. On the 19th of May 1643, Condé decisively beat the Army of Flanders at Rocroi. That ended any hope of reopening the Spanish Road, and Madrid finally accepted Dutch independence. Yet in November the Bavarian general Franz von Mercy shattered the French army in Germany at Tuttlingen.

  The war's last great plunder came in Prague. In July 1648, a Swedish force under von Königsmarck seized Prague Castle and the Malá Strana district. Their main aim was loot. They failed to take the Old Town, but carried off treasures including the Codex Gigas, which can now be seen in Stockholm.

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• 6. The Westphalian Settlement

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  A total of 109 delegations attended the talks at one time or another, split between the Westphalian towns of Münster and Osnabrück. Negotiations began in 1642. After the Swedes rejected Christian of Denmark as mediator, the delegates settled on the Papal Legate Fabio Chigi and the Venetian envoy Alvise Contarini. The final settlement consisted of three agreements: the Peace of Münster between Spain and the Dutch Republic, the Treaty of Osnabrück between the Empire and Sweden, and the Treaty of Münster between the Empire and France.

  The first to be signed, on the 30th of January 1648, was the Peace of Münster. It confirmed Dutch independence from Spain, although the Republic was not officially recognised as outside the Empire until 1728. The Dutch also won a monopoly over trade through the Scheldt estuary, which secured the commercial rise of Amsterdam. Antwerp, capital of the Spanish Netherlands and once the most important port in northern Europe, did not recover economically until the late 19th century.

  The treaties with France and Sweden first needed approval from Ferdinand and the Imperial Estates, and states such as Saxony and Bavaria wanted very different outcomes. Ferdinand delayed, hoping his military position would improve. A Spanish defeat at Lens in August 1648 ended that hope, and on the 24th of October he signed. One view holds that the terms were a major turning point in German and European legal history, because they changed the constitution and religious order of the Empire itself.

  Article 5 reconfirmed the Augsburg settlement, set 1624 as the Normaljahr for deciding a state's dominant religion, and guaranteed freedom of worship for religious minorities. Article 7 recognised Calvinism as a Reformed faith. It also removed the ius reformandi, the rule that subjects must follow a ruler who changed religion. These terms did not apply to Habsburg hereditary lands such as Lower and Upper Austria.

  The territorial changes were large. Brandenburg-Prussia received Farther Pomerania and the bishoprics of Magdeburg, Halberstadt, Kammin and Minden. Frederick's son Charles Louis regained the Lower Palatinate and became the eighth imperial elector, while Bavaria kept the Upper Palatinate and its electoral vote. France formally received the Three Bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun, which it had occupied since 1552, plus the Décapole cities of Alsace except Strasbourg and Mulhouse. Sweden received five million thalers, Swedish Pomerania, and the Prince-bishoprics of Bremen and Verden, which gave it a seat in the Imperial Diet.

  Pope Innocent X denounced the terms, since he considered the bishoprics given to France and Brandenburg to be Church property that only he could assign. Many exiles were disappointed too, because Catholicism was accepted as the dominant religion in Bohemia and Upper and Lower Austria, all Protestant strongholds before 1618. Fighting did not stop at once. Demobilising over 200,000 soldiers took time, and the last Swedish garrison left Germany in 1654. Mazarin kept the Burgundian Circle out of the Treaty of Münster, so France could keep fighting Spain until the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees.

  The winners and losers took different paths. The Habsburgs failed to turn the Empire into a centralised state like Spain, and over the next 50 years Bavaria, Brandenburg-Prussia, Saxony and others increasingly followed their own policies. Yet Habsburg lands suffered less than many others, and with Bohemia added and Catholicism restored they formed a more coherent bloc. Sweden's gains proved short-lived, because its German territories remained part of the Empire and set it against Brandenburg-Prussia and Saxony. Much of Pomerania passed to Prussia in 1679 and 1720, and the rest remained Swedish until 1815. France gained most. By 1648, Richelieu had separated the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs, pushed the French frontier into the Empire, and ended Spanish military supremacy in northern Europe.

  The peace also changed how people were governed. Many subjects had held several political and religious loyalties. After 1648 they were understood to owe obedience first to their own state, which made it easier to raise national forces. After Wallenstein and the Swedish invasion, German states wanted permanent armies of their own, and German society became far more militarised. It has been argued that the settlement created the principle of Westphalian sovereignty, meaning non-interference in domestic affairs, though that claim has since been challenged. Religion remained divisive, but this is arguably the last major European war driven mainly by it. Later religious clashes, such as the Camisards revolt in southern France, were internal, and others, like the 1712 Toggenburg War, were minor. The congress model of negotiation was reused at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1668, Nijmegen in 1678 and Ryswick in 1697.

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• 7. Counting the Dead

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  Estimates of total deaths in the Thirty Years' War range from 4.5 million to 8 million. Most occurred after 1630, when Sweden entered the war, and the great majority were civilians. The war belongs to what historians call the General Crisis of the mid-17th century, which also struck places from Ming China to the British Isles and Tsarist Russia. Older claims of 12 million dead from a population of 18 million are no longer considered realistic. Nineteenth-century German nationalists often exaggerated the toll to show the dangers of a divided Germany. Even so, historians agree that the war was a man-made mortality disaster unlike anything Europe had seen.

  Historian Peter Wilson puts those killed or wounded in action at around 450,000. Disease raised that figure by a factor of two to three, giving total military casualties of 1.3 to 1.8 million. Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin offers 2,071,000 military deaths, though his method is disputed. Most battles involved armies of 13,000 to 20,000 men a side. Combatants in Germany averaged 80,000 to 100,000 from 1618 to 1626, peaked at 250,000 in 1632, and fell below 160,000 by 1648.

  Local returns show that only 3% of civilian deaths came from military action. Bubonic plague caused 64%, starvation 12%, dysentery 5% and typhus 4%. Poor harvests through the 1630s and repeated plundering of the same areas brought famine. Reports describe people eating grass, too weak to accept alms, or turning to cannibalism. Foreign soldiers, shifting fronts and rural families crowding into cities all sped the spread of disease. Soldiers moved out of Germany allegedly sparked the Italian plague of 1629-1631, described as the worst mortality crisis to affect Italy in the early modern period. It killed some 280,000 people, with estimates as high as a million.

  The German areas of the Empire lost roughly 40% of their people, falling from between 18 and 20 million in 1600 to between 11 and 13 million in 1650. They did not regain pre-war levels until 1750. Nearly half of those losses came in Sweden's first intervention, from 1630 to 1635. The Czech lands fell 27%, from about 2.95 million to 2.15 million. In 1940, historian Günther Franz concluded that about 40% of the rural civilian population and 33% of the urban became casualties. His figure counts total demographic loss, which includes permanent migration and lower birthrates as well as deaths. Regions differed widely. Northwest Germany lost very little, while Mecklenburg, Pomerania and Württemberg fell by nearly 50%. From 1620 to 1650, Munich shrank from 22,000 to 17,000 people and Augsburg from 48,000 to 21,000.

  In the winter of 1638, wolves overran Bavaria, and the following spring packs of wild pigs destroyed its crops. Rodents multiplied and worsened the food shortages. With local government collapsed, landless peasants banded together against soldiers of both sides, and rebellions broke out in Upper Austria, Bavaria and Brandenburg.

  Contemporaries spoke of a frenzy of despair, and religious authorities blamed divine punishment. The search for a supernatural cause fed witch-hunts that began in Franconia in 1626. They started in the Bishopric of Würzburg, where Bishop von Ehrenberg, a devout Catholic, wanted to assert church authority. By his death in 1631, over 900 people had been executed. The Bamberg witch trials, held from 1626 to 1631, claimed over one thousand lives. In 1629, 274 people died in the Eichstätt trials, and another 50 in neighbouring Palatinate-Neuburg. Many trials took place in areas the war barely touched, so the link to the fighting is debatable. Ferdinand feared the brutality would discredit the Counter-Reformation, and active persecution largely ended by 1630.

  The financial damage is harder to read. Towns sometimes overstated their losses to avoid taxes, and some upper estimates of material loss exceed prewar tax records. The war caused short-term disruption, especially from 1618 to 1623, but it seems to have sped up existing shifts in trade without reversing larger trends. For survivors, one study found that wages in Germany rose by 40% in real terms between 1603 and 1652.

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• 8. Armies and Memory

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  In the 1590s, Maurice of Orange moved infantry from massed columns into lines to increase firepower. Gustavus Adolphus cut Maurice's ten ranks to six and increased the share of musketeers against pikemen. He also gave each unit quick-firing light artillery on both flanks. Breitenfeld was the clearest demonstration. Whether tactics or technology drove these changes, which belong to the so-called Military Revolution, is still debated.

  Lines were harder to coordinate. The supposedly obsolete Spanish tercios exposed that weakness when they beat the Swedes in 1634. Lines also lacked the punch of columns, so Gustavus demanded aggressive cavalry and often used Finnish Hakkapeliitta as shock troops. Even the Swedes used columns at times, as in the failed assault at the Alte Veste. The debate between line and column lasted into the early 19th century, and both appeared in the Napoleonic Wars.

  Such tactics needed professional soldiers who could hold formation, reload and fire disciplined volleys under attack. Manuals described thirty-two movements for pikemen and forty-two for musketeers. In theory, training took up to six months, but many men fought with far less. More responsibility fell on junior officers, and one of the first military schools to produce them opened at Siegen in 1616.

  Strategy did not keep pace. Historian Jeremy Black calls most campaigns inconclusive, since they were driven by the hunt for supplies and pay rather than clear objectives. When fighting officially ended in 1648, over 150,000 troops were still under arms in the Empire. Few states could pay for armies that size, so they relied on contributions taken from the lands the armies crossed. Armies grew smaller and leaned on cavalry, which could move faster than infantry. Poor roads kept commanders near rivers, the main route for bulk transport. Feeding the troops became a goal in itself, largely beyond the control of any government. In 1628 and 1629, imperial troops devastated Brandenburg and Saxony, both nominal allies, and that damage helped push them toward backing the Swedes.

  Some commentators argue that the truly revolutionary change lay in institutions rather than weapons. Funding, supplying and directing permanent armies across wide theatres demanded far more sophisticated machinery. Organised violence passed from contractor generals such as Wallenstein or Mansfeld to nation-states.

  The war left a literary mark as well. In 1668, Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen published Simplicius Simplicissimus, a picaresque novel drawn from his own soldiering and confirmed by other sources. The diaries of Peter Hagendorf, who took part in the Sack of Magdeburg, describe the everyday brutality of the war in compelling detail. Societies formed to purge foreign elements from the German language, and the war has been credited with reviving German literature.

  For German and, to a lesser extent, Czech writers, the war became a defining national trauma, and the 18th-century poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller was one of many to draw on it. It was also called the Great German War, the Great War or the Great Schism. For 19th- and early 20th-century German nationalists it showed the danger of division, and they used it to justify the German Empire of 1871 and the Greater Germanic Reich the Nazis imagined. In 1939, Bertolt Brecht set his anti-war play Mother Courage and Her Children against its backdrop. The war still draws writers, and Daniel Kehlmann's novel Tyll, set during the conflict, was nominated for the 2020 Booker Prize.

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