Thirty Years' War

The causes

Since the Reformation, the Holy Roman Empire had been divided between Catholic and Protestant princes. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) had settled the problem, but tensions returned. In 1618, in Prague, Protestant nobles from Bohemia threw two representatives of the Catholic emperor Ferdinand II out of a window: this was the Defenestration of Prague, which set off the revolt.

Religious and political tensions hardened in the 1600s. In 1608, the Protestant princes formed the Evangelical Union, and in 1609 the Catholic princes responded with the Catholic League. In Bohemia, the Letter of Majesty, granted in 1609 by Emperor Rudolf II, guaranteed freedom of worship to Protestant nobles, but its clauses were contested by Catholic advisers. When Ferdinand, a prince educated by the Jesuits and a partisan of the Counter-Reformation, was elected King of Bohemia in 1617, many Protestant nobles feared losing their rights. The Habsburgs, who also ruled Spain, then appeared as a threat to the liberties of the German princes.

The course of the war

The war unfolded in several phases. First, imperial troops crushed the Bohemians at White Mountain in 1620. Then Denmark, and after it Sweden under King Gustavus Adolphus, intervened on the Protestant side. The Swedish king was killed at Lützen in 1632, but the Swedes carried on the fight.

In 1635, France under Cardinal Richelieu, although Catholic, openly entered the war against the Habsburgs to weaken their power. Armies lived off the land, plundered and burned, and famine and plague struck the countryside. Peace negotiations opened in 1644 and ended in 1648.

In 1619, the Bohemian nobles offered the crown to Frederick V, a Calvinist Elector Palatine who had no solid support. His reign lasted only one winter: the defeat at the White Mountain, in 1620, forced him into exile. The Palatinate was occupied by the troops of the Catholic League, and the electoral dignity passed to Maximilian of Bavaria in 1623. In 1625, Wallenstein raised an army of mercenaries for the emperor, which he largely financed with his own loans, and which allowed Ferdinand II to exert pressure on northern Germany.

In the 1630s, the conflict took on a European dimension. The Edict of Restitution of 1629 required the return to Catholics of secularized ecclesiastical property, which alarmed the Protestant princes and foreign powers. Gustavus Adolphus landed in Pomerania in 1630, then in 1631 defeated at Breitenfeld the army of the Catholic League commanded by Tilly. After the imperial victory at Nördlingen, in 1634, the Swedes were weakened, and the Peace of Prague, in 1635, brought the emperor closer to Saxony.

The war struck civilians hard. The armies, composed largely of mercenaries, lived off the land, requisitioned food and extorted ransoms from villages. War contributions, imposed by both sides, weighed heavily on towns. In 1631, the capture of Magdeburg by Tilly's troops ended in a sack and a fire that destroyed the city almost entirely. Soldiers plundered churches and farms, which caused massive exoduses and the ruin of many countryside areas, where peasants abandoned their lands.

The consequences

The Peace of Westphalia (Münster and Osnabrück, 1648) recognised the independence of the United Provinces and Switzerland, gave France most of the Habsburg rights in Alsace and Sweden territories on the Baltic and North Sea. German princes gained near-sovereignty: the emperor lost strength. Germany was devastated, with millions dead, mostly civilians, and took decades to recover. These treaties are often seen as the origin of a European order based on sovereign states.

After 1648, Germany remained fragmented into many states, and the Holy Roman Empire survived until 1806, without political unity before 1871. Bohemia underwent forced recatholicization after 1620 and the exile of many Protestant nobles. Historians have long debated the role of the Treaties of Westphalia: the "Westphalia myth" long presented these treaties as the birth certificate of modern sovereign states, a reading that recent research has qualified, since the Empire and the Habsburgs kept an important role. In Germany, the war remains in collective memory as a trauma associated with famine and destruction.

Timeline

1. 1618Defenestration of Prague: the revolt begins
2. 1620Imperial victory at White Mountain
3. 1632Death of Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus at Lützen
4. 1635France openly enters the war
5. 1648Peace of Westphalia

Key figures

• Ferdinand II, Catholic emperor of the Holy Roman Empire
• Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, military leader of the Protestant side
• Richelieu, chief minister of King Louis XIII of France
• Wallenstein, commander of the imperial armies