The Treaty of Westphalia is signed, ending the Thirty Years War and radically shifting the balance of power in Europe.
The
Thirty Years War, a series of wars fought by European nations for
various reasons, ignited in 1618 over an attempt by the king of Bohemia
(the future Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand II) to impose Catholicism
throughout his domains. Protestant nobles rebelled, and by the 1630s
most of continental Europe was at war.
As a result of the Treaty
of Westphalia, the Netherlands gained independence from Spain, Sweden
gained control of the Baltic and France was acknowledged as the
preeminent Western power. The power of the Holy Roman Emperor was broken
and the German states were again able to determine the religion of
their lands.
The principle of state sovereignty emerged as a
result of the Treaty of Westphalia and serves as the basis for the
modern system of nation-states.
The Thirty Years War
This conflict, which redrew the religious and political map of
central Europe, began in the Holy Roman Empire, a vast complex of some
one thousand separate, semiautonomous political units under the loose
suzerainty of the Austrian Hapsburgs. Over the previous two centuries, a
balance of power had emerged among the leading states, but during the
sixteenth century, the Reformation and the Counter Reformation had
divided Germany into hostile Protestant and Catholic camps, each
prepared to seek foreign support to guarantee its integrity if need
arose.
Thus in 1618, when Ferdinand II, heir apparent to the
throne of Bohemia, began to curtail certain religious privileges enjoyed
by his subjects there, they immediately appealed for aid to the
Protestants in the rest of the empire and to the leading foreign
Protestant states: Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, and Denmark.
Ferdinand, in turn, called upon the German Catholics (led by Bavaria),
Spain, and the papacy. In the ensuing struggle, Ferdinand (elected Holy
Roman Emperor in 1619) and his allies won a major victory at White
Mountain (1620) outside Prague that allowed the extirpation of
Protestantism in most of the Hapsburg lands. Encouraged by this success,
Ferdinand turned in 1621 against Bohemia's Protestant supporters in
Germany. Despite aid from Britain, Denmark, and the Dutch Republic, they
too lost, and by 1629 imperial armies commanded by Albrecht von
Wallenstein overran most of Protestant Germany and much of Denmark.
Ferdinand then issued the Edict of Restitution, reclaiming lands in the
empire belonging to the Catholic Church that had been acquired and
secularized by Protestant rulers.
Only Swedish military aid saved
the Protestant cause. In 1630 an army led by King Gustavus Adolphus
landed in Germany and, with a subsidy from the French government and
assistance from many German Protestant states, routed the Imperialists
at Breitenfeld (1631) and drove them from much of Germany. The
Protestant revival continued until in 1634 a Spanish army intervened and
at Nordlingen defeated the main Swedish field army and forced the
Protestants out of southern Germany. This new Hapsburg success, however,
provoked France-which feared encirclement-to declare war first on Spain
(1635) and then on the emperor (1636).
The war, which in the
1620s had been fought principally by German states with foreign
assistance, now became a struggle among the great powers (Sweden,
France, Spain, and Austria) fought largely on German soil, and for
twelve more years armies maneuvered while garrisons-over five hundred in
all-carried out a "dirty war" designed both to support themselves and
to destroy anything of possible use to the enemy. Atrocities (such as
those recorded in the novel Simplicissimus by Hans von Grimmelshausen)
abounded as troops struggled to locate and appropriate resources.
Eventually, France's victory over the Spaniards at Rocroi (1643) and
Sweden's defeat of the Imperialists at Jankau (1645) forced the
Hapsburgs to make concessions that led, in 1648, to the Peace of
Westphalia, which settled most of the outstanding issues.
The
cost, however, had proved enormous. Perhaps 20 percent of Germany's
total population perished during the war, with losses of up to 50
percent along a corridor running from Pomerania in the Baltic to the
Black Forest. Villages suffered worse than towns, but many towns and
cities also saw their populations, manufacture, and trade decline
substantially. It constituted the worst catastrophe to afflict Germany
until
World War II.
On the other hand, the conflict helped to end the age of religious
wars. Although religious issues retained political importance after 1648
(for instance, in creating an alliance in the 1680s against Louis XIV),
they no longer dominated international alignments. Those German
princes, mostly Calvinists, who fought against Ferdinand II in the 1620s
were strongly influenced by confessional considerations, and as long as
they dominated the anti-Hapsburg cause, so too did the issue of
religion. But because they failed to secure a lasting settlement, the
task of defending the "Protestant cause" gradually fell into the hands
of Lutherans, who proved willing to ally (if necessary) with Catholic
France and Orthodox Russia in order to create a coalition capable of
defeating the Hapsburgs. After 1630 the role of religion in European
politics receded. This was, perhaps, the greatest achievement of the
Thirty Years' War, for it thus eliminated a major destabilizing
influence in European politics, which had both undermined the internal
cohesion of many states and overturned the diplomatic balance of power
created during the Renaissance.
The Reader's Companion to Military
History. Edited by Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker. Copyright © 1996
by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
