Initially a war between various Protestant and Catholic states in the fragmented Holy Roman Empire, it gradually developed into a more general conflict involving most of the great powers. These states employed relatively large mercenary armies, and the war became less about religion and more of a continuation of the France-Habsburg rivalry for European political pre-eminence. In the 17th century, religious beliefs and practices were a much larger influence on an average European.
In that era, almost everyone was vested on one side of the dispute or another. The war began when the newly elected Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, tried to impose religious uniformity on his domains, forcing Roman Catholicism on its peoples. The northern Protestant states, angered by the violation of their rights to choose granted in the Peace of Augsburg, banded together to form the Protestant Union. His policies were considered heavily pro-Catholic.
The Holy Roman Empire was a fragmented collection of largely independent states. The position of the Holy Roman Emperor was mainly titular, but the emperors, from the House of Habsburg, also directly ruled a large portion of imperial territory lands of the Archduchy of Austria and the Kingdom of Bohemia , as well as the Kingdom of Hungary. The Austrian domain was thus a major European power in its own right, ruling over some eight million subjects. Another branch of the House of Habsburg ruled over Spain and its empire, which included the Spanish Netherlands, southern Italy, the Philippines, and most of the Americas.
After the Protestant Reformation, these independent states became divided between Catholic and Protestant rulership, giving rise to conflict. Although the Peace of Augsburg created a temporary end to hostilities, it did not resolve the underlying religious conflict, which was made yet more complex by the spread of Calvinism throughout Germany in the years that followed.
This added a third major faith to the region, but its position was not recognized in any way by the Augsburg terms, to which only Catholicism and Lutheranism were parties. Religious tensions remained strong throughout the second half of the 16th century. The Peace of Augsburg began to unravel—some converted bishops refused to give up their bishoprics, and certain Habsburg and other Catholic rulers of the Holy Roman Empire and Spain sought to restore the power of Catholicism in the region.
This was evident from the Cologne War — , in which a conflict ensued when the prince-archbishop of the city, Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg, converted to Calvinism. As he was an imperial elector, this could have produced a Protestant majority in the college that elected the Holy Roman Emperor, a position that Catholics had always held.
At the beginning of the 17th century, the Rhine lands and those south to the Danube were largely Catholic, while the north was dominated by Lutherans, and certain other areas, such as west-central Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, were dominated by Calvins.
Minorities of each creed existed almost everywhere, however. In some lordships and cities, the numbers of Calvinists, Catholics, and Lutherans were approximately equal. Much to the consternation of their Spanish ruling cousins, the Habsburg emperors who followed Charles V especially Ferdinand I and Maximilian II, but also Rudolf II and his successor, Matthias were content to allow the princes of the empire to choose their own religious policies.
These rulers avoided religious wars within the empire by allowing the different Christian faiths to spread without coercion. This angered those who sought religious uniformity. Meanwhile, Sweden and Denmark, both Lutheran kingdoms, sought to assist the Protestant cause in the Empire, and wanted to gain political and economic influence there as well. Ferdinand II, educated by the Jesuits, was a staunch Catholic who wanted to impose religious uniformity on his lands.
This made him highly unpopular in Protestant Bohemia. The so-called Defenestration of Prague provoked open revolt in Bohemia, which had powerful foreign allies. Ferdinand was upset by this calculated insult, but his intolerant policies in his own lands had left him in a weak position.
The Habsburg cause in the next few years would seem to suffer unrecoverable reverses. The Protestant cause seemed to wax toward a quick overall victory. The war can be divided into four major phases: The Bohemian Revolt, the Danish intervention, the Swedish intervention, and the French intervention. In , the Peace of Augsburg had settled religious disputes in the Holy Roman Empire by enshrining the principle of Cuius regio, eius religio , allowing a prince to determine the religion of his subjects.
Since , the Kingdom of Bohemia had been governed by Habsburg kings who did not force their Catholic religion on their largely Protestant subjects. He was increasingly viewed as unfit to govern, and other members of the Habsburg dynasty declared his younger brother, Matthias, to be family head in Without heirs, Emperor Matthias sought to assure an orderly transition during his lifetime by having his dynastic heir the fiercely Catholic Ferdinand of Styria, later Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor elected to the separate royal thrones of Bohemia and Hungary.
Ferdinand was a proponent of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and not well-disposed to Protestantism or Bohemian freedoms.
Some of the Protestant leaders of Bohemia feared they would be losing the religious rights granted to them by Emperor Rudolf II in his Letter of Majesty However, other Protestants supported the stance taken by the Catholics, and in Ferdinand was duly elected by the Bohemian Estates to become the Crown Prince and, automatically upon the death of Matthias, the next King of Bohemia.
Ferdinand had wanted them to administer the government in his absence. On May 23, , an assembly of Protestants seized them and threw them and also secretary Philip Fabricius out of the palace window, which was some sixty-nine feet off the ground.
Remarkably, though injured, they survived. This event, known as the Defenestration of Prague, started the Bohemian Revolt. Moravia was already embroiled in a conflict between Catholics and Protestants. The religious conflict eventually spread across the whole continent of Europe, involving France, Sweden, and a number of other countries. Immediately after the defenestration, the Protestant estates and Catholic Habsburgs started gathering allies for war.
Because they deposed a properly chosen king, the Protestants could not gather the international support they needed for war. This was a serious blow to Protestant ambitions in the region. As the rebellion collapsed, the widespread confiscation of property and suppression of the Bohemian nobility ensured the country would return to the Catholic side after more than two centuries of Protestant dissent. There was plundering and pillaging in Prague for weeks following the battle. Several months later, twenty-seven nobles and citizens were tortured and executed in the Old Town Square.
Twelve of their heads were impaled on iron hooks and hung from the Bridge Tower as a warning. After the Defenestration of Prague and the ensuing Bohemian Revolt, the Protestants warred with the Catholic League until the former were firmly defeated at the Battle of Stadtlohn in After this catastrophe, Frederick V, already in exile in The Hague, and under growing pressure from his father-in-law, James I, to end his involvement in the war, was forced to abandon any hope of launching further campaigns.
The Protestant rebellion had been crushed. Peace following the imperial victory at Stadtlohn proved short lived, with conflict resuming at the initiation of Denmark.
The Bohemian leadership, meanwhile, formally deposed the Habsburgs and elected Frederick of the Palatinate their king. Frederick was an ambitious, obstinate man, who was convinced by the righteousness of his cause and who had an unshakable belief in ultimate Protestant victory. Unfortunately, he was crowned under a new constitution that deprived the monarchy of most of its power. Either way, Ferdinand had secured the most important victory of the entire conflict. With his enemy Frederick fleeing to the Dutch Republic, he was now in a dominant position.
All were desperate for news and expressed a heavy sense of dread at reports of troops heading in their direction. Maria Anna Junius, a Dominican nun living in a convent on the outskirts of Bamberg — whose father had been executed during the conflict — was one of many to wrestle with the dilemma of whether to flee from advancing Swedish troops.
Virtually any idea that anyone might have had initially that this was a war of religion disappeared once they encountered soldiers who usually behaved equally badly, regardless of which faith they espoused or prince they served. Why was their behaviour so appalling? Primarily because none of the belligerents could pay their soldiers properly, forcing them to live off the land.
The bloodshed, the perpetual fear, the chronic instability manifested itself in other ways. In the Mecklenburg region of northern Germany, entire populations fled to the woods, marshes or lakes.
The population of Strasbourg doubled to 60, in March as refugees flooded into the city to escape the carnage. Meanwhile, fear of witchcraft surged in the early 17th century three escalating waves of persecution in Bamberg probably claimed a thousand victims. It therefore entered the popular memory as something truly awful that must never be allowed to return. Within a few months of the battle of the White Mountain, the Holy Roman Emperor had seized rebel properties amounting to around half of all landed estates in Bohemia and redistributed these to his supporters.
He would repeat this practice with every successive imperial victory. The trouble was, the defeated Palatines had powerful supporters beyond the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire. First Denmark from —29; then Sweden from ; and finally France after Of these, the Swedish intervention, led by Gustavus Adolphus, is surely the best known. Gustavus is one of the most charismatic figures of the 17th century, whom later generations have, with considerable exaggeration, celebrated as a brilliant military innovator.
The British military theorist. Such awe is, in no small part, due to his exploits at the battle of Breitenfeld in when his Protestant army inflicted the first major defeat on Catholic forces in the entire war. It truly was a spectacular victory. Both the emperor and Sweden sustained their war effort by distributing captured land to their German supporters.
This added to the difficulties of peacemaking, because neither party felt able to compel their allies to return these gains as part of some compromise peace, yet neither side was strong enough to secure the outright victory needed to dictate terms.
So the war continued. This was a hugely controversial decision — one that would have bloody consequences for the British Isles later in the century. The war did not end through mutual exhaustion, as is widely thought — France and Spain were able to continue their own, separate conflict for another 11 years! Today Germany has several religious tendencies in its midst, but protestants remain in the majority. They both loosely belonged to the same confederation the Union of Kalmar which disintegrated at the time of the Reform movement.
Lutheranism soon became the main religion and this favoured the constitution of national Churches which could each retain the use of its own language — they were all under State control. Today, even if the churches are not full, the influence of Lutheranism can still be deeply felt in the life of these countries.
In the XIV th century, Jean Hus introduced the Reform Movement to Bohemia and Moravia these two countries are now known as Czechoslovakia , where it caught on quickly with the local population. Although the Protestants were in the majority in the XVI th century, they lived through difficult times after the defeat at the Battle of White Mountain in During the next years they had to keep their religion secret. Although the Low Countries and Belgium which was in fact part of the latter for several centuries had shared a common history in the past, the consequences of the events shared by both countries were quite different : in Holland the population was mainly calvinist, while in Belgium catholicism was the prevailing religion.
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