The Devastation of the Thirty Years’ War
The author of the following excerpt, Hans Jakob Christoph von Grimmelshausen (1621-1676) barely survived the horrors of the Thirty Years' War His parents were killed, probably when he was thirteen years old, and he himself was kidnapped the followingyear and forced into the army. By age fifteen, he was a soldier. His darkly satiric masterpiece, Simplicissimus ("The Simpleton"), drew heavily on these experiences. Although technically a fictional memoir, it portrays with brutal accuracy the terrible realities of this era.
Ithough it was not my intention to take the peaceloving reader with these troopers to my dad's house and farm, seeing that matters will go ill therein, yet the course of my history demands that I should leave to kind posterity an account of what manner of cruelties were now and again practised in this our German war: yes, and moreover testify by my own example that such evils must often have been sent to us by the goodness of Almighty God for our profit. For, gentle reader, who would ever have taught me that there was a God in Heaven if these soldiers had not destroyed my dad's house, and by such a deed driven me out among folk who gave me all fitting instruction thereupon? . . .
The first thing these troopers did was, that they stabled their horses: thereafter each fell to his appointed task: which task was neither more nor less than ruin and destruction. For though some began to slaughter and to boil and to roast so that it looked as if there should be a merry banquet forward, yet others there were who did but storm through the house above and below stairs. Others stowed together great parcels of cloth and apparel and all manner of household stuff, as if they would set up a frippery market. All that they had no mind to take with them they cut in pieces. Some thrust their swords through the hay and straw as if they had not enough sheep and swine to slaughter: and some shook the feathers out of the beds and in their stead stuffed in bacon and other dried meat and provisions as if such were better and softer to sleep upon. Others broke the stove and the windows as if they had a never-ending summer to promise. Houseware of copper and tin they beat flat, and packed such vessels, all bent and spoiled, in with the rest. Bedsteads, tables, chairs, and benches they burned, though there lay many cords of dry wood in the yard. Pots and pipkins must all go to pieces, either because they would eat none but roast flesh, or because their purpose was to make there but a single meal.
Our maid was so handled in the stable that she could not come out, which is a shame to tell of. Our man they laid bound upon the ground, thrust a gag into his mouth, and poured a pailful of filthy water into his body: and by this, which they called a Swedish draught, they forced him to lead a party of them to another place where they captured men and beasts, and brought them back to our farm, in which company were my dad, my mother, and our Ursula.
And now they began: first to take the flints out of their pistols and in place of them to jam the peasants' thumbs in and so to torture the poor rogues as if they had been about the burning of witches: for one of them they had taken they thrust into the baking oven and there lit a fire under him, although he had as yet confessed no crime: as for another, they put a cord round his head and so twisted it tight with a piece of wood that the blood gushed from his mouth and nose and ears. In a word each had his own device to torture the peasants, and each peasant his several tortures.
Source: Hans Jakob Christoph von Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus, trans. S. Goodrich (New York: 1995), pp. 1-3, 8-10, 32-35.
Questions for Analysis
1. The first-person narrator here recounts the atrocities committed "in this our German war," in which both perpetrators and victims are German. How believable is this description? What lends it credibility?
2. Why might Grimmelshausen have chosen to publish his account as a satirical fiction rather than as a straightforward historical narrative or autobiography? How would this choice affect a reader's response to scenes such as this?
EUROPE AT THE END OF THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR. This map shows the fragile political checkerboard that resulted from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. ¦ When you compare this map to the map on page 431, what are the most significant territorial changes between 1550 and 1648? ¦ Which regions would have been weakened or endangered by this arrangement? ¦ Which would be in a strong position to dominate Europe?
THE BATTLE OF ROCROI, 1643. Spain's defeat by the French at Rocroi was the first time the Spanish army had lost a land battle since the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (see Chapter 12) and was yet another contributing factor to the decline of Spanish power during the Thirty Years' War. This painting shows the victorious French general, Duke d'Enghien, surveying the battlefield from afar.
Parts of Central Europe erupted into war. French Catholics and Protestants, who had enjoyed relatively peaceful relations since the Edict of Nantes in 1598, came into violent contact once again. Protestant Denmark, fearing that Catholic victories in neighboring parts of the Holy Roman Empire might threaten its sovereignty, was drawn in— losing valuable territories before it was forced to concede defeat.
In this new phase of the conflict, political expediency soon outweighed either religious or dynastic allegiances. When a confederation of Catholic princes seemed close to uprooting Protestantism throughout Germany in 1630, it found its way blocked by other German Catholic princes who were willing to ally with Protestants in order to preserve their own autonomy. Joining them was the (Protestant) king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus (r. 161132), who championed both the German Lutheran states and his own nation’s sovereignty in the wake of Denmark’s brush with disaster—but whose Protestant army was secretly subsidized by Catholic France, which would otherwise have been surrounded by a strong Habsburg alliance on its northern, eastern, and southern borders.
One of the great military commanders of all time, Gustavus had become king at age seventeen. Like another young general, Alexander the Great (see Chapter 4), he was not only an expert tactician but a splendid leader. His army became the best-trained and best-equipped fighting force of the era—what some have called the first modern army. When Gustavus died in battle in 1632, a month before his thirty-eighth birthday, Sweden had become one of Europe’s great powers, rivaling Spain and Russia in size and prestige.
But in 1635, with Gustavus dead, France was compelled to join Sweden in declaring war on the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs. In the middle lay the Germanspeaking lands of Central Europe, already weakened by seventeen years of war and now a helpless battleground. In the next thirteen years, Germany suffered more from warfare than at any time until the twentieth century. Several cities were besieged and sacked nine or ten times over, while soldiers from all nations, who had to sustain themselves by plunder, gave no quarter to defenseless civilians. With plague and disease adding to the toll of outright butchery, some towns and rural areas were nearly eradicated. Most horrifying was the loss of life in the final four years of the war, when the carnage continued even after peace negotiators arrived at broad areas of agreement.
The Peace of Westphalia and the Decline of Spain
The eventual adoption of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was a watershed in European history. It marked the emergence of France as the predominant power on the Continent, a position it would hold for the next two centuries. The greatest losers in the conflict (aside from the millions of German victims) were the Austrian Habsburgs, who were forced to surrender all the territory they had gained and to abandon their hopes of using the office of Holy Roman Emperor to dominate Central Europe.
The Spanish Habsburgs were also substantially weakened and were no longer able to fall back on the wealth of their Atlantic empire. Large portions of the Atlantic trade had been infiltrated by merchants from other countries, and the expansion of local economies in Spain’s colonies had made them less dependent on trade with Spain itself. In 1600, the Spanish Empire had been the mightiest power in the world. A half century later, this empire had begun to fall apart.
As we’ve already noted, New Spain’s great wealth had begun to turn into a liability when the infusion of silver spiked inflation and slowed economic development at home. Lacking both agricultural and mineral resources of its own, Spain might have developed its own industries and a balanced trading pattern, as some of its Atlantic rivals were doing. Instead, the Spanish used imperial silver to buy manufactured goods from other parts of Europe, offering no incentives to develop exports of their own. When the river of silver began to abate, Spain was plunged into debt.
Meanwhile, the Spanish crown’s commitment to supporting the Catholic Church committed it to costly wars, as did attempts to maintain Spain’s international dominance. Involvement in the Thirty Years’ War was the last straw. The strains of warfare drove the kingdom, with its power base in Castile, to raise more money and soldiers from the other Iberian provinces. First Catalonia and then Portugal (incorporated into Spain in 1580) rose in revolt, followed by the southern Italians who rebelled against their Castilian viceroys in Naples and Sicily. It was only by chance that Spain’s greatest external enemies, France and England, could not act in time to take advantage of its plight. This gave the Castilian-based government time to put down the Italian revolts; by 1652, it had also brought Catalonia to heel. But Portugal retained its independence while Spain remained isolated, weakened, and without European allies after the Peace of Westphalia.
The Emergence of French Power in Europe and North America
France emerged from the crisis of the Thirty Years’ War with a stronger state, a more dynamic economy, and increased influence abroad. Like Spain, France had grown over the course of the previous centuries by absorbing formerly independent principalities whose inhabitants cherished traditions of local independence and were not always willing to cooperate with the royal government. The fact that France became more powerful as a result of this process, while Spain did not can be attributed in part to France’s greater natural resources and the greater prestige of the French monarchy, which can be traced back to the rule of Louis IX (later canonized as Saint Louis; see Chapter 10). Most subjects of the French king, including the Protestants whose welfare had been cultivated by Henry IV, were loyal to the crown. Moreover, France had enormous economic resiliency, owing primarily to its rich and varied agricultural productivity. Unlike Spain, which had to import food, France was able to feed itself. Moreover, Henry IV’s ministers had financed the construction of roads, bridges, and canals to facilitate the flow of goods. Royal factories manufactured luxury goods such as crystal, glass, and tapestries, and Henry also supported the production of silk, linen, and wool throughout the kingdom.
Henry’s patronage had also allowed the explorer Samuel de Champlain to claim parts of Canada as France’s first foothold in the New World. In 1608, Champlain founded the colony of Quebec in the Saint Lawrence river valley. Whereas the English initially limited their colonial settlements to regions along the Atlantic coastline, the French set out to dominate the interior of the North American continent. French traders ranged far up and down the few Canadian rivers that led inland, exchanging furs and goods with the Native American groups they encountered, while French missionaries used the same arteries to spread Catholic Christianity from Quebec to Louisiana. Eventually, French imperial ventures spread via the Great Lakes and the great river systems along the Mississippi to the prairies of America’s Midwest.
These far-flung French colonies were established and administered as royal enterprises like those of Spain, a fact that distinguished them from the private commercial ventures put together by the English and the Dutch. Also like New Spain, the colonies of New France were overwhelmingly populated by men. The elite of French colonial society were military officers and administrators sent from Paris. Below their ranks were fishermen, fur traders, small farmers, and common soldiers who constituted the bulk of French settlers in North America. Because the
ILLINOIS INDIANS TRADING WITH FRENCH SETTLERS. This engraving from Nicholas de Fer's 1705 map of the Western Hemisphere illustrates the economic interdependence that developed between early French colonies and the native peoples of the surrounding region. ¦ How did this differ from relations between Native Americans and English agricultural communities on the Atlantic coast?
Fishing and fur trades relied on cooperative relationships with native peoples, a mutual economic interdependence grew up between the French colonists and the peoples of surrounding regions. Intermarriage between French traders and native women was common.
Yet in contrast to both Spanish and English colonies, these French colonies remained dependent on the wages and supplies sent to them from the mother country. Only rarely did they become truly self-sustaining economic enterprises. Indeed, their financial rewards were modest. Furs, fish, and tobacco were exported to European markets, but it was not until the late seventeenth century that some French colonies began to realize large profits by building sugar plantations in the Caribbean islands of Hispaniola (the French portion of this large island, now Haiti, was known as Saint-Domingue), Guadeloupe, and Martinique. By 1750, 500,000 slaves on Saint-Domingue were laboring under extraordinarily harsh conditions to produce 40 percent of the world’s sugar and 50 percent of its coffee (see Chapter 15).
The Policies of Cardinal Richelieu
This expansion of French power can be credited, in part, to Henry IV’s de facto successor, Cardinal Richelieu (REESH-eh-lyuh). The real king of France, Henry’s son Louis XIII (r. 1610-43), had come to the throne at the age of nine, so Richelieu, as his chief minister of state, dominated his reign. His chief aim was to centralize royal bureaucracy while exploiting opportunities to foster French influence abroad.
Within France, Richelieu amended the Edict of Nantes so that it no longer supported the military and political rights of the Huguenots. He also prohibited these French Protestants from settling in Quebec. Yet considering that he owed his political power (in part) to his ecclesiastical position in the Catholic Church, the fact that he allowed the edict to stand speaks to his larger interest in fostering a sense of French national identity that centered on monarchy. In keeping with this policy, he also imposed direct taxation on powerful provinces that had retained their financial autonomy up to that point. Later, to make sure taxes were efficiently collected, Richelieu instituted a new system of local government which empowered royal officials to put down provincial resistance.
These policies made the French royal government more powerful than any in Europe. It also doubled the crown’s income, allowing France to engage in the Thirty Years’ War that extended its power on the continent. Yet this increased centralization would provoke challenges to royal authority from aristocratic elites in the years after Richelieu’s death. Eventually, the extreme centralization of royal authority in France would lead to the French Revolution (see Chapter 18).
One more immediate response to Richelieu’s policies was a series of uncoordinated revolts known collectively as the Eronde (from the French word for a sling used to hurl stones). In 1643, just after the death of Richelieu, Louis XIII was succeeded by his five-year-old son, Louis XIV. The young king’s regents were his mother, Anne of Austria, and her alleged lover, Cardinal Mazarin. Both were foreigners—Anne was a Habsburg and Mazarin was an Italian by birth—and many extremely powerful nobles hated them. They also hated the way that Richelieu’s government had curtailed their own authority in their ancestral provinces. Popular resentments were aroused as well, because the costs of the ongoing Thirty Years’ War were now combined with several consecutive years of bad harvests. So when cliques of nobles expressed their disgust for Mazarin, they found much popular support. In 1648, the levy of a new tax had protesters on the streets of Paris, armed with slings and projectiles.
However, neither the aristocratic leaders of the Fronde nor the commoners who joined them claimed to be resisting the young king; their targets were the corruption and mismanagement of Mazarin. Some of the rebels, it is true, insisted that part of Mazarin’s fault lay in his pursuit of Richelieu’s centralizing policy. But most aristocrats wanted to become part of this centralizing process. Years later, when Louis XIV began to rule in his own right in 1651, the memory of these early turbulent years haunted him. He resolved never to let the aristocracy or their provinces get out of hand. Pursuing this aim, he became the most effective absolute monarch in Europe (see Chapter 15).
THE CRISIS OF MONARCHY IN ENGLAND
Of all the crises that shook Europe in this era, the most radical in its consequences was the English Civil War. The causes of this conflict were similar to those that had sparked trouble in other countries: hostilities between the component parts of a composite kingdom; religious animosities between Catholics and Protestants; struggles for power among competing factions of aristocrats at court; and a fiscal system that could not keep pace with the increasing costs of government, much less those of war. But in England, these developments led to the unprecedented criminal trial and execution of a king, an event that sent shock waves throughout Europe and the Atlantic world.
The chain of events leading to civil war in England can be traced to the last decades of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The expenses of England’s defense against Spain, rebellion in Ireland, widespread crop failures, and the inadequacies of the antiquated English taxation system drove the queen’s government deeply into debt. When Elizabeth was succeeded by her cousin, James Stuart—King James VI of Scotland, James I of England—bitter factional disputes at court were complicated by the financial crisis. When the English Parliament rejected James’s demands for more taxes, he raised what revenues he could without parliamentary approval, imposing new tolls and selling trading monopolies to favored courtiers. These measures aroused resentment against the king and made voluntary grants of taxation from Parliament even less likely.
James also struggled with religious divisions among his subjects. His own kingdom of Scotland had been firmly Calvinist since the 1560s. England, too, was Protestant but of a very different kind, since the Church of England retained many of the rituals, hierarchies, and doctrines of the medieval Church (see Chapter 13). Indeed, a significant number of English Protestants, known as Puritans, wanted to bring their church more firmly into line with Calvinist principles; it was a group of Puritan refugees who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony (above). Although James was largely successful in mediating these conflicts, he stirred up trouble in staunchly Catholic Ireland by encouraging thousands of Scottish Calvinists to settle in the northern Irish province of Ulster. In doing so, he exacerbated a situation that had already become violent under Elizabeth.
English politics became more volatile in 1625, when James was succeeded by his surviving son, Charles. Charles alarmed his Protestant subjects by marrying the (Catholic) sister of France’s Louis XIII, and he launched a new war with Spain, straining his already slender financial resources. When Parliament refused to grant him funds, he demanded forced loans from his subjects and punished those who refused by lodging soldiers in their homes. Others were imprisoned without trial. Parliament responded by imposing the Petition of Right in 1628, which declared that taxes not voted by Parliament were illegal, condemned arbitrary imprisonment, and prohibited quartering of soldiers in private houses. Thereafter, Charles tried to rule England without Parliament—something that had not been attempted since the establishment of that body 400 years earlier (see Chapter 9). He also ran into trouble with his Calvinist subjects in Scotland because he began to favor the most Catholic-leaning elements in the English Church. The Scots rebelled in 1640, and a Scottish army marched south into England to demand the withdrawal of Charles’s “Catholicizing” measures.
To meet the Scottish threat, Charles was forced to summon Parliament, whose members were determined to impose radical reforms on the king’s government before they would even consider granting him funds to raise an army. There was even support for the Scottish Calvinists among Puritans in Parliament. To avoid dealing with this difficult political situation, Charles tried to arrest
World History
