Dan Snow's History Hit - Europe's Tragedy: The Thirty Years War

Episode Date: May 10, 2020

The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe. It killed nearly a quarter of all Germans and transformed the map of the modern world. Professor Peter Wilson of Oxford University took me on a whistle stop tour through these tumultuous years - from defenestrations in Prague, Westphalian sovereignty and how the soldiers of WWI remembered these events three centuries later. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. We have got our BEST EVER offer available at the moment. If you use the code 'VEDay' on sign up, you get 30 days free, then your first five months access will be just £1/€1/$1 - it's £5.99 a month after. 

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Through the first half of the 17th century, Europe was devastated by a war known simply as the Thirty Years' War. It was both a religious and geopolitical struggle, as we're about to hear, because on the podcast today is Professor Peter Wilson of Oxford University, who took me on a whistle-stop tour of the Thirty Years' War, one of the most complex, remarkable, barbaric and terrible wars in Europe's history. And that's saying something, people, that's saying something wars in Europe's history. Not saying something, people. Not saying something. And it was fought against a backdrop of a global climate crisis,

which meant the harvests failed. The world was cooling. It was a perfect storm. The Thirty Years War, until the advent of the 20th century wars, was long remembered in Germany as the darkest of times. As armies, domestic domestic and foreign marched to and fro, acts of barbarism were commonplace. It's really exciting having Peter on the podcast. I've been wanting to talk about the Thirty Years' War for ages and he is exactly the man to do it. If you subscribe to History Hit, you will get access to hundreds of history documentaries. It's got a history channel, historyhit..tv it's got all the back episodes of this podcast that are now not available anywhere else so 400 extra episodes we run live podcasts

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cost of just five pounds, euros, or dollars. So take advantage of that while you can. In the meantime, everyone, enjoy Professor Peter Wilson. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. We're so used to talking about the great global confrontations of the 20th century. Can you help a modern audience to understand the scale of what we call the 30 Years' War? Quite simply, I mean, it's the most devastating conflict in Europe prior to the two world wars. And if you think about it in terms of the proportion of the loss of population in Central Europe, the war's main zone, that far exceeds the kind of population losses that we're

talking about even in the Second World War. What was the extent of the fighting? Because obviously, who was involved? I mean, are you someone who thinks of the fighting going on, you know, the involvement of Stuart, England and France as part of this 30 year war? Or who should we include? So that's a really good question, because I think on that hangs pretty much whatever else we're going to say about the war. For me, I tend to go with what most of the contemporaries, the people who lived through it, thought, and they did perceive a number of distinct conflicts in Europe. So the Thirty Years' War proper is a war really over the religious and political order of Central Europe. And then it's related to other conflicts because other powers, such as France, Sweden, Spain, intervene at different times. And these powers are fighting their own separate wars. So it's not the same, say, as the Cold War,

where we could sort of divide the world into two sides that fight a number of different wars, sometimes through surrogates. This is really more a series probably of about three or four great regional struggles for dominance in different parts of Europe that are going on at the same time, that have a varying combination of interconnectedness. It's a war that is too gigantic to fit into a 30-minute podcast. Let's give it a go. Okay.

I mean, the key point there is this idea of religious and political conflicts in Central Europe. Is it useful to untangle those or can we not untangle them? Is it useful to think about the politics of that zone alone and then add religion in later on. It's really very difficult because this was an age of faith. So for the people living through this, politics and religion were very closely intertwined. And if you think about the religious struggle, a lot of that is down to the idea that Christianity should be singular, that there's a single God and there's a single truth. idea that Christianity should be singular, that there's a single God and there's a single truth. So the modern idea of toleration based on sort of mutual understanding is completely alien.

So that obviously makes agreements difficult. And then if you add in the fact that this is also a legalized order, where the war takes place in the Holy Roman Empire had a constitution, had a legal order, and people were very concerned about being perceived to be legitimate. That was also an issue about religion. You did not want to go against the natural order and be perceived to be illegitimate. So constitutional rights, safeguarding the practice of religion and so on, or jurisdiction over churches, access to particular lands, all of these things are on, or jurisdiction over churches, access to particular lands. All of these things are very, very closely connected. Who are the key players? Why does this war come about as a result of this

political and religious schism in Central Europe? A key thing to think about and to remember is that it's people that are doing this. This is a war that has individuals. So it's not a conflict between monolithic religious blocks is that it's people that are doing this. This is a war that has individuals. So it's not a conflict between monolithic religious blocs. And it's certainly different from the, what we call the wars of religion in France, which are late 16th into the early 17th century, which has a degree of popular mobilization, which doesn't take place in Germany. So this is a war that's waged by authorities against each other, largely with professional Germany. So this is a war that's waged by authorities against each other, largely with professional soldiers. So this is not mobilizing the masses to go and massacre

their neighbors because they're of a different faith. On the contrary, most people experience this not really as a religious war, but as a succession of intrusions into their community by different bands of soldiers that became increasingly difficult to distinguish from each other. So that's the general context. So we then look at, you know, why does this come about? It comes about because there is a kind of political vacuum in the empire in the later 16th century, the Habsburg dynasty that basically are the supreme princes within the empire and they hold the imperial title. It's their duty to sort of sort these problems out. The head of the House

of Habsburg is this man, Rudolf II, who is increasingly reclusive and allows really a kind of power vacuum to develop. And into that step, two rivals from different branches of the same family, this empire's second biggest family, the Wittelsbachs. One, the Palatine branch, are adherents of Protestantism and their rivals in Bavaria are adherents of Catholicism. So there's a family rivalry for influence within the empire that's linked to conflict of faith. And then their supporters in these two sort of groups also see advantages of either joining these groups to sort of advance their interests in a more local level so peter you don't see this as in some sort of gigantic determinist way that these religious

schisms within the empire or the loose nature of imperial confederation just inevitably lead to a gigantic war you're saying this is about individuals this is about one or two men being either ambitious or reclusive and not up to the job well i wouldn't go quite as far as that because of course they have to persuade people to support them and other people are also seeing opportunities here and jumping in but the thing is if we see this as sort of inevitable as down to the forces beyond human control we deny the historical act as any kind of agency i mean these are people who made mistakes they're people who had opportunities to draw the conflict to a close and that is really the kind of the tragedy about this whole war is that there are numerous opportunities to bring it to a conclusion

they're in fact talking to each other most of the time. That's one of the reasons why I would downplay the idea that this is purely a conflict on religion. They're still able to talk to each other whilst fighting. The trouble is that they usually saw an opportunity to increase their advantage at their rival's expense and therefore choose not at that moment to make peace but there were many opportunities where they could have contained this and prevented it from growing or equally later on to have reduced it and brought it to conclusion sooner. Without going into the defenestration of people throwing people through windows in Prague and I would urge people to go

and wikipedia that particular incident tell me about the changing character of the war and the different phases, if you would. Initially, is it fair to call it an operation against sort of dissident Protestant princes within this kind of loose imperial structure? Yes, that's right. I mean, it starts in Bohemia, which belongs to the Habsburgs. Modern day Czech Republic. Yeah, exactly.

So then they're linked to the Palatinate, which is the leader of the Protestant or part of the Protestant princes. From the Habsburgs' point of view, this is a rebellion, and they're trying to snuff this out as quickly as possible. And their opponents, the French and others who have interests in keeping the war alive, basically supply money and resources to whoever is opposing the Habsburgs at any one moment. So each time the Habsburgs gain the upper hand, somebody else basically intervenes to prolong the conflict. So Habsburgs have essentially won very quickly by about 1623-24. Then the Danes intervene,

the war restarts, the Danes get defeated. There's a year when there is really no fighting, the Habsburgs are triumphant. War restarts because the French bankroll. The Swedes, who have their own interests about intervening, so the war restarts in 1630. When the Swedes are on their last legs again, having been defeated by about 1635, then the French intervene, and then French intervention is progressively stepped up,

and that is one of the major reasons why the war then continues. With this sort of Franco-Swedish alliance against the Habsburgs, they fight each other to a sort of standstill. And after prolonged peacemaking and negotiations, which are interspersed with further military operations, they arrange a compromise peace, the famous Peace of Westphalia, 1648. Well, we'll come on to the Peace of Westphalia, 1648. Well, we'll come on to the Peace of Westphalia and the Westphalian system that lots of people like to bang on about, if it even exists. The fact that the French, the great Catholic power of this France, their enemy's enemy is their friend, has made people, particularly in this secular age in which we live, it's made people very cynical about the role of religion here,

because you've got the fanatical Protestant Swedes under their brilliant war leader, Gustavus Adolphus, taking on the Catholic house folks, being paid for by the French. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, I mean, Gustavus said that this was a religious war, he would make war against the Pope. And of course, he never declares war against the Pope. And Sweden's biggest trading partner is the Spaniards, who are, of course, Catholics. The whole thing is extremely complex. And I think that's the point. I think that the people who were involved, I mean, there are a few militants who clearly saw this as a religious war, felt summoned personally by God to fight. But the great bulk of them are much more

pragmatic. They have religious goals. The French also had religious goals too. And they resort to Swedish intervention mainly because they failed to make an agreement with the Bavarians, who are, of course, good Catholics. And the French have this complicated network of alliances, which ultimately collapses and means that they are stuck helping the Swedes out. So they do try to avoid compromising religion. But for the vast majority of the kind of key decision makers, they are much more pragmatic about how they achieve their religious goals. And the religious goals are much more distant than the political goals that you achieve in order to put yourself into a position to therefore achieve your religious goals. I'm always interested in Spain's role here, because this idea that if everyone else is fighting,

you try and sort of achieve your aims, grab a bit of territory, deal with a few problems under the banner of this wider war. And they've got an interesting relationship with the Dutch, haven't they? Because the Dutch were Protestants, technically still part of the Holy Roman Empire. Spain wishes to reassert their control of the Dutch, and it kind of badges it as part of the anti-Protestant mission of the Thirty Years' War,

but it doesn't have that much to do with it, does it? Exactly. I mean, that's, I think, a good point about the fact that contemporaries could see that there are separate wars. I mean, the Dutch Revolt, which sort of restarts in the early 1620s and continues, is a separate war. The thing with a piece of Westphalia is they're actually trying to solve three separate wars at once, and they get two out of three. The Dutch revolt is resolved when the Spanish finally recognize that the Dutch are independent.

And of course, a significant proportion of the population are still Catholic. And that's one of the reasons why the Spanish have been fighting, to preserve their monarchy. And they would have done a deal much sooner had the Dutch granted greater toleration to the Catholics which would have enabled the Spanish to make peace and save face. And then the second war that's ended is the Thirty Years' War in the Empire and the one that isn't ended is the war between the two leading Catholic powers, France and Spain. So there's a separate conflict going on and that continues up until 1659. Your book was hailed by all reviewers as a kind of the final comprehensive survey of the 30 years war that we've been needing for so long. So thank

you for providing that. Speaking of Spain and the Netherlands fighting, one of those battles took place curiously right on the coast of Britain, didn't it? I mean, talk to me a little bit about England's relationship with what was going on on the continent and some of the pressures that were brought to bear on the stewards for getting involved or staying out of it. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan

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There are new episodes every week. They're trying basically to be arbiter within Europe. I mean, James I obviously has become king in a complex composite monarchy, which is Britain, if you like, and the religious settlement in Britain is not clear. And just like the political and religious settlement in Europe more broadly isn't clear. And he thinks the best way to survive and make the best of this is to sort of be arbiter of all the different factions. So he starts out British policies essentially trying to arbitrate between the different factions within Europe.

The trouble is, how do you intervene if you're in Britain? Well, you can bankroll various people. So they try that they try to provide subsidies to different parties that seem to be in their interest. But of course, that means you can't control them. And then you can send expeditionary forces. Well, that's quite difficult. You're an island on the archipelago stuck out pointing into the Atlantic and you need to intervene in the heart of Europe. That's actually quite difficult to do at the time. And this is one of the frustrations. So they have the succession of very expensive, what are criticized as half measures, which of course causes further financial problems for the Stuart monarchy and is a major factor then in their overall financial problems and their troubles

with Parliament, which lead of course to the British civil wars. And then they're basically knocked out in the sense of no longer really able to act in the continent with the civil wars going on in Britain. And that is one of the things that are perceived by their subjects as a failure. I mean, more Britons fight on the continent than do Swedes. And yet Sweden comes out with a massive slice of the North German coast as a gain, and the Stuart monarchy, well, doesn't come out at all and heads chopped off, end of the monarchy. And the bloodiest war per capita in Britain's history. So you've got conflict stretching from the west coast of Irelandireland across eastern europe it's totally on that note what do you think of this new research that suggests that the world was actually experiencing a cool period

in terms of our climate and did that exacerbate was it a cause make it worse more bloody did prolong it it's a very interesting argument i mean it's been around for a while and it has been stated of course famously by jeffrey parker and very interesting argument. I mean, it's been around for a while and it has been stated, of course, famously by Jeffrey Parker, a very interesting and relatively recent book. The problem is the difficulty of drawing a direct connection between generally bad conditions and human action. You can point to the evidence and say, well, there's all of this climate change, the so-called Little Ice Age, harvest failures, and so on and so forth.

It's difficult then to lead from those generally bad conditions to the incidence of particular wars. I mean, the 17th century was known as the sort of Iron Century, a pretty horrible time most of the time. I'm not sure whether that's necessarily the incidence of war and revolt is necessarily produced by these environmental factors, I think. Yeah, if Gustavus Adolphus has stayed alive and got the job done, the war might have ended quicker, no matter what the weather was like. But can I ask, why does the Thirty Years' War have this reputation for civilian casualties, for slaughter, rape, despoilation, for slaughter, rape, despoilation in a way that even the Napoleonic Wars don't quite, even though Napoleon was famously brutal, his armies looted as they went along. What is it about 30 Years' War that saw this event that cast such a long shadow,

particularly in Germany, of centuries? The main thing is the sort of weakness of all states. We're talking about a time where even in a good year of peace, the state is pretty much bankrupt. Its ability to raise resources from its own population is extremely restricted, plus the ability of the population to pay resources. I mean, this is an under-monetized economy. It's hard to pay taxes even in a good year. So everyone goes to war basically with no money, can't pay their forces. So how do the forces survive? Well, typically they're presented as living off the land. That's not quite true

because commanders don't want that to happen. That's extremely bad for discipline. If your army disperses, it means that you can't get them together to fight again. So they take over local infrastructure. So they come in, they bully the mayor, they bully the town council, and they say, you're no longer paying your taxes to your prince. You now have to pay them to us, and you have to pay them at five times the rate. And the kind of surety that underpins this is the fact that the rulers are basically parceling out parts of the territory that is being conquered to the army commanders that provides the sort of

surety that they will eventually get paid. And that, of course, is the thing that makes the war so difficult to bring to an end, because you want to arrange a compromise peace, you might want to return some of the gains and so on. You can't do that if you've given them to the army on which you depend in order to make that peace. and it's a kind of catch-22 situation that they all get caught in and that explains both why the war will last so long and also why it is so extraordinarily destructive of the lives of ordinary people and the economy in general. The Treaty of Westphalia, it took them weeks or something, months to just work out who should sit where, didn't it? Sort of precedence of all these royals and aristocratic commanders and diplomats is it fair to say that they ended this

war or as you point out there were three wars but the end of the sort of central war between the catholic hapsburgs and these distant protestant princes by basically going to the status quo before the war started is that fair it sort of looks like that. If you open an atlas, a historical atlas, and you look at it, I mean, first of all, it's mind-bogglingly colourful. It's hard to tell what's actually happened between 1618 and 1648. But it's actually a highly complicated arrangement, but it's about 170 different articles or so. The devil's in the detail. I mean, it is a compromise, an intricate compromise that's taken a very long time to put together. And it means that there are very few outright losers and also very few outright winners. But there's enough shift on all the various points of contention that not all, but most of the belliger the ones that you won't see when you open a map because they are the sort of landlords and so on who back the wrong side. For example, half the population in what we now call the Czech Republic changes landlord because those nobles who back the

anti-Habsburg faction have been expropriated and their lands have been redistributed to families that back the Habsburgs and therefore continue to back the Habsburgs. One of the reasons why the Austrian Habsburg monarchy lasts so long. These folk are still basically the beneficiaries all the way up to 1948 when the communists expropriate them again. Wow. Bizarre bit of timing there on the anniversary. And then the other thing it said about Westphalia is that it's sort of beginning of this modern state system. Why do people bang on about the Treaty of Westphalia, its political and religious settlements? And do you think that is justified and useful? It's become a shorthand, as you say, the Westphalian system. So the idea that the world

is divided up into fully sovereign independent states. And this idea is that the Peace of Westphalia supposedly ushers in this age of fully sovereign independent states. It doesn't, of course, do that. But I think it is a step towards conceiving of a political order, which, let's face it, Europeans at the time only thought in European terms, but conceiving of an order which is a hierarchy. And there's only one emperor in Europe, and then there are a number of kings and princes and republics. And these interact in this sort of hierarchical system where they all have different rights and status.

And you shift gradually from that to an order where powers interact more equally. And that takes some time. There are other milestones, other peace treaties. The peace treaty in the early 18th century ending the war of Spanish succession is a significant step. The Vienna settlement ending the Napoleonic Wars is an even further step where we move towards this sort of moment. So yes, it's exaggerated, but there is a kernel of truth in the idea that the Westphalian system doesn't necessarily have its origins in 1648. But 1648 is nonetheless an important step towards that. How interesting. So there is truth that this idea that you see in the establishment of the UN during and after the Second World War, the constituent parts of the UN are these kind of nation states, none of whom have more legitimacy.

Well, obviously, there was a Security Council, but it's seen as kind of equal within that assembly. That is something that you see developing in the mid 17th century. Yes, it is. I mean, one of the things that they resolve in order to get the peace conference underway is to accept, again, not everybody, accept, again, not everybody, but most of the belligerents are able to participate. And they also eventually waive many of the kind of status protocols that would have given, you know, some powers a greater opportunity to negotiate than others. So there are some significant steps towards that idea that if you are recognized as an authority, then you have a more equal right to participate in negotiations. And one of the key things that they do in 1648, which is a genuine step in that direction, is they seal off a kind of political level. So individual noblemen and towns and so

on within the empire are no longer able to negotiate with foreign powers. The prince of the territory can do that individually for that territory, but no longer his nobleman and collectively the empire does it collectively for itself. What about the sort of geopolitics of where everything ends up? Because I'm always very struck by the fact that France appears to me to have the worst 17th century imaginable, yet emerges as almost a global hegemon towards the end of it. Sweden ends up looking pretty good and then disappears as a European, let alone global power almost straight away. And the Habsburgs kind of keep staggering on as they always seem to do. I mean, has any family or empire lost so many battles and yet remained a great power for so long?

Where are we at the end of the war and how does that shape what comes next? Pretty much as you summarise there, France overplays its hand at the peace settlement and of course then enters this period of civil war known as the Fronde, which is a sort of big step back. And then there is this slow and then accelerating recovery. Once Louis XIV gains his majority and then, as you say say by the end of the 18th century it's clearly the most powerful state so that's got very little to do with the 30 years war that's got much more to do with the fact that France is a very populous and at the time comparatively rich country and that gives the resources that Louis XIV is able to play with I mean Sweden as you say, appears very powerful, and they have their military reputation cemented because of the Thirty Years' War. But there is a distinct lack of substance to sustain that power.

And that's noticeable then when Russia becomes more powerful under Peter the Great. And that's the demise of Sweden really as a great power then at the beginning of the 18th century. And the Habsburgs are surprised, I think, here, the Austrian Habsburgs, conventionally they're presented as having lost the war, but they've actually consolidated their hold on their own hereditary possessions, and they've renegotiated the basis in which they interact with the rest of Germany. And that pact that they've basically evolved by the end of the 30 Years' War is enough to sustain them for the next 150 years or so

until the next serious challenger, which is Napoleon. As for Germany, that's predominantly the battlefield. Are there any accurate figures for the number of people or proportion of the population that lost their lives? That's really difficult to calculate, and there's been estimates that range very wildly. And the older estimates of like three quarters of a population and so on are clearly exaggerated. I mean, it's probably about a fifth of the total population. And it takes around 60, 70 years for

the population to recover to its pre-war level. So it's not really until the beginning of the 18th century that you have the same level of population that you had in 1618. So that gives you some indication of the longevity of the impact. And why does the war matter in terms of its legacy, leaving aside the Westphalian, the kind of political question? Is it the case that the memory, the folk memory, the political memory of those years really does endure up to and through the 19th century. Yes, yes, definitely. I mean, it becomes a kind of benchmark conflict by which every subsequent war is measured really up until the Second World War, which kind of displaces it. So you do get people writing in the First and Second World War that compare their experience

then with the Thirty Years' War. And if you go around parts of Germany, the tour guide will point to, you know, a missing wall or a half-demolished turret of a castle or something, and you expect that you're going to be told that that was damaged in the Second World War. And they'll say, well, that was the Swedes that did that. So even today, there are these kind of markers around that remind people of this. It is sort of seared into the kind of popular memory as this all-destructive fury. Well, your book is a brilliant account of it. It is called?

Europe's Tragedy, History of the Thirty Years' War. Also called The Thirty Years' War, Europe's Tragedy. It has two titles. They're pretty similar. So Google either of them, everybody. Google either of them. Buy them in a good book shop near you thank you very much for coming on the podcast it's a pleasure thank you

i hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go bit of a favor to ask i totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money, makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.