In Our Time - The Thirty Years War

Episode Date: December 6, 2018

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the war in Europe which begain in 1618 and continued on such a scale and with such devastation that its like was not seen for another three hundred years. It pitched Catholics against Protestants, Lutherans against Calvinists and Catholics against Catholics across the Holy Roman Empire, drawing in their neighbours and it lasted for thirty gruelling years, from the Defenestration of Prague to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. Many more civilians died than soldiers, and famine was so great that even cannibalism was excused. This topic was chosen from several hundred suggested by listeners this autumn.The image above is a detail from a painting of The Battle of White Mountain on 7-8 November 1620, by Pieter Snayers (1592-1667)WithPeter Wilson Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of OxfordUlinka Rublack Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John’s CollegeAndToby Osborne Associate Professor in History at Durham UniversityProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, in 1618, a war began in Europe on such a scale and with such devastation that it's like was not seen for another 300 years. It pitched Catholics against Protestants, Lutherans against Calvinists,

and Catholics against Catholics across the Holy Roman Empire. drawing in their neighbours, and it lasted for 30 grueling years from the de-penestration of Prague in 1618 to the peace of Westphalia in 1648. Many more citizens died than soldiers, and family was so great that even cannibalism was excused. We're discussing the 30-year-war now, as this autumn we asked you to suggest today's topic. This one came from Dan Jackson, Barbara Buck, Andre Keel, Rex Walters, and I could go on about another dozen supporters. My thanks to them, and to all of you.

for sending in several hundred ideas. With me to discuss the 30-year-s war are Peter Wilson, Chicholice Professor of History of War at the University of Oxford, Olinka Rublack, Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Cambridge and fellow of St John's College, and Toby Osborne, Associate Professor in History at Durham University. Olmecourablek, Baltair was to call the Holy Roman Empire,

now the Holy Nor Roman Empire. What's the Holy Roman Empire that we're meeting in 1618? It's a pretty complex entity. We need to go a bit into the history of it, but it really, really matters to understand it. And I'll tell you why, because we now think of the 30-year-s war is really not primarily motivated by religious division,

but primarily as a conflict about the nature of governance in the German land and about the balance of power in Europe. So to understand the issues about the nature of governance, we need to understand what the Holy Roman Empire was. And it might be easiest to however first to think about what it was not. So it was not a monarchy with one ruler, and it was not just a confederation of territories without any overlord like Switzerland. It had been shaped in the Middle Ages as a

feudal union of personal association bound to an elected emperor. And it was also religiously supercharged. The idea was that here was an empire that was the guardian of Christianity, and that was, in fact, the last world empire, as prophesied in the book of Daniel and the Bible. So with an elected emperor, the key question is, well, who elects the emperor? And this was laid down in the Golden Bowl in 1356. There were three archbishops, Mainz, Cologne and Trier, and four secular territories that could elect the emperor, Palatinate, Saxony, Brunburg, and Bohemia. And this matters for our story. and for 1618 because the question is who's missing. So there's another big B.

That's Bavaria. Bavaria turns into a very powerful territory and is not amongst these electors. How big was the Holy Roman Empire? Using the contemporary map of Europe, how big was it? It was all of Germany and what else? You see, one of the tricky things to understand about

is that it's actually not a territory. That's why I said it's a feudal configuration really with an S.A. But it reaches, if you want, at times, from the north, up to northern Italian territories. I mean, it's obviously a very big part of Central Europe we're looking at. The empress that were elected and tended to be Catholic Habsburgs always were in our period. This configuration was put on the strain by the Reformation. But these strains were resolved in the peace of Augsburg in 1555. In the piece of ours, I understand it, that each prince or ruler could choose their religion for their people.

How did that work out? Well, it worked out surprisingly well. So you can see it strengthened the territorial state in quite an amazing way. If the ruler changed his mind or mind, then the population had to follow. And dissidents were given the right to emigrates. What we see after 1555 for about 25 years is that we have two emperors, Ferdin on the first and Maximilian the second, who are actually very engaged with the politics in the German lands.

There are a number of political summits. There's an interest in getting the institutions of the empire, such as Supreme Courts that mandate against the miscarriage of justice to work. So the view again that this was a kind of a configuration that was doomed to failure after the peace of Augsburg and after quite the amazing gesture that said we can tolerate two faiths. Lutheran and Catholic faith is just not true. So up until the 1580s, this works pretty well. Then we see the pressure and tensions mounting and for a number of reasons.

One is that we have Calvinism as another Protestant faith that emerges alongside Lutheranism. Secondly, we have the recatalization after the ending of the Council of Trent, and that is often realized in quite a militant way to recatholicize areas. We have a new emperor, Rudolph the 2nd, who turns out to be less effective. We have, and this is really a headache, for instance, for historians, we have two calendars operating for 1582, one that was a papal reform calendar, and another one that Protestants still hung on to. Well, thank you very much.

You gave us a lot of building blocks there. So we had, that's the time we come to this. we had Protestants against Calvinists as well as Protestants against Catholics as Catholics against Catholics and a resurgence of the idea that Catholics should control the whole caboosh. Can I move on you to now, you Peter?

Were these tensions about the freedom of religion or about the rights and powers of states within the empire? Well, it's a bit of a mixture. I mean, I think that it's a misnomer to think of it as a religious war because we tend to think of a religious war

in very much stark terms as a choice, say, between a secular and a religious outlook. And we have to, in order to, I think, to understand the role of religion in this period, we got to sort of rethink ourselves back into how people in the 16th and 17th century saw religion in their lives. And it was sort of an atheist or secular position was unthinkable. So religion permeated everything. So in some senses, of course, yes, it's about religious. but I think the way to understand that is to think that there is the majority of the population and certainly the majority of the political leadership are what I would call moderates.

So yes, they want to reunite Christendom under their interpretation of Christianity, but they're fairly pragmatic about how they're going to achieve that. And there's only a minority who are militants who are the ones who tend to follow a kind of providentialist, theology where they might actually feel personally summoned by God to fight and to take up arms but they're usually members of the clergy and they're usually outside the realm

of power. Was there much resentment? It seems curious if there wasn't. Against Protestantism Lutheran Protestantism saying that the whole North Catholic Church was corrupt and the Catholic church saying we are the one church, we are St. Peter's representation

on earth. Seems to me religion might have played it. You tell me, said not much of it, had much of an impact. That seems to me, and you tell me. Well, if we read the polemic, and again, this comes from, mainly from theologians, that is

very virulent and there is a lot of critique. But we have to remember that people are having to navigate these sort of divisions sometimes in some cities where there are minorities and so on, and yes, there are certain situations where

there is rioting and protests, but equally around a fifth of marriages are cross-confessional marriages. So people sort of bump along, they rub along, and they have other interests too, and I think that's the thing that's usually missing from the explanation. What are the other interests? Well, if we take the factors that are actually going to lead to war, a major part of this is access to the church lands. So these make up about a seventh of the empire. So on the one hand, it is a religious issue, but it's also an issue concerning, for example, the family politics of the German princes,

because the different princely families who had embraced Lutheranism didn't want to give up their access to the churchlands. That's the convenient place where you put your unmarried daughter or your younger son who's not going to inherit and they can exercise political influence. and so there are these dynastic and family politics that are going to play in fact a major part in what happens. The rather spectacular event that seemed to kick it up in 1618, the de-fenestration in the Protestant city of Prague where three Catholics were thrown out of a high window only to land safely under dung-heap.

There must be a moral there somewhere. Why was that such a trigger? Well, I mean they land on the dung-heap but in the kind of Protestant propaganda and there is a wonderful counter image to this which is that the Madonna unfilzer cloak and they glide to the ground. If you actually go to Prague,

you'll see that there is a kind of escarpment and they sort of fall out of the window, they're heavily bundled up in cloaks, and they sort of basically bounce off this slope at the bottom. They're injured, but they're not killed. Why is this a trigger? Well, it's a deliberately provocative act, and it's intended by a minority of malcontented Protestant nobles in Bohemia

who've been largely excluded from political office to force people to take up sides. It doesn't immediately trigger a major conflict. There's a long series of negotiations to try and settle this, but the problem is that both sides feel that by arming, they can add weight into their negotiating position. So there is a shift to war. Toby Osborne, how strong were the forces, the alliances backing the Catholic Holy Roman Empire?

Well, the emperor himself actually lacked the resources when war broke out actually to pursue a war against these rebels so far as he saw them. And in the first instance, he turned to Ferdinand II we're talking about here, the emperor from 1619, he turns to his Spanish cousins, who at that moment are fairly willing to offer support to the imperial Habsburgs.

The Spanish, at that moment, were at peace with the Dutch, and that truce was going to expire in 1621, but nevertheless they're at peace. But they've got an eye on the fact that war may well resume, so the Spanish have their own strategic interests in supporting the emperor at this stage. The emperor also turns to Maximilian of Bavarian, we've heard from Malinka about Bavaria already,

a power that's ambitious, but feels partly marginalised. It's not an electoral power at this stage. And so the Emperor can't necessarily defeat these rebels by himself, but he does so in alliance with these self-interested parties, his cousins and the Bavarians at the head of the Catholic League. One grounds did the Protestants have, if any, for thinking that they could resolve this quickly by force?

Well, I'm not sure the Protest necessarily did think that they could resolve this by force. Partly circumstance. I think this is one of the features, and Peter and O'Lincoln may have their own ideas about this. This is, for me, it's one of the distinguishing features of this period, is that combatants tended to think that they were in the right, and that arguments for going to war partly rested on recourse to legal arguments, to dynastic arguments, to principles. And certainly,

The elector of Palatinate, who became the elected king of Bohemia, thought he was in the right. The problem was, so did Ferdinand. And this is where we had this loggerhead situation, where neither side felt able or willing, at least at those moments, to back down. Circumstances changed things at various moments. Frederick defeated, wanted a settlement, but was unable to reach a settlement, and things became more problematic when his home territories were occupied as a consequence of the rebellion. Was there any sense at an early stage that this was going to be? come a 30 years war?

No, and again I think at various moments we have these sort of staging posts, so to speak, in the conflict as it unfolded, where peace could have been obtained and possibly peace could have been reached quite early in this period after the Battle of

White Mountain where the Bohemians are defeated, Frederick's defeated at the hands of the imperialists but for circumstances again mitigated against that Frederick retired out of Bohemia, retired northwards, and actually managed in the aftermath to muster some forces,

which provoked an imperial response. And as part of the actual package of rewarding the Spanish and the Bavarians, they went on then to occupy Ferdinand's patrimonial territories. And it's at that point where things arguably begin to move beyond just a regional rebellion to a much large. larger international conflict. It seems rather stop-start. It's coming to an end and then another

power comes in, another force to be reckoned with, and on it goes again. Then, as Toby said, it settles down to what's going to become a very long war. It was to devastate the region. Can you give us some idea what the ordinary people suffered during this time?

Yeah, first of all, perhaps we should talk about figures, but they're very hard to come by. We now think about 15% population loss across the German. lands. But the key point here is to say it was not a collective trauma. So this did not hit Germany at the same time and in the same way. So on the one hand, we can think of a territory in the southwest like Wittenberg where we have 57% population loss, 57, but mostly after the Battle of

Nuttling in 1634. On the other hand, Saxony 10 to 20%, and then a city like Hamburg in the north that is not so hit. Most of the deaths were a result of disease that came in the wake of soldiers moving, fighting, rather than direct combat, of course. And the experience of common people, we will talk about cannibalism, I think,

was first of all, when the war had its devastating impact, it was because soldiers were quartered in houses. You have to remember, this is a period when people live with a very delicate ecology, they have one pig, and that one pig will be slaughtered in December, and that gets you through winter. They have one cow, that's a cow, that gives you all your milk.

The soldiers are quarter because the war is meant to feed on the war. They're quartered in people's houses, and they just live off the resources because no soldier knows how long he's going to live. So there's then also famine, and that is where cannibalism come in. So it's always been thought. I mean, it's a fear. There's actually very little evidence that it happened, but there is some evidence that it did happen.

And that is because also the idea was, and it was legitimized since antiquity, that it was a sign of absolute desperation that made this legitimate. So, for instance, there's a pastor from an area near Augsburg who writes in horror about a woman who's eaten her husband, and his superior simply replies, okay, just don't punish her too hard.

Very briefly. Just very briefly, just to follow on from Malinka's point about plague, it shouldn't be forgotten, of course, that Italy, northern Italy was devastated by a plague as a consequence of incursions of troops from the empire at the end of 1629 into 1630. And Italy wasn't a major battleground. Maybe we'll come on to talk about this in a bit. But nevertheless, its effects were certainly felt beyond the empire as well. Peter Wilson, Sweden then comes into the conflict. It's these countries keep popping up and things seem to die down, and then another log's thrown on the fire, isn't it really?

That's right. Now, Sweden blows the idea in every way that it's a religious war because they go in for commercial reasons, as I understand it. Not exactly, no. I mean, you're quite right. The Swedish intervention transforms the situation. I mean, the war is effectively over by June of 1629. The emperor has defeated all of his opponents,

and there's about a year, and the Swedes intervene. So they are celebrated in propaganda in print as saving German Protestants. That's not the case. They haven't been invited. The brother-in-law of Gustavus Adolphus, the Swedish king, the electorate Brandenburg says, you know, the Swedes is a foreign prince who has no right to be here. So why didn't they go?

They come in because they feel their own security interests are affected. and they're trying to carve out a Baltic Empire. So that's not religion. It's their insecurity in carving out a baltic empire. Pretty much. Their interventions brokered by France, which helps fund this. So that's Catholic supporting Protestant. Indeed it is. It is. Yes, that's right.

I mean, obviously, what they're pursuing is a war where they see long-term religious goals as reconcilable with their more immediate strategic interests. So they think that an intervention, in the empire will redress the balance and restore the lost rights of the Lutherans in particular. Is there any sense that your level-headed theoretical retrospective view is actually covering up what was opportunism? The empire was weak, it was all over the place,

and there was a chance to grab something while they're going was good. There is, I think, an element of opportunism in the Swedish intervention. That's true. I mean, they land with maps that only go as far as northern Germany and as a result of after about 15 months of intervention of a result of a major victory at Breitenfeldt, they greatly increase their goals because the scope of their operations increases. One thing I would add as a bit of caution is that we've got to remember

these are people who are not cynically using religion to excuse things and they are all very devout. And so they do think that if they act contrary to true religion, they will be punished for this. So there is a measure of caution here. That's why I don't want to override religion because everybody was bound by most. Oh, most everyone.

If you weren't, you kept your mouth shot, your tongue was cut out. It was bound by religion at that time. But it wasn't at the forefront. It wasn't we are going to save the souls of the people in North Germany. Not in terms of the Swedish. intervention, though. Thank you. But here also we have a real challenge for historians. How do we read the sources? If we read the official declaration of Sweden, it is absolutely all about commerce in the Baltic. And at the same time, Gustavus of Dolphus writes to the elect of Brandenburg in four lines

saying, look, you're either with us and on the side of God or you're on the side of evil. So how do we reconcile these two documents? Well, that's when we had to sort out. Plenty to do for the next few minutes. Toby, there was a lot of proxy wars going on around the edges. Can you give us one or two of the most prominent ones? Well, we could probably, for simplicity sake, reduce this to three. The Baltic, and we've heard a bit about that already from Peter. And this Baltic region involved a series of ongoing denastic territorial commercial disputes between Sweden and Poland on the one hand

and Sweden and Denmark on the other. A second region was in the Netherlands involving Spain and the Dutch Republic as it was. And of course, for the Dutch, this is their 80 years war that had its origins in the 1560s, itself resolved in 1648, temporarily put on hold in 609 and then resumed in 1621. And then a third region would be North Italy. So those, broadly speaking, are the three areas that around the edges that have an impact, a role to play. Olinka, you mentioned documents.

Was there any sense in which the press, let's call it the press for ease, played a part in this? Yeah, the press is organized in ways that it hasn't been. So we have by 1648, we have 30 weekly newspapers with distribution of 15,000 and many more readers. And we have publications like the Teartremao, which really tries to give as close an account of battles and of negotiations as possible. Well, that's for literature reader. But then this is also a great age of propaganda. So we have single leaf broochies, just as in the Reformation, that combined images and texts. And for instance, one of the great battles is that of Magdeburg, that resists the Catholic forces, is then taken by Tilly.

And instantly, the Catholic propaganda celebrates that as a triumph against the maiden who has been taken rightfully. Whereas the Protestants say, well, the maiden is just sleeping and she's waiting for a rescuer, the Protestants build up instantly Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden as a Protestant rescuer. And he dies, of course, very quickly after two years, so in 1632 at the Battle of Lutzen, and instantly stylized as a martyr who spilled his blood in order to save German liberties and Protestantism. And of course, there were many tensions we must not forget, amongst Lutherans even. So, Johann Georg of Saxony played a particular role. He is portrayed alongside Gustavus Adolphus to demonstrate Protestant unity. So certainly there's a lot

of propaganda that it comes into play. How effective is it? Well, it has a middling effect. I mean, I think the thing to do is to think that some material is targeted at particular audiences. So what the general population are getting are essentially messages that are passed through the pulpit, and that is basically your sins have caused this war. And so this is another way in which we can see this is a war involving religion, but not in the way that we would expect religion to be involved. So there are no calls to arms, they're not told to go and massacre their neighbours. On the contrary, they're told that it's your sinfulness, and you need to be obedient and pious and eventually God will take war away.

Does God say anything about the devastation of Magdeburg where 20,000 people were killed? Is there any propaganda about what we thought of as a mass slaughter at that time? There's certainly, as Sir Lucas says, I mean, this is woven into the sort of Swedish rationale. I mean, the Swedes basically have egged on the defenders who have accordingly then refused summons and the city catches fire and most of the people are in fact seemingly suffocated in cellars and so on rather than directly killed and it's a disaster

for everyone all concerned and so the various Well definitely definitely but I mean it's a political disaster for both sides I mean from the Catholic point of view the imperial side they wanted to capture the city to use it as a base so Tilly actually has to then publish a kind of defence of his actions and for the Swedes they get they're off the hook by the fact that the city has been destroyed

because that atrocity then wipes out the fact that they weren't able to save it you wanted to come in Toby just to say again looking from the margins from the proxy war so to speak what's interesting I think in the cases of England we haven't mentioned England at all so far the Stuart England. But also, I think, particularly more interestingly, arguably from the perspective of France, is the potential for domestic opinion

actually to play a role, at least to be mobilised or to be called upon, and Richelier, who is France's chief minister for much of this period, faced enormous domestic pressures for his policies in opposing or seemingly opposing Catholic interests in the empire, at least opposing

the imperialist's interests. And we shouldn't forget that as we've been talking about the fact that religion arguably wasn't a component of the war in the way that we might understand, there were moments when religion could have a part to play in the political arguments, discourse and so on. And that's, I think, very evident in the ways in which French policymaking was framed. Richler had to respond to those kinds of arguments that he was facing at home about the morality, for want of a better word, of his foreign policies. Likewise, I think another actor we haven't mentioned, which from my own work, I'm interested in terms of the, papacy, the papacy's role during

the entire 30s war, as again, there's something very interesting. It faces criticism at times for not intervening forcefully enough in defence of religion in the empire. There's a lovely satire that appears in the wake of Sweden's intervention of the church covered in flies,

beseeching Rome for aid and Rome not coming to the church's aid. Who fought this wall? There weren't, no, as I understand that there weren't many, if any, standing armies. So who felt this war? So there were volunteers, but there were conscripts and essentially mercenaries. We have up to hundreds of thousands of soldiers who fight. Where do the mercenaries come from, mostly? Well, they come from different countries, Scots, and all of people from Greece, even Cyprus. So it's very multinational, but of course most of them were Germans.

I'm a gem because that's where it was taken. You put your hand up. Yes, I mean, just to sort of qualify the term mercenary, which is kind of a historical and heavily laden with prejudice. And so I think it's better to think of these soldiers as very badly paid and ill-disciplined regular troops. So they are recruited as Olenka says from, by and large from the subjects of the ruler that they are serving except in the case of the Swedes,

where they're the German collaborators, the princes that have allied with the Swedes who are raising the bulk of the troops. But aren't they, you say local people, did somebody go around the villages and say you, you and you? Or were the people who had already had some training in warfare who were knocking about who were brought into these armies? Well, on the whole, what's really interesting,

is that Germany, because they're no standing armies, I mean, people are not in the frame of mind for soldiering very often. I mean, you know, the rulers try to mobilize them for defense purposes. And the peasants, they're really not interested. They just fool around. So this is very different from our notion of men actually being interested in they're not. So if we look at the, then the people who do this, we know most about one particular soldier who left a diary from the time of 1624 to the end of the war.

And this is a very typical soldier. He fights on different sides. He marches 25,000. kilometers altogether. He even gets to Italy, which he loves. So, you know, we have to remember that at the time German life and communities was very rulebound. So this was an opportunity for risk takers. This was an opportunity for men who wanted to go against conventions. That meant in reality, for instance, a lot of rape, which he records. Then he eventually does marry, but then he had to look after a wife and even managed the logistics of having a son and schooling him.

So quite remarkably. But yeah, he does, for instance, talk about fighting at Magdeburg. And he does just note, oh, I was sorry to see this beautiful city of my fatherland go up in flames. And he's heavily injured. But, you know, he does that all and just will keep fighting for whoever he's fighting for. I think certainly just to follow on from those points, we shouldn't think of this period as one in which there are conscript or volunteers, volunteer armies paid for by states of their own subjects.

And that we have a kind of mixed economy of fighting here of public private initiatives, of businessmen, of nobles, who are using their resources, their connections, their credit mechanisms to raise troops in the hope of getting returns at some point. And one of the other things I think that's quite striking at various moments throughout the period, not just the 30 years war, is that various armies are multinational. we've already touched on this. The Dutch armies, for instance, before the 30s war included, people from all over Europe, from Bortick, Scandinavia, from Italy,

from the British Isles, and equally quite strikingly. Again, this comes back to a point we've talked about in relation to religion. These could also be cross-confessional armies as well. That's to say, Catholics fighting in Protestant armies or vice versa. So I have a feeling that the place of the Holy Roman Empire across Europe, these people are moving from one area to an army. are they dependent on opportunities and circumstances and people they owe their allegiance to?

And this just goes on and on. Does it ever seem any logic in it? Yes, there is logic. I mean, this is the thing. The standard picture is that this somehow gets out of control and if we look at the sort of engravings of the time, so Jacques Callow, the greater and lesser miseries of war and shows all these scenes of plundering.

And obviously that is happening. But plundering is incredibly bad for discipline. and it erodes military cohesion, and it is punished, and the last of Callow's engravings is the hanging tree, and they are marauders who have been punished. And it is a sign that while there were very, very considerable problems, this was a war fought conventionally,

and the purpose of war was not to exterminate your opponent, it was to force your opponent to make an acceptable peace. And the negotiations and the deployments, and the diplomacy of the war are very closely linked to the military operations which had that purpose. So how did they set about trying to construct a peace treaty which could become a lasting peace

which ended up in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648? I mean, how do they move towards that? Well, a meaningful beginning to the 1648 settlement really can be located in the early 1640s. But I think Peter's absolutely right. it took, I think, partly because of the way in which people went into war, having recourse to arguments, legal arguments, juridical arguments, trying to defend their positions. On the one hand, this made actual negotiating problematic because people would have to come to a point where they would compromise on those principles. But actually, it also made the war receptive to negotiation throughout.

That's the point, I think, of legal arguments that they're open to negotiation. the problem was is actually getting the different parties, as Peter said, to a point where they're willing to negotiate and I think that therefore comes down to an issue of when their military successes or failures were out in terms of the balances between those military successes and failures

when they reached the point where it was no longer to a benefit to continue fighting. Sort of exhaustion? I wouldn't call it exhaustion. No, not really. No, it's more strategic calculation, I think. Absolutely. This is the thing. I entirely agree. I mean, this war doesn't end through mutual exhaustion.

They could have carried on fighting, but most of the parties have got enough sufficient gains that they deem it acceptable to make peace. Well, Linko, what sense were writers of the time and other art in making of this? Well, the best known is Grimmelshausen, but what's important to know about him is that he's born in 1621 and he writes long after.

And he really sensationalizes figures like famously the Courage, a woman who's governed by her insatiable sexual lust and also her insatiable lust for plundering. And his other figure is the simply Cisemos. So what he wants to move away from in a way is that predominant view that war is made by God or, you know, divinely ordained. And he depicts it as very manmade as bringing out the worst. in people, such as Courage, who, I mean, this is what keeps readers going, sadly. I mean, scenes of group sex with multiple soldiers and so on. So the depravity, and yet she's a kind of very alluring, a can-do woman. She decides to be a farmer, and then she is a farmer, and she's always cunning and a survivor.

Both of them are survivors. So that is one of the responses. I, Peter, I hurried you through this getting to the piece, which was not exhausted, which I just put forward as a proposition to be contradicted, of course, which you did. Now then, can you tell us a bit more, you two, why they decided, after slogging it out for 30 years, that now is the time to stop, a bit more detail? Well, the French and the Swedes, so France has intervened in 1635 at the point when it looks as if the Swedes are going to be knocked out, and the French and the Swedes evolve eventually a fairly effective military partnership,

which targets the various German principalities that are still back in the emperor, and they bully them into neutrality. So gradually the parts of the empire that are supporting the imperial armies are shrinking. So the emperor is definitely on a back foot. And he has a very effective negotiating team. He makes a series of concessions about the arrangements for the peace negotiations, so two cities in the region of Vesphalia are declared neutral. and Osnabrück, and his generals are, while they still suffer significant defeats,

nonetheless hold sufficient ground that it becomes obvious to the Swedes and the French that this will just drag on forever, and so they are prepared to compromise on some of their demands as well. To go back to the empire on the UK, was there any sense ever that the Holurom Empire felt we've had it where we're about to disintegrate. Did they ever feel seriously threatened? You mean as an empire? Yes, the Honorable Empire and the people around him.

I wouldn't think so, really. I mean, it was clear that they saw themselves as the elected leaders of this entity and very powerful, so I wouldn't. Yeah, there are some pretty dark moments but the point is that they still have sufficient forces to continue fighting and they're still able to mobilize external support. So all this disruption didn't affect them fundamentally?

The ruling Habsburg family of them didn't affect, that's what I mean by them. Well, it depends on what you mean by fundamentally. Well, let's just go for the ordinary. How fundamental. I mean, one of the really extraordinary features is the financing. I mean, if you just think of how expensive, I mean, that's why there is no standing army in the German, because it is so expensive. And yet, the financing goes on and on and on.

The resources keep moving. But I think a point we really have to stress in the program is then how the war is remembered. And we really have to turn to the 19th century. And that is the great age when myths about this war are constructed. And what myths are the? Who wants to start with the myths, do we? Well, just to go back to an earlier point of mine, May about the existential threat to the empire. If there was a threat, arguably it came from

the emperor when he overplays his hand at various moments and the German princes feel threatened. So it's actually a reverse threat, not the threat to the emperor, but threat from the emperor. Going on to the consequences, yeah, sorry. Let's just go back to the Peace of Westphalia itself in 1648. Must have been a bit of a surprise to a lot of people. How did it play at the time? How did it go down at the time? Well, the peace negotiations have been going on for a number of years and there are certainly concerns whether this piece will last so there are great efforts to convince people that the piece has actually been finally made

so around 30,000 printed copies of the peace treaty are made and distributed there is a special Congress of generals that is held in Nuremberg which settle the process of paying off and withdrawing the troops that's actually extraordinarily successful and by about 1650 it is very clear that the empire is at peace whereas the French and the Spanish are continuing their war for another eight years. But yes, even longer they lasted.

Nine years, yes, that's right. And so then we move into this era of initially celebration, so literally a big fireworks display at the end of the Swedes, to outdo the imperialists with their firework displays, so rivalry is still continuing. But then we move into this process of commemoration, which is done deliberately on an almost annual basis. Let's talk about commemoration and legacy.

Toby. If I may before we get there, just very briefly to follow on Peter's point, the choreography of the peace negotiations, I think are really quite important, quite fascinating in their own rights. Having these two separate cities effectively taken out of imperial jurisdiction for the duration of the talks. And this, I think, is a response to the delicacies

of actually organizing a piece on this scale, but also between the confessions. And this does, to a degree, pave the way to future negotiations. Well, I'll go to you, Alinka. What was commemorative about this from 1648 onwards? I mean, it's actually commemorated still in the city of Augsburg today. There's a peace meal and children, I think, get something for free. So what matters then, however, in the 19th century is the common toleration that is really quite fatal on two levels.

So first of all, here arises the idea, partly because Grimelshausen is now read in a major way that this was a collective trauma for the German nation. And there's myth-making that the opportunity to build a strong Protestant nation state was lost, in particular when Gustavus Adolfs. die, that he would have been that leader. And that, in fact, it's a negative commemoration from then on that lasts into the 20th century, that the peace of Westphalia reduced this wonderful

nation of culture to just a puzzle of little insignificant territories and Germany just into, in a way, an insignificant entity in Europe.

I think there's another story also to speak of which we've mentioned. in passing, that's to say the myth of Westphalia. And if we're talking about its legacy, then the legacy for international relations specialists and for historians of the diplomacy has been enormous, although misguided. And that's rested very briefly on two foundations.

First of all, that this was the last war of religion, and we've already dissected that to a degree, but also that this is the first time, this is the first piece involving states as autonomous, discrete entities who can make their own policies. Both of those foundations, both those claims are problematic.

finally? Yes, I entirely agree. I think we shift, in terms of commemoration, we shift from a fairly positive memory initially. I mean, apart from the destruction, that's emphasized right from the beginning, but that the piece of Vesfaylis, as Toby says, I mean, it's international dimension has been exaggerated.

It really was a settlement of sort of resetting the imperial constitution, and that is actually very successful. The empire lasts another 150 years or so, when it collapses in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, then this negative narrative sets in exactly as Erlinka was outlining. Well, thank you very much, Peter Wilson, Erlinka Rubelach, and Tony Osborne. Next week it's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the great medieval poem set at Camelot at Christmas and lost for hundreds of years.

Thanks for listening. And thanks to the listeners for sending that idea in. In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotsam. A new In Our Time book, marking the programme's 20th birthday, and based on 50 of the most popular programmes is available now. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Would you love to have said that you didn't say?

I think to come back to your question about why the war will last so long and what we were talking about in terms of the financing of the war, I mean, I think the thing that we missed is really this redistribution of land and titles and jurisdictions. So essentially because the major rulers can't pay their armies, they're relying on the senior commanders to sort of raise these troops on credit, and the senior commanders are being rewarded with essentially gifts of territory. So the emperor starts this by confiscating property from his opponents

and the changes that happen in Bohemia are the largest transfer of private property. in Europe prior to the seizure by the communists, in fact, of the descendants of the beneficiaries of this process in the late 4thes. And then the Swedes then copy this process very quickly once they've arrived. And so what you have is you have the rulers who are essentially in hock to their military commanders and it's then very difficult to make peace without having to actually return some of these possessions. I'm reading more of your accounts that the idea of a standing army became quite attractive and that was when Prussia began to build up a standing army. Yeah, one of the interesting effects is, for instance,

if we look at Frederick Wilhelm of Brandenburg and then Brunberg Prussia can be argued that his whole sense of how he locates himself in time really shifts with this war, that he thinks of that as a period of chaos and uses that as an opportunity to push true against his estates that they must now finance a standing army and this was vastly expensive in order of course he says to be able not just to react but you know to act be prepared for defensive wars but as we know with silesia later on of course these were also aggressive wars that followed then from that prussian army and that was a consequence of this 30 years war well i mean you know the building up of standing armies was yeah yeah in progress

What did you want to say that you didn't say to him? Gosh, one of the things that interests me in my own work, for instance, the intersections between art and politics. And we've heard about some of the literary responses to war, but there are also some artistic responses to war that are quite striking. You mean literature isn't art? Visual art, I should say. I stand corrected. Visual art.

And certainly my own interests in Rubens, who's a fascinating figure in this period, as an artist diplomat. and somebody for whom art is visual art is a way of getting his head around peacemaking and also arguably around cross-confessional peacemaking as well, peacemaking between Catholics and Protestants. If you were to go, for instance, the National Gallery,

you'll see one of his visual responses to war and also in the Dulwich Picture Gallery. And art becomes a kind of international cultural language which can actually mediate other kinds of differences. and I think that's for Rubens personally. Well, for Rubens personally, it was a way for him to, somebody who is based in a war-torn area, so to speak, on the front line in Antwerp, which had suffered greatly in the war against the Dutch,

this is under Spanish control. But also for rulers, for princes and courts who looked to his art and were interested in his art, it was a way in which they could actually have conversations that weren't directly about divisional politics, they were shared interests. did we dig into as deeply as we could have done into the causes of the war? Well, yeah, they are actually, we could have certainly say, yeah.

There's lots more you can say. How many more episodes do you walk? I mean, I think, I think. Obviously, we didn't you talk about the formation of the Protestant and the Catholic? That would be the one thing I, I mean, to pick up on Olinca's point about Bavaria. I mean, there is, we know of the Habsburgs. They're the number one family in the empire, but there is a second family, the Wittlesbach's. and this is also an inter-familial feud between them.

There is the Bavarian branch who back the Emperor and the Palatine branch oppose the Emperor, and the Bavarians gain at the Palatine expense. And they had a specific historical president for this in the middle of the 16th century, and they calculate that once their Palatine cousins have put their foot wrong by accepting the Bohemian crown, they think this is their opportunity of achieving electoral status. So it is taken, the status is removed from the Platonet

and given to the Bavarian branch as a reward. And in the peace of Vistphalia, it's enshrines. So suddenly there are eight electors, and that is, so really they're managed to be the eight electors, the Bavarians. And that just means that you're... That's right,

amongst the most powerful people in that structure of governance. Did the empire and the emperor of the empire go on in that stayed for much longer? Or was it weakened by this and bled away in some way? I would argue it's actually strengthened. I mean, many, the great outcome really of the piece of Vesvailia is to sort of remove the abstract from religious disputes. So you're not arguing whether Lutheranism is better than Catholicism. Theologically, you're arguing,

do you have the right to exercise jurisdiction over a particular church? And so it makes it much more difficult to polarise disputes. And the empire develops a very sophisticated legal machinery that resolves these through a process of arbitration. And these sort of cataclysmic divisions, political divisions, and otherwise do not reoccur, in fact, until the rise of pressure basically breaks the system as being a second disproportionately large and powerful

German state alongside the Austrian Habsburgs. But finally, as you said, we scarcely mention the Calvinists who were extremely important. Yes, and we can look at a figure like Frederick of the Palatinate. I mean, here he is, he's age 23. He's very young when he decides to take the Bohemian crown. He's married to Elizabeth Stewart, and they really are the kind of glamour couple of the period. He's such a coup to have married into what is perceived as a... a strong English state that, of course, has united the crowns and is perceived to be much more

pecunius than the Palatine. And Palatin is quite poor. Many of these small German territories don't have a lot of financial backing. So here he is age 23 thinking he can take the Bohemian crown. And there, you know, I do think we need to think a bit more about the psychology of someone like that. what kind of man was he, what was really going on in his mind, but then we are sometimes limited by the sources. They don't always tell us. Well, thank you all very much. I think we're being interrupted.

Interrupted to your coffee. A cup of tea, please. Tea. Yeah, tea would be great. Tees, Melvin. Four teas. Hi, I'm Monty. Sorry for interrupting your podcast.

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