Moments in Time: The Thirty Years' War (part 1)

Twice a year, I record a broadcast (or series of broadcasts) for my college's public radio station, WUCX, for their Moment in Time segment. I decided to collect the texts of these together here, as I have not been using this blog for anything else. Bear in mind these are aimed at a popular audience, so they are not the most cutting-edge scholarship. I have oversimplified a little at times, but hope I've avoided any outright errors.

This entry is the first in a pair that were first broadcast in January 2018.

The audio of this broadcast can be found here.

1618: The Thirty Years' War (part 1)

2018 marks a significant anniversary of one of Europe’s bloodiest wars. I don’t mean the end of World War One, the centenary of which occurs in November, but the 400^th anniversary of the start of an equally devastating conflict: the Thirty Years War. By the time it ended in 1648, the war had killed as many as 8 million people; more than ten times the death toll of the American Civil War. Yet, outside Germany where it was mainly fought, it is a war that few people today have heard of.

The Defenestration of Prague

The Thirty Years War is often explained as a conflict over religion; this conveniently fits the label ‘Wars of Religion’ which we historians tend to slap onto conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as allowing us to view it as a product of the benighted past that we modern westerners think we have grown out of. And yes, it’s hard to ignore religion as a motivating factor. Germany in 1618 was divided into Catholic and Protestant states, the legacy of the Reformation that had begun almost exactly a hundred years earlier. The war started when Protestants in Bohemia (today’s Czech Republic) expelled officials of their Catholic ruler– an event given the catchy name ‘the Defenestration of Prague.’ (‘Defenestration’ meaning they threw them out of a window - remember that word for future spelling bees, trivia quizzes, and elections). Religion probably added a level of violence to what turned out to be a brutal conflict, as the other side could be seen not just as opponents but as enemies of God. The deadly persecution of women labelled as witches also reached its height in wartime Germany, possibly a side-effect of heightened religious intolerance.

It would be simplistic, however, to see the Thirty Years War simply as a war of religion. The war was also about power-politics within the collapsing Holy Roman Empire, which covered Germany and much of Central Europe. The philosopher Voltaire joked that it was neither Holy, Roman, nor an Empire – its rulers were no saints; its power-base was in Austria and Bohemia, not Rome; and it was a collection of hundreds of virtually independent states under the very loose authority of its emperor. So when the Bohemians threw out their Catholic king, who belonged to the Habsburg imperial dynasty, it was not just a question of religion, but a challenge to the empire itself. And when neighboring countries were drawn into the conflict, it was to prevent the Habsburgs turning the imperial title from a meaningless honor to a political reality. So we see Catholic France fighting alongside Protestant Germans and Dutchmen against Catholic, Habsburg Austria.

Seventeenth century people were not all religious fanatics; Prague, where the war began, was a center of learning and science. Queen Christina of Sweden, the leading Protestant power in the war, was a patron of scientists and philosophers, and later gave up her throne to become a Catholic.  We have to understand seventeenth-century Europe as the world that gave us both the Scientific Revolution, Galileo and Newton and religious persecution and the witch-hunt. The Thirty Years War helped give birth to the modern world, a theme I will return to in part 2, when we will look at the legacy of the war.