Thirty years of war! The slaughters of Rome's worst Emperors, the persecution of the Christians under Nero and Diocletian, the invasions of the Huns and Magyars, the long struggle of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, left no such desolation behind them. At the beginning of the century, the population of the German Empire was about thirty millions: when the Peace of Westphalia was declared, it was scarcely more than twelve millions! Electoral Saxony, alone, lost 900,000 lives in two years. The population of Augsburg had diminished from 80,000 to 18,000, and out of 500,000 inhabitants, Würtemberg had but 48,000 left. The city of Berlin contained but three hundred citizens, the whole of the Palatinate of the Rhine but two hundred farmers. In Hesse-Cassel seventeen cities, forty-seven castles and three hundred villages were entirely destroyed by fire: thousands of villages, in all parts of the country, had but four or five families left out of hundreds, and landed property sank to about one-twentieth of its former value. Franconia was so depopulated that an Assembly held in Nuremberg ordered the Catholic priests to marry, and permitted all other men to have two wives. The horses, cattle and sheep were exterminated in many districts, the supplies of grain were at an end, even for sowing, and large cultivated tracts had relapsed into a wilderness. Even the orchards and vineyards had been wantonly destroyed wherever the armies had passed. So terrible was the ravage that in a great many localities, the same amount of population, cattle, acres of cultivated land and general prosperity, was not restored until the year 1848, two centuries afterwards!
1648. DESOLATION OF GERMANY.
This statement of the losses of Germany, however, was but a small part of the suffering endured. Only two commanders, Gustavus Adolphus and Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, preserved rigid discipline among their troops, and prevented them from plundering the people. All others allowed, or were powerless to prevent, the most savage outrages. During the last ten or twelve years of the war both Protestants and Catholics vied with each other in deeds of barbarity; the soldiers were nothing but highway robbers, who maimed and tortured the country people to make them give up their last remaining property, and drove hundreds of thousands of them into the woods and mountains to die miserably or live as half-savages. Multitudes of others flocked to the cities for refuge, only to be visited by fire and famine. In the year 1637, when Ferdinand II. died, the want was so great that men devoured each other, and even hunted down human beings like deer or hares, in order to feed upon them. Great numbers committed suicide, to avoid a slow death by hunger: on the island of Rügen many poor creatures were found dead, with their mouths full of grass, and in some districts attempts were made to knead earth into bread. Then followed a pestilence which carried off a large proportion of the survivors. A writer of the time exclaims: "A thousand times ten thousand souls, the spirits of innocent children butchered in this unholy war, cry day and night unto God for vengeance, and cease not: while those who have caused all these miseries live in peace and freedom, and the shout of revelry and the voice of music are heard in their dwellings!"
1648.
In character, in intelligence and in morality, the German people were set back two hundred years. All branches of industry had declined, commerce had almost entirely ceased, literature and the arts were suppressed, and except the astronomical discoveries of Copernicus and Kepler there was no contribution to human knowledge. Even the modern High-German language, which Luther had made the classic tongue of the land, seemed to be on the point of perishing. Spaniards and Italians on the Catholic, Swedes and French on the Protestant side, flooded the country with foreign words and expressions, the use of which soon became an affectation with the nobility, who did their best to destroy their native language. Wallenstein's letters to the Emperor were a curious mixture of German, French, Spanish, Italian and Latin.
Politically, the change was no less disastrous. The ambition of the house of Hapsburg, it is true, had brought its own punishment; the imperial dignity was secured to it, but henceforth the head of the "Holy Roman Empire" was not much more than a shadow. Each petty State became, practically, an independent nation, with power to establish its own foreign relations, make war and contract alliances. Thus Germany, as a whole, lost her place among the powers of Europe, and could not possibly regain it under such an arrangement: the Emperor and the Princes, together, had skilfully planned her decline and fall. The nobles who, in former centuries, had maintained a certain amount of independence, were almost as much demoralized as the people, and when every little prince began to imitate Louis XIV. and set up his own Versailles, the nobles in his territory became his courtiers and government officials. As for the mass of the people, their spirit was broken: for a time they gave up even the longing for rights which they had lost, and taught their children abject obedience in order that they might simply live.
1648. THE GERMAN STATES.
After the Thirty Years' War, Germany was composed of nine Electorates, twenty-four Religious Principalities (Catholic), nine princely Abbots, ten princely Abbesses, twenty-four Princes with seat and vote in the Diet, thirteen Princes without seat and vote, sixty-two Counts of the Empire, fifty-one Cities of the Empire, and about one thousand Knights of the Empire. These last, however, no longer possessed any political power. But, without them, there were two hundred and three more or less independent, jealous and conflicting States, united by a bond which was more imaginary than real; and this confused, unnatural state of things continued until Napoleon came to put an end to it.
CHAPTER XXX.
GERMANY, TO THE PEACE OF RYSWICK.