CHAPTER VIII.
The Church gathered herself for one supreme effort to stem this fatal tide, which was loosening her foundations.
Just one hundred years from the birth of Protestantism, pope and emperor, putting their spiritual and temporal heads together, planned a crusade against twenty-five million Protestants.
The desultory war against the new heresy had been ineffectual. As it was stamped out in one place, it blazed up afresh in others. Now it should be, at whatever cost, exterminated in the German Empire.
Thus was initiated what is known as the "Thirty Years' War," the most desolating in history. Generations came and went while it raged fierce and furious—eight million slain, and twelve million surviving to meet horrors worse than death. Cattle exterminated, food exhausted, the uncultivated fields drenched with blood and tears—a vast graveyard, in which were the mouldering corpses of eight million slaughtered people, one-third of the population of the empire! Earth was kneaded into bread; men found dead with their mouths filled with grass; and there are frightful stories of human beings hunted down, like deer, for food.
The spirit of the people was broken. Germany had been set back two hundred years. And for what? Not to accomplish any high purpose, not even from mistaken Christian zeal, but simply to carry out the despotic resolve of the Catholic Church to rule the minds and consciences of all men through its popes and priesthood. It was the old battle commenced six centuries before. Had Henry not gone to Canossa in 1073, there had been no Thirty Years' War in 1618!
The empire of Charlemagne virtually perished during this struggle, the Hapsburgs wearing its empty ornaments and trappings for a couple of centuries more, imaginary rulers of an imaginary empire, the reality and substance of which had departed.
There was a flickering of the dying splendor when Maria Theresa was empress (mother of the unfortunate Marie Antoinette), and impressed her own strong, brilliant personality upon her empire and age—an age rendered memorable also by the great Frederick, who brought Prussia from obscurity to be ranked with the great powers, and thus rekindled national pride and renewed the hopes of Germany.