The Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648

by Samuel Rawson Gardiner

What a peace it was when it really came at last! Whatever life there was under that deadly blast of war had been attracted to the camps. The strong man who had lost his all turned soldier that he might be able to rob others in turn. The young girl, who in better times would have passed on to a life of honourable wedlock with some youth who had been the companion of her childhood in the sports around the village fountain, had turned aside, for very starvation, to a life of shame in the train of one or other of the armies by which her home had been made desolate. In the later years of the war it was known that a body of 40,000 fighting men drew along with it a loathsome following of no less than 140,000 men, women, and children, contributing nothing to the efficiency of the army, and all of them living at the expense of the miserable peasants who still contrived to hold on to their ruined fields. If these were to live, they must steal what yet remained to be stolen; they must devour, with the insatiable hunger of locusts, what yet remained to be devoured. And then, if sickness came, or wounds—and sickness was no infrequent visitor in those camps—what remained but misery or death? Nor was it much better with the soldiers themselves. No careful surgeons passed over the battle-field to save life or limb. No hospitals received the wounded to the tender nursing of loving, gentle hands. Recruits were to be bought cheaply, and it cost less to enrol a new soldier than to cure an old one.

§ 2. Decrease of the population.

The losses of the civil population were almost incredible. In a certain district of Thuringia which was probably better off than the greater part of Germany, there were, before the war cloud burst, 1,717 houses standing in nineteen villages. In 1649, only 627 houses were left. And even of the houses which remained many were untenanted. The 1,717 houses had been inhabited by 1,773 families. Only 316 families could be found to occupy the 627 houses. Property fared still worse. In the same district 244 oxen alone remained of 1,402. Of 4,616 sheep, not one was left. Two centuries later the losses thus suffered were scarcely recovered.

§ 3. Moral decadence.

And, as is always the case, the physical decline of the population was accompanied by moral decadence. Men who had been accustomed to live by the strong arm, and men who had been accustomed to suffer all things from those who were strong, met one another, even in the days of peace, without that mutual respect which forms the basis of well-ordered life. Courts were crowded with feather-brained soldiers whose highest ambition was to bedeck themselves in a splendid uniform and to copy the latest fashion or folly which was in vogue at Paris or Versailles. In the country district a narrow-minded gentry, without knowledge or culture, domineered over all around, and strove to exact the uttermost farthing from the peasant in order to keep up the outward appearance of rank. The peasant whose father had been bullied by marauding soldiers dared not lift up his head against the exactions of the squire. The burden of the general impoverishment fell heavily upon his shoulders. The very pattern of the chairs on which he sat, of the vessels out of which he ate and drank, assumed a ruder appearance than they had borne before the war. In all ranks life was meaner, poorer, harder than it had been at the beginning of the century.

§ 4. Intellectual decline even before the war.

If much of all this was the result of the war, something was owing to causes antecedently at work. The German people in the beginning of the seventeenth century was plainly inferior to the German people in the beginning of the sixteenth century. During the whole course of the war Maximilian of Bavaria was the only man of German birth who rose to eminence, and even he did not attain the first rank. The destinies of the land of Luther and Göthe, of Frederick II. and Stein were decided by a few men of foreign birth. Wallenstein was a Slavonian, Tilly a Walloon, Gustavus a Swede, Richelieu a Frenchman. The penalty borne by a race which was unable to control individual vigour within the limits of a large and fruitful national life was that individual vigour itself died out.

§ 5. Difficulties inherited from early times.

We may well leave to those who like such tasks the work of piling up articles of accusation against this man or that, of discovering that the war was all the fault of Ferdinand, or all the fault of Frederick, as party feeling may lead them. Probably the most lenient judgment is also the truest one. With national and territorial institutions the mere chaos which they were, an amount of political intelligence was needed to set them right which would be rare in any country or in any age.