There was no lack here of materials for a long and terrible struggle. But there was no longer any noble aim in view on either side. The ideal of Ferdinand and Maximilian was gone. The Church was not to recover its lost property. The Empire was not to recover its lost dignity. The ideal of Gustavus of a Protestant political body was equally gone. Even the ideal of Wallenstein, that unity might be founded on an army, had vanished. From henceforth French and Swedes on the one side, Austrians and Spaniards on the other, were busily engaged in riving at the corpse of the dead Empire. The great quarrel of principle had merged into a mere quarrel between the Houses of Austria and Bourbon, in which the shred of principle which still remained in the question of the rights of the southern Protestants was almost entirely disregarded.
§ 8. Condition of Germany.
Horrible as the war had been from its commencement, it was every day assuming a more horrible character. On both sides all traces of discipline had vanished in the dealings of the armies with the inhabitants of the countries in which they were quartered. Soldiers treated men and women as none but the vilest of mankind would now treat brute beasts. 'He who had money,' says a contemporary, 'was their enemy. He who had none was tortured because he had it not.' Outrages of unspeakable atrocity were committed everywhere. Human beings were driven naked into the streets, their flesh pierced with needles, or cut to the bone with saws. Others were scalded with boiling water, or hunted with fierce dogs. The horrors of a town taken by storm were repeated every day in the open country. Even apart from its excesses, the war itself was terrible enough. When Augsburg was besieged by the imperialists, after their victory at Nördlingen, it contained an industrious population of 70,000 souls. After a siege of seven months, 10,000 living beings, wan and haggard with famine, remained to open the gates to the conquerors, and the great commercial city of the Fuggers dwindled down into a country town.
1636
§ 9. Notes of an English traveller.
How is it possible to bring such scenes before our eyes in their ghastly reality? Let us turn for the moment to some notes taken by the companion of an English ambassador who passed through the country in 1636. As the party were towed up the Rhine from Cologne, on the track so well known to the modern tourist, they passed "by many villages pillaged and shot down." Further on, a French garrison was in Ehrenbreitstein, firing down upon Coblentz, which had just been taken by the imperialists. "They in the town, if they do but look out of their windows, have a bullet presently presented at their head." More to the south, things grew worse. At Bacharach, "the poor people are found dead with grass in their mouths." At Rüdesheim, many persons were "praying where dead bones were in a little old house; and here his Excellency gave some relief to the poor, which were almost starved, as it appeared by the violence they used to get it from one another." At Mentz, the ambassador was obliged to remain "on shipboard, for there was nothing to relieve us, since it was taken by the King of Sweden, and miserably battered.... Here, likewise, the poor people were almost starved, and those that could relieve others before now humbly begged to be relieved; and after supper all had relief sent from the ship ashore, at the sight of which they strove so violently that some of them fell into the Rhine, and were like to have been drowned." Up the Main, again, "all the towns, villages, and castles be battered, pillaged, or burnt." After leaving Würzburg, the ambassador's train came to plundered villages, and then to Neustadt, "which hath been a fair city, though now pillaged and burnt miserably." Poor children were "sitting at their doors almost starved to death," his Excellency giving them food and leaving money with their parents to help them, if but for a time. In the Upper Palatinate, they passed "by churches demolished to the ground, and through woods in danger, understanding that Croats were lying hereabout." Further on they stayed for dinner at a poor little village "which hath been pillaged eight-and-twenty times in two years, and twice in one day." And so on, and so on. The corner of the veil is lifted up in the pages of the old book, and the rest is left to the imagination to picture forth, as best it may, the misery behind. After reading the sober narrative, we shall perhaps not be inclined to be so very hard upon the Elector of Saxony for making peace at Prague.
[CHAPTER X.]
THE PREPONDERANCE OF FRANCE.
[Section I.]—Open Intervention of France.
§ 1. Protestantism not yet out of danger.