Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit Civil War in the Holy Roman Empire About this episode In this episode, we hear about one of Europe’s most devastating conflicts - the Thirty Years’ War. From 1618 to 1648, the continent was torn apart by religious strife, shifting alliances, and ruthless ambition. What began as a Bohemian rebellion exploded into a brutal struggle that reshaped borders, broke empires, and left millions dead.
We're joined by Peter Wilson, a professor of history at the University of Oxford and author of ‘The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy’. He takes us from the war’s early years to its bitter end, and explains how the conflict changed Europe forever.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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1:26 Dan Snow? Hi buddy, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In Germany, they still shudder at the destruction, the famine, the monstrous criminality and dislocation of the Thirty Years' War. From 1618 to 1648, a great swathes of Europe were given over to violence. It became a cockpit of war. Armies scoured the landscape, they lived off the land and its people like locusts.
2:03 Dan Snow? There are so many atrocities to choose from, but if you had to pick one out, you might want to talk about the 20th of May 1631, when the city of Magdeburg was sacked. A conquering army swarmed into the town and started looting. They set a few fires and soon the wind fanned the flames, and the fire ended up consuming nearly all the city's 1,900 buildings. Of 25,000 inhabitants, it's thought that only 5,000 would survive, and nearly all of them had been exposed to unimaginable trauma. We have an account by a politician in the town, a councilman, and he said, "When civilians ran out of things to give the soldiers,
2:48 Dan Snow? the misery really began. For then the soldiers began to beat and frighten and threaten to shoot, skewer, hang, etc., the people."
2:59 Dan Snow? It had been one of the largest cities in Germany, and it took over 100 years to recover something of its prosperity and size. The devastation was so great that a new word entered the German language: "Magdeburgizerrien", the "Magdeburgization", which signifies utter and complete destruction, rape and pillage.
3:26 Dan Snow? The Thirty's War was fought largely within the bounds of the Holy Roman Empire. This was a galaxy of states and statelets and cities, stretching from what is now France and Belgium, deep into Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to northern Italy. When Hitler is talking about the Third Reich, well, this was the First Reich. It was a very loose confederation of political units that were in practice pretty much independent, but were on paper all part of this empire. And at the top, there was an emperor, there was an imperial assembly, the diet, although its decisions weren't necessarily binding on that emperor, and indeed, the emperor's decisions were often not felt
4:10 Dan Snow? in some of the constituent parts of the empire. That emperor was chosen by seven electors, states which, pretty much by accident of history, had been given that privilege. If you were the Archbishop of Mainz, if you were the Archbishop of Triere or Cologne, or if you were the King of Bohemia, or the Count Palatine of the Rhine, or the Duke of Saxony, or the Margrave of Brandenburg, well, you were one of the seven people that were able to elect the emperor. But in practice, the emperor had been a member of the Habsburg family for a long, long time. They directly ruled over great swathes of the empire. They were kings of Bohemia, for example. So they ruled over much of modern Austria, and the Czech Republic, and Croatia, and elsewhere.
4:53 Dan Snow? They were the most powerful family in the empire, and so their succession to the imperial throne was largely just a rubber-stamping exercise. That fractious empire was no stranger to violence over its centuries of existence. But there was something so savage about the Thirty Years' War in the 17th century that it still stands out. Perhaps four to eight million people died from the violence, but also from the dislocation, the disease, the famine. Many regions, it said, lost up to a third of their population. So we're talking about a catastrophe on the scale of the Black Death. It left large parts of Central Europe devastated, and it set back the German people, the German economy, for generations. There
5:38 Dan Snow? are all sorts of fascinating historical consequences of the Thirty Years' War, and all sorts of tragic human ones as well. Tell us all about it. I'm so excited to have Peter Wilson back on the podcast. He's a professor of history at the University of Oxford. He specialises on the impact of war on European and world development, and on the Holy Roman Empire. It's a difficult subject, and luckily, we have just the man to guide us through it. His book, The Thirty Years' War: Europe's Tragedy, is a must-buy. So with our expert guide, let's take on this, well, very chunky bit of history. Here's the Thirty Years' War. Enjoy.
6:31 Dan Snow? Peter, great to see you. Thanks for coming back on the podcast.
6:33 Speaker 02 Well, thank you. Thanks for having me back.
6:35 Dan Snow? I guess the thing I'd like you to explain to me first is what's the political geography of Europe in the 17th century? Because this is what everyone thinks about with the Thirty Years' War and the emergence of these nation-states. What does Central Europe, the German lands, how are they run? Who's in charge of what?
6:51 Speaker 02 Right, well, how long have you got for that one?
6:52 Dan Snow? About 30 seconds, thanks.
6:56 Speaker 02 I think it's best to see it as a kind of collective in which the major components don't have equal powers, but in order to get things done, they're basically forced to collaborate. And one of the causes of the war is the breakdown of that collaboration. So you have the position of emperor, which is elected, but in practice is more or less monopolised by the Habsburgs. You control around a third of the whole surface area of the empire and its resources. And then you have a variety of princes and free cities. They have different ways of negotiating, different institutions and so on, but in essentially, no one bit can really act properly without the collaboration and cooperation of the others.
7:37 Dan Snow? And let's just quickly check in on the extent of that empire, the term we use there. We're talking northern Italy all the way up to the Baltic.
7:45 Speaker 02 Exactly, yes. So it would include the whole of modern northern Italy, except for Venice, which at that point was a republic and controlled part of the mainland. It would stretch then into what is now France. So eastern France, north-eastern France belonged to the empire. Theoretically, Switzerland belonged to the empire at this point, and it would range then into, cover the whole of modern Czech Republic, and into northern Germany, Baltic coast, and then westward through what would now be Belgium.
8:14 Dan Snow? So the emperor is, it could be as little as just a titular head, have absolutely nothing to do with one or two of these little statelets, or he could really be in charge. Perhaps, Max, it's odd, isn't it? They're emperors of this whole empire, but they do actually run, as you say, what about a third of it?
8:30 Speaker 02 Yes, exactly, yeah. You've nicely really outlined the potential options. So part of the Thirty Years' War is really, what's at stake is how that political balance may alter. So the emperor might become more powerful, or correspondingly, he might be weakened.
8:46 Dan Snow? And presumably the Reformation has just thrown a giant hand grenade into this quite tricky but strangely durable system, this patchwork nature of rule in in central, well, across a great swathe of Europe. Tell me about the effect of the Protestant Reformation.
9:02 Speaker 02 Right, well, we've got to remember, I mean, the Reformation is that this is early 16th century and essentially the kind of disputes over the Reformation have largely played out by the middle of the 16th century, when there is a kind of compromise piece to settle this and to try to stabilise the balance and to mean that within the empire, so before the Reformation, the empire is Christian and now we've got to accommodate two different versions of the truth. And that's the key thing. The law, politics, everything flows from the idea that there is a singular truth and now there are competing versions of the truth. And that's basically what makes the whole Reformation then so explosive. So how do you manage to live with two different versions of the truth within the same political order? And they do that by sort of compromising and using neutral
9:47 Speaker 02 terms, the word reformation being used to mean supervision of the church and supervision of religious practice, rather than just, you know, what the Protestants are trying to do. And they use various other kind of deliberately ambiguous terms in this settlement. And it's by and large, pretty durable. There isn't much violence. There are a few minor flare ups here and there, but mostly the disputes following this sort of settlement are resolved relatively peacefully, or at least the can is kicked down the road without too much trouble. And that compares with what happens in France, so Europe's otherwise most powerful state at this time, where there is this whole series of so-called religious
10:28 Speaker 02 wars, which are civil wars, or what happens in the the Northern Netherlands, modern day Netherlands, where there is again a long running dispute between the Dutch and their Catholic Spanish overlords.
10:40 Dan Snow? So they've howled out a sort of compromise, roughly speaking, states in which the leadership or the prince want to be Protestant, are Protestant, and other ones remain Catholic. What shatters this equilibrium? Should we be thinking here, Peter, about individuals or should we be thinking about deep, substructural history? Like, what's, is it just that Ferdinand becomes head of the Habsburg family and decides to go on an absolute tear? What's the best way to think about this?
11:05 Speaker 02 The usual way of thinking about it is that, first of all, that the war is somehow inevitable. And if we regard it as inevitable, then we kind of deny human agency to these past actors. So we got to see this as a sequence of mistakes, of people taking the wrong decision or reacting in a way that escalates that problem. And obviously, we can talk about that in a minute. So there's that, I would say. And then the other thing, I think, when we're trying to understand this is that it's not either a religious war or a war about power. For some people, it clearly was very much a religious war, and they interpret everything through the lens of religion. But I think that the majority of those, especially those who are at the top with some of the levers of power, while they are not secular in their outlook, they are what
11:50 Speaker 02 I would call moderates. So for most of them, yes, they want to achieve religious goals. So that would be re-Catholicise the area or spread the Reformation throughout the area. But these are long-term objectives which are unlikely to be achieved in their own lifetime. While they might want to help the conditions to be favourable, they're not trying to do this. And they actually have, this is the big irony of the whole thing, they have religious reasons for not pushing things too quickly because they feel that if they are to, say, exploit a military victory or a political advantage for immediate gain, especially if that means breaking an agreement that they might have made or breaking their understanding of the law, they'll lose divine favour.
12:34 Speaker 02 So that their religious faith is actually a constraint to some extent on violence.
12:39 Dan Snow? Interesting. Shall we start with the revolt in Bohemia? Because that A is that often heralded as the start and B kind of put a bit of meat on the bone describing some of those things that you've just been outlining. So Bohemia, roughly speaking, chunks of modern-day Czech Republic? Part of this Holy Roman Empire, tell me about how the Habsburg family relate to this part of the world.
13:01 Speaker 02 Well, Bohemia is a kingdom, so it gives them a royal title. The Habsburgs don't have a royal title, they're archdukes, which is a title they invented in order to try to be bigger and better than any of the other German princes. But being a king is better still. It's a kingdom, so it's got status. It's a relatively rich and populous area as well, so it's definitely worth having. And with the Habsburgs throughout this whole time, we've got to remember, they've always got one eye looking eastwards at whatever the Ottoman Sultan's going to do. And the Habsburgs, they're a European power, the Sultan is a world power. And it's very lucky for the Habsburgs throughout this, that he's too busy most of the time fighting the Persians. But the threat to the Habsburg lands is omnipresent
13:44 Speaker 02 from the Sultan. So having money from Bohemia, having money from the rest of the empire, having money from Austria, is essential to keep this border defence that they've set up in Hungary going. They want to hold on to this, and it's also whoever is the king of Bohemia has one of these electoral titles. So there's only seven of those. And having one in your bag is going to be good to make sure that your relations will then be elected the next emperor. And at the point when the problems break out, we have Emperor Matthias, who's childless and is ailing. And so he has basically signaled his relation, the Austrian lines have been split, that's again a weakness. Archduke Ferdinand of the Styrian branch,
14:26 Speaker 02 which ruled the kind of area to the east, he's the successor designate, but he's got to be approved by all the other electors. So having an electoral title in the bag is worth having. And the problem that they've had in Bohemia, like they had in Austria to some extent, is the spread of Lutheranism and other forms of Protestantism amongst the nobility. And it's with the nobility you've always got to negotiate in order to get your taxes and so on. And they have granted concessions to these nobles in 1608, the so-called famous letter of majesty. And that basically has allowed a group of nobles to set up what is a parallel government. And it's an attempt to kind of claw back power, which is going on slowly, that
15:11 Speaker 02 creates a difficult situation by sixteen eighteen, because the leaders of this parallel government, basically, they've had lucrative court positions, so that's still within the Habsburgs' gift, and they have been losing these, and these have been reassigned to those nobles who are either Catholic or have converted back to Catholicism. And so a group within the Bohemian nobility feel on the back foot, and they feel that the population is either indifferent, or they're not going to support them, and so they manufacture a crisis, and that's the defenestration. So they burst into the castle where the government is based, where the emperor's representatives are, there aren't very many of them there, they pick the two, they throw them out of the window, they remember that the secretary
15:54 Speaker 02 is in the room as well, he gets thrown out too, they all survive, it fails in a sense, but it's a deliberately violent and provocative act to create a situation from which there can't be a going back, they're trying to create a conflict.
16:08 Dan Snow? And they get a conflict, they get one hell of a conflict. Initially, Bohemia puts a Protestant on the throne, right, very briefly, the Winter King, with his wife, who's Charles the First's sister?
16:20 Speaker 02 Yes, that's right, yeah.
16:21 Dan Snow? So bringing a little mini English connection in there. But the Habsburgs respond with an overwhelming force.
16:27 Speaker 02 They do eventually, yes. I mean, one of the things about this supposedly being inevitable or not, I mean, no one is prepared for this. So the man you mentioned, Frederick the Fifth of the Palatinate, the man who is eventually elected by the Bohemian rebels as the replacement king, he's been busy trying to manufacture another crisis by picking a fight with one of the bishops in the Rhineland. None of them have troops as well. I mean, the Habsburgs are in the process of disbanding the last of their field troops that they've used in a short war against the Venetians. Everyone else is tied to garrisons in Hungary, so it takes them a while to get going, and this is one of the reasons why the conflict escalates. So in the meantime, the Habsburgs say to the rebels, lay down your arms, it's
17:10 Speaker 02 like the equivalent of, we don't talk to terrorists, we're happy to negotiate. But you've got to lay down your arms. They're not going to do that. They're all sounding out which prince in the empire will support us, who will send us money. The emperor gets some money from Spain. Eventually, he does deals with the Bavarians, who are really the other big player in the empire, and also the Lutheran Saxons, and they provide troops. And it's this combined force that eventually invades Bohemia two years later. And the main block of this force triumphed just outside Prague at the Battle of White Mountain in November. And that's the truly decisive victory. And that's the reason why Frederick V is only a winter king. He lasts a very brief time.
17:52 Dan Snow? So he's a winter king. The Habsburgs are back on the throne of Bohemia. Bohemia is back under their sway. So this is a nice open and shut case, surely. Why do things escalate so radically from this point on?
18:03 Speaker 02 Exactly. And you could ask that question really at any of these turning points. The short answer for this is there's usually somebody somewhere that wants the struggle to go on. And that somebody is generally speaking, somebody outside the empire. So in this case, the Dutch basically are interested in financing anyone who is prepared to oppose the Habsburgs in the empire, because they know that the truce that they've signed with the Spanish is going to expire in 1621. And they know the Spanish are busy helping the Austrians in the empire. So we keep a war going in the empire, and that will carry on and tie the Spanish down, and they won't be able to deploy their full forces against us. Whereas the Spanish are thinking exactly the opposite.
18:46 Speaker 02 Let's send men and money to help the Austrians, and we'll settle the empire, and then Austria will help us against the Dutch. And so that's one of the things that's going on in 1619 to 1621, a little bit longer. And plus, there have been these various princes who've been, one might say, foolish enough to back the wrong side in rebellion. And so the emperor thinks, right, this is my opportunity to crush these people, establish better authority in the empire. And also, I have no money, and the easiest way of paying everyone who's helped me is to expropriate the lands of whoever opposed me and redistribute them. And so that creates another set of losers who are then also then looking for who's going to get my lands back.
19:30 Dan Snow? Amazing, isn't it? Okay, so we got the Habsburgs settling scores, both kind of long term and short term. They do well in the 1620s, don't they, the Austrian Habsburgs? The cause of the Catholic emperors seems to be pretty effectively managed. Talk to me about going up north, because you mentioned people outside the empire. King Christian of Denmark is not part of the empire, is he?
19:53 Speaker 02 Well, just to show how complicated it is, he is, because he's also Duke of Holstein, and Holstein is part of the empire.
20:01 Dan Snow? Right, of course.
20:01 Speaker 02 The big problem that you've got if you're a Protestant monarch or prince at this time is what do you do with all of your sons? So the Catholics, the second and third and fourth son, have this possibility of having careers in the so-called imperial church. So around a seventh of the empire are these prince bishoprics, and that's really one of the big things that's in dispute here. So the Lutheran families, those that have converted to Lutheranism, are always thinking, well, for centuries we've had influence over this local bishopric, and periodically our children have been elected bishop. That gives us political influence, and it also provides a nice income for the son who can't inherit the main principality.
20:45 Speaker 02 And Denmark is in that same position. His younger sons have been placed in various bishoprics in northern Germany, which spreads Danish influence, gives them something lucrative to do and something sensible to do. And the local Catholics are saying, but what about us? We're members of the true church. These are Catholic lands. And Emperor Ferdinand II, because he's now succeeded Matthias, at this point, this is a mistake. He overreaches himself. He thinks he's settled things in the southern part of the empire, and he can do the same in the north. And the Danes fear this, and one of the reasons why they intervene is to secure the Danish influence in the north.
21:27 Dan Snow? So yes, it's about religion, but it's also about jobs for elite. It seems to me there's too many sons.
21:33 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
21:34 Dan Snow? There's a surplus of sons in the Holy Roman Empire in the 17th century. So Ferdinand, he does have a reach, right? Because he sort of tries to unpick some of that 16th century post-Reformation settlement, right? So Protestants in the north start to think, oh, the Catholic juggernaut is heading for us, as our sort of crusty old grandparents feared and predicted they might one day.
21:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And this is the main bone of contention, really, that they have. And likewise, the Danes are able to draw on funding. Again, the Dutch are prepared to provide some funds because equally it's hopefully going to tie down the Spanish. And the Danes are decisively defeated, just like the earlier opponents have been defeated. And Ferdinand, at this point, does actually listen to advice. He listens to advice from his senior general by this point, Valenstein, who says, make a generous peace and you will gain Danish friendship. So Denmark, mainland Denmark's been overrun. All of that is returned. The Danish king is basically left alone. His sons are pushed out of these bishop ricks,
22:35 Speaker 02 but that's the only real loss, despite him being decisively defeated. So the emperor has this opportunity to settle, to draw a line under everything, but he issues this so-called edict of restitution, which is all the lands that have been taken since the 16th century from Catholics have to be returned.
22:53 Dan Snow? Ah.
22:53 Speaker 02 And it's done in a kind of sweeping blanket way. So not by individual court case to check all the complicated legal arrangements. No, we're sending the soldiers and they will take it over and we'll hand it back. And of course, that's a convenient way also of making sure the imperial army gets paid in the meantime.
23:11 Dan Snow? So this is now existential for these Protestant elites, these people that have got former monastic lands, for example, they would lose everything?
23:20 Speaker 02 They would, they would. But we've got to remember that it's never all the Protestants. So throughout this time, Saxony, which is the big Protestant player in the empire, which is Orthodox Lutheran, they, at this point, they're neutral, they're biding their time. They want this mid-16th century settlement to be restored, but they don't want a so-called Protestant victory because they hate the Calvinists. And Calvinism has emerged since the mid-16th century and is excluded from the formal arrangements in the empire. They hate them even more than they hate the Catholics.
23:55 Dan Snow? Listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about 30 years of war, more coming up.
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27:28 Dan Snow? We are going to get some pleasant victories, though, whether they like it or not, because one of the great military geniuses of European history is about to enter the conversation. Tell me about him.
27:38 Speaker 02 Right, well, this is Gustavus Adolfus, King of Sweden, who's been busy fighting in Poland. Sweden and Poland have had, since the late 16th century, long-running conflict. He's been embroiled in trying to sort that out, and Poland basically got bogged down. And he doesn't like the Danes, but the fact that Denmark has been defeated and Imperial armies are on the Baltic coast is perceived as a threat to Sweden. And there's actually a gap of a year. So the settlement with the Danes is June of 1629. And basically, the Thirty Years' War has effectively ended. And so when Gustavus lands in Pomerania and on the Baltic coast in northern Germany in June of 1630, he's restarting
28:19 Speaker 02 the war. That would be the anti-Habsburg view. From the Habsburgs' point of view, this is an entirely new war. This is a foreign invasion. But the problem is that they've overplayed their hand and they've alienated the Protestant princes. So most of the Protestant princes, including Gustavus's own father-in-law, the Elector of Brandenburg, they're sitting on their hands. They don't want him. Georg Wilhelm, Gustavus's brother-in-law, says, you know, Gustavus, he's a foreign prince and he has no business in the empire. And that's his own brother-in-law. And he only joins the Swedes when the Swedes train their artillery on his palace and say, this is a choice between me and the devil. You have to join me. So
29:01 Speaker 02 they're very, very reluctant. They don't want another war. They want things to be settled by a compromise, by negotiation. Gustavus turning up forces the issue. They wait really quite a long time because, you know, it's not clear that he's the military genius, but he wins in September of 1631, a really clear victory at Breitenfeld, which is just outside Leipzig in north-eastern Germany. Then they think, right, well, this guy could win, so we'll take the risk. And some of them then join him after that point.
29:31 Dan Snow? So this is a very basic way of looking at it, but that's going to Protestant cause within the empire is having its moment now, after a decade of setbacks.
29:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, definitely. We've got to remember that Protestant cause is to a considerable extent manufactured by Swedish propaganda. Because, as I say, they are forcing a lot of these Protestant princes to cooperate with them. They cannot fight in Germany. You know, a very significant proportion of the Swedish army is sick or dead within six months of arrival. And the only way they can fight in Germany is if they get German soldiers to help them. And the only way they can get German soldiers, basically, is if the princes are recruiting them for them. And this idea that this is a Protestant cause is to sort of smooth over the fact that what the Swedes really after about eighteen months or so of being in Germany, what they're starting to do is reorganise
30:22 Speaker 02 the empire. So every bit that they capture is handed over to one of their German collaborators, but on the terms that it is now a fief of the Swedish crown and not of the Holy Roman Emperor. So they're creating a new network within Germany that will be part of a greater Swedish empire that will at the very least provide a defensive buffer and keep anyone nasty away from the Baltic.
30:48 Dan Snow? And that might have happened, were it not for Gustavus's astonishing victory at the Battle of Lutzen, but also simultaneously his death as well.
30:57 Speaker 02 Yes, yeah. Well, I mean, it's arguably the Battle of Lutzen is a draw. Valenstein, the opponent, doesn't know that Gustavus is dead and is demoralised by the end of the day and he clears out. And if you concede the battlefield, then you seemingly concede defeat. But the loss of Gustavus is really a much bigger, it negates any kind of military advantage.
31:19 Dan Snow? Yes, it's a Pyrrhic victory at best, yeah.
31:21 Speaker 02 Definitely, definitely, yeah. Gustavus's young daughter, Christina, is queen, she can't lead, so everything falls to the Chancellor Oxenstirmer, who is really quite brilliant, but he's not a military commander. So he can do the diplomacy, he can handle the finances, but he doesn't have the kind of charisma to keep this sort of loose coalition together.
31:43 Dan Snow? Shall we pause here and talk about why the Thirty Years' War is remembered as such an astonishing disaster, tragedy for the peoples of this great chunk of Europe? Is it just that we keep getting these sort of bizarre accidents that ensured it was just a long series of wars, as you've already outlined? Or is there something about the animosity, the civil nature, the religious nature, that made the atrocities worse? Or the way in which, as you say, the armies weren't properly funded, so they're living off the land? Why, given the long and lamentable catalogue of European wars that we get to choose from, why does the Thirty Years' War stand out as just one of the more hideous times to be alive in the history of Europe?
32:22 Speaker 02 I think one thing is that the area where it's been fought has largely had peace for sixty three years. I mean, the empire and the emperor have been involved in wars, but they've all been somewhere else. They've been mainly in Hungary against the Turks. So this is the first large-scale violence in two generations. So it's shocking. People have read about violence elsewhere, and that's one of the things why they're really nervous. They know war is very nasty, but now they're confronted with it. And also, it becomes a general war. I mean, it's really the Swedish intervention that makes it a general war. So the empire's got around eleven regions in the sixteen twenties. The war is only present in about three of those at the most at any one time. After the Swedes have arrived, it's fought generally, and it's fought
33:07 Speaker 02 by armies that are not properly funded. So they are forced to live off the resources of the local population. And to sort of quantify this, a farm, the standard farm at the time, might have in seed corn and stuff stuffed in the barn and hams hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen, you know, enough to feed five hundred meals across a year. So you could keep going, in other words, your family, but the margin of survival is very small. A single regiment would have at least a thousand men plus five hundred women camp followers. So you're going to consume three times the amount of what you've got stored in your farm for a year
33:47 Speaker 02 in a day. And so they're like locusts, and they just eat everything up. If they're in a town, then they burn everything up because they smash your furniture and your doors and your floorboards to keep them warm. So it's hugely, hugely destructive for a society where we're a little bit above the the margin of survival, but that margin is very, very narrow.
34:10 Dan Snow? And then I guess it's the fact that it just goes on for so- neither side can deliver this knockout blow. So it's, yes, there's an intensity there, but it's the fact that it's then waged at that intensity for year after year after year.
34:22 Speaker 02 Yes, that's right. You read this in the accounts that people have left behind. So before the soldiers turn up, the writer is usually distinguishing between, you know, my side and the enemy. Once they've encountered soldiers, it's just all soldiers are terrible. And once you've encountered soldiers repeatedly, it's like, well, there's no point in rebuilding my barn. They're going to come and destroy it again. So why bother? So the level of productivity falls, the society is demoralized, people move. I mean, most of the population loss is not actually death, it's people moving, leaving, going somewhere else. And that, of course, does exacerbate things, but through the spread of the plague. So from 1631, there's several plague years,
35:05 Speaker 02 and they are really, really horrendous. That makes this time of the Swedish High Point also the absolute worst of the war.
35:13 Dan Snow? Just unutterably grim.
35:15 Speaker 02 Yeah.
35:15 Dan Snow? And at this point, I remember from reading you, and I remember from my undergraduate professors, with a great flourish, would announce that what you think is a great religious war is somewhat complicated by the arrival of the Catholic French. What on earth are the French up to at this point?
35:31 Speaker 02 Right. France, as I say, it had its own civil wars. It's largely got through those, if you think Three Musketeers, Siege of La Rochelle, so on, 1620s. The crown has asserted authority by the late 1620s. So the French monarchy is again finally in a position to be an international actor. And they are concerned about the growth of Spanish power. They've been bankrolling the Dutch, fighting Spain. And they are concerned particularly that after 1634, the emperor, with the assistance of Spanish troops, has defeated the Swedes, whose position in the empire has collapsed. They've largely retreated back to the North Sea coast. And so France is concerned that the emperor will win out again, as he has done against the Danes,
36:16 Speaker 02 and then he'll come in and help Spain, and France will be isolated and seriously under threat. So they're basically, they want to make sure the war in the empire continues. They're not so concerned about grabbing territory or ultimate victory. They just want the emperor and his German allies To be preoccupied. They've paid the Swedes to help them to come in in the first place. They revive those payments at a higher level. That doesn't really work. They take over some of the Swedish army. That's not enough. So they gradually feed in more and more troops after the sort of late sixteen thirties. And become a full belligerent then in the conflict in the empire.
36:55 Dan Snow? Goodness me. So now you've got German statelets fighting each other, switching sides, being nimble. I suppose you've got the Catholic French fighting the Spanish and the Austrians. Paying money to Protestant princes to keep up the fight. I mean, it's just extraordinary, this phase. As the sixteen thirties grinds on, indeed, as it turns into the sixteen forties, does any side achieve any kind of decisive result?
37:21 Speaker 02 It's very, very difficult to achieve a decisive result. For one thing, there's the nervousness of generals and their political masters to kind of risk that roll of the dice where you might lose a field army in a defeat. The other thing is the war has been fought in lots of different regions at once. And so the tendency would be a defeat in one region could be offset by a victory somewhere else and vice versa. So it's quite difficult to gain a preponderance. And so a lot of it is about switching troops from one area to another. And increasingly, that gets harder and harder to do because resources are getting tighter. The breakthrough comes really from the French and the Swedes finally by the sort of early to mid sixteen forties. They actually work out a viable strategy.
38:04 Speaker 02 So they have their main army opposing the emperor, wherever the emperor's main army is. And they use these much more mobile columns with a lot more cavalry that can move faster. And also carry supplies with them. And they target any of the German princes who are still backing the emperor. And they basically bully them into neutrality. So one by one, the emperor's main supporters who've been providing troops, providing resources are knocked out. And that also causes the war to converge into fewer and fewer places in the empire, but being fought with greater intensity, which is why some of the contemporary accounts think that. The last phase of the war is the worst. It is the worst if you're in the Danube Valley, for example, or in Bohemia.
38:49 Speaker 02 But it's not the worst overall because quite a lot of the parts of the empire have been somewhat pacified. They're under military occupation by the French and especially the Swedes. But there's not so much fighting going on.
39:04 Dan Snow? More Thirty Years' War after this. Don't go away.
39:16 Speaker 01 This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.
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40:05 Speaker 03 Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. Next. So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it healthy optimism. It's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying again and again until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at optum.com.
40:45 Dan Snow? Let's come to the Peace of Westphalia 1648. People might have heard at home with the Westphalian system of nation-states and this kind of stuff. Are we right to accord the peace negotiations and the eventual treaty such high status in the development of a world that we might think is recognizably modern?
41:01 Speaker 02 In some respects, I would say yes. It is a remarkable attempt to settle three major wars that are going on at the same time. So there is the war in the Empire, what we were calling the Thirty Years' War. There is the war that Spain and the Dutch have been fighting really since the 1560s. And there is the war that breaks out as an open war between France and Spain in 1635. And they declare two towns in Westphalia, Münster and Osnabrück. They declare them as neutral. So these are venues where the envoys can gather and they work out various ways in which they can overcome all sorts of protocol disputes and stuff so they can have some serious negotiations. The Dutch and the Spanish do settle.
41:43 Speaker 02 They settle in May of 1648, so that settles that one. The Dutch Republic is acknowledged as independent.
41:49 Dan Snow? And that's a huge moment. People will be familiar with Elizabeth Tudor and the Spanish Armada and all of this. That is the Dutch revolt that has been raging ever since that reign. So that's extraordinary.
41:59 Speaker 02 Yes.
41:59 Dan Snow? And the Dutch Republic now exists, which will then have a huge impact on the rest of early modern history. Okay, so that's that one sorted. What about the others?
42:07 Speaker 02 Exactly. That one's sorted and no one thought that was going to be possible. So there's optimism. And the war in the Empire is settled by two treaties. And there are complicated reasons, but basically the Catholics have been talking mainly in Münster and the Protestants have been talking mainly in Osnabruck. So they're signed simultaneously on the 24th of October 1648. And both towns, if you go there, they've got town halls preserved with portraits of all the envoys. It's really worth having a look. I mean, it's really interesting places to go and visit. And those two treaties make up another part of the Westphalian settlement. And that ends the Thirty Years' War. And the one that doesn't work is the negotiations between France and Spain.
42:51 Speaker 02 They carry on in 1649 and then both sides leave. And that's really because both think they can gain more by fighting rather than settling at that point. And they're wrong. They're stuck in another 10 years of war until the Peace of the Pyrenees ends that one.
43:05 Dan Snow? Why do we talk about the Westphalian system? Is it something to do with the status accorded to all these German states and principalities and city-states and bishoprics?
43:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, it is and it isn't. I mean, first of all, it's not because they've been made independent. I mean, the idea that Switzerland is made independent is nonsense. In nowhere in the Peace of Esfalia does it say that. It just says that Basel doesn't have to pay fees to one of the Imperial Supreme Courts. So this idea of sovereignty, that it creates modern sovereign independent states and so on, that's an invention really of international lawyers looking back from the 1860s and thinking, ah, it must have begun in the Peace of Esfalia, looking for a kind of baseline. And partly because the Peace of Esfalia was invoked in most international settlements up until 1815. So it was given a kind of benchmark status.
43:58 Speaker 02 So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that is inaccurate, but I think, first of all, it's a genuine attempt to settle a hugely complicated conflict by allowing pretty much everyone who's involved to negotiate. I mean, some people are excluded, but the majority of those, even the very small actors, have a voice. That, I think, is a kind of path-breaking thing and something that perhaps modern peacemaking could still learn a lesson from.
44:25 Dan Snow? Okay, and let's do the strategic wins and losses, the Politico playbook version. So we've got the cause of the Habsburgs within the Empire. What have they got to show for their 30 years of unimaginable blood and treasure?
44:39 Speaker 02 Right, they actually come out surprisingly well. They have a special opt-out rule from most of the so-called religious clauses, which is granting freedoms or recognizing freedoms for Protestants. So all of their lands, except for a very small part in Silesia, which is now Poland, they are officially Catholic and they don't have to tolerate Protestants. So that's a major victory because the second element of that is they don't have to restore any of the nobles that they've expropriated. And it's a large number, half of the population of Bohemia and Moravia changed land. Landlord as a result of the Habsburgs taking the land from those Protestant nobles who've opposed them and giving it to the Catholic loyalists.
45:24 Speaker 02 And it's those loyalists that basically sustained the Habsburg monarchy until nineteen eighteen. And their descendants, in fact, are still beneficiaries until the nineteen forties, when they're expropriated by the communists. And one of them, in fact, survives Liechtenstein, originally from Bohemia and eventually becoming a prince of the Holy Roman Empire. And now as an independent state. So it's a kind of curious quirk of history that still survives. So the Habsburgs do pretty well.
45:55 Dan Snow? And they, well, they've got hold of Bohemia, which is where it all began. And they also are still acknowledged as the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, and they will go on being the hereditary titular rulers of the empire for another several generations.
46:09 Speaker 02 That's right. And they've also learnt, I think, a sanitary political lesson. So they changed the way that they interact with the German princes. They are much more successful at playing a more prescribed constitutional system. So there are some constitutional checks that become a bit clearer as a result of the peace. And they actually are very successful in the later seventeenth and into the eighteenth century at playing this system and getting the maximum they can from the empire to help them on their rise, in fact, to being a great power in their own right. So by the late seventeen thirty, eighteen century, Austria has emerged as really one of the great powers. It sustains itself despite briefly losing the imperial title in the seventeen forties.
46:52 Speaker 02 So the long term consequences are broadly positive for the Habsburgs.
46:57 Dan Snow? And yet broadly positive for all these much, much smaller, often Protestant German principalities as well.
47:03 Speaker 02 Yes, so Saxony comes out well, thanks to having supported the emperor at his hour of need. They get, in fact, a portion of Bohemia that's transferred to them. Bavaria, thanks to backing the Habsburgs, comes out with half of the Palatinate. They're actually one of the real losers. And the Protestant line of the Palatinate dies out fairly quickly anyway, so it was somewhat all a waste. The time, they're making peace really at the expense of the much, much weaker players. So the Bohemian and some Austrian nobles have lost out, the platoon that loses out, the Habsburgs cede a bit of land to France, they cede part of Alsace to France. That's not really such a great loss. And the Swedes come out very well, they've gained lands which the Danes had originally
47:48 Speaker 02 coveted in northern Germany. So those bishoprics that the Danes had been holding are then switched to Swedish possession.
47:55 Dan Snow? If it weren't for the intensity and longevity of this war and the scale of it, would we remember it? So do we remember it in terms of its outcomes? Did it change Europe and the world in fundamental ways? Or is it because it was just so horrific that we remember it?
48:10 Speaker 02 I think it's primarily the latter, yes. It's seared onto the popular memory in Central Europe and it's still, some of that is still present there today. I mean, the public consciousness of, of the war as being a great disaster, that's definitely there. And despite there being subsequent disasters in the two world wars, it's not entirely gone away because of that. So it's definitely remembered because of that. And I think it's misremembered from the way in which the Vestfaling settlement has been interpreted. But nonetheless, I think that that vest failure has something of a significance as a, a way to bring a settlement to a complicated conflict through a peace congress. And that is sort of repeated all the other great European wars through until the end
48:55 Speaker 02 of the Napoleonic wars, really follow that kind of congress model.
48:59 Dan Snow? Well, Peter Wilson, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Your book is called The Thirty Years' War: Europe's Tragedy. And thank you for trying to gallop us through it. I appreciate it.
49:09 Speaker 02 Thank you very much.
49:13 Dan Snow? Thanks very much for listening, everyone. Before we go, I'll tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch it on YouTube. We are moving fast and breaking things here, folks. Our Friday episodes each week will be available to watch on YouTube and you can see me, you can see what we're talking about. I'd love it if you could subscribe to that channel over there. Just click the link in the show notes below and you can watch it on your phone, your tablet, or even a TV, or even a giant cinema movie screen, if you have one in your underground lair. See you next time, folks.
49:59 Speaker 03 Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. Next. So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it healthy optimism. It's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying again and again, until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at Optum.com.
50:29 Speaker 01 This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA,
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