The Background of the War

The first historical event we will look at is the Thirty Years’ War. All of us, no doubt, studied European History in high school—I think it was somewhere around our Junior year, maybe Senior year in high school. Perhaps some you studied history beyond that level, but certainly, the Thirty Years’ War was a period of extreme unrest, of extreme bloodshed, in Central Europe.

Again, what started this, and what perpetuated this war, which lasted for thirty years—oh, by the way, that’s where the title comes from—really has to do with the balance of powers in Central Europe among the Roman Catholic Church and some of these emerging denominations, looking for who was going to be in control of particular regions. Last week, we talked about the Civil War that had convulsed England, as well as other bloodshed which had taken place in the British Isles, as part of their Reformation. Well, there’s some background, though. We’re back on the continent of Europe now. There is some background here that we want to look at that leads up to this Thirty Years’ War.

You remember that there had already been a good bit of fighting, a good bit of bloodshed, which had taken place between the Catholics and the Protestants in the Central part of Europe, primarily in the southern part of Germany and Switzerland, and parts of Austria, and what not, going back into the latter part of the 15^th Century and into the 16^th Century. There was something that we mentioned briefly a few weeks ago as we were talking about that period of time. It was called The Peace of Augsburg which was agreed to in 1555. It had brought something of a truce, albeit an uneasy truce, to these religious wars that were going on in Germany that had come in the wake of the Reformation. However, The Peace of Augsburg was really nothing more than a truce—one side didn’t win over the other, but there was an agreement, there was a truce that was made. That truce was really a truce between the Catholics and the Lutherans. It really didn’t represent a permanent settlement. It established, among other things, the principle that the religion of the ruler would be the religion of the people who were under his rule. And so, if you lived in a region where the ruler was Catholic, then you were Catholic. If you lived in an area where the ruler was Lutheran, then… You recall from our study of that, there were many of the elites, many of the rulers of the day in Central Europe at that time, who were converted to Lutheranism. And so, if you lived in a region where the ruler was Lutheran, then you were Lutheran.

But, this arrangement failed to take into consideration the consciences of the people. The people, many of them, were not willing to accept this. It also didn’t take into account another group that emerged from the Reformation here in Central Europe also, and they were the Calvinists. Calvinism had spread into areas that were covered by this agreement, but under the terms of the agreement, under the terms of this settlement, this Peace of Augsburg, the Calvinists had no legal status. They simply weren’t recognized. They, in effect, didn’t exist.

Well, there was also a further unsettling factor, and that was the aggressive efforts that were being undertaken by the Jesuits to win Protestants back to the Catholic faith. You recall that the Jesuits were a sect, a group of Catholics who were very missionary-minded; they were very aggressive in some of their tactics, and so on. And it was also during this period in this region that they were putting a lot of pressure—doing a lot of things to force Protestants back to the Catholic faith. Well, through some behind-the-scene maneuvers, the Jesuits had, by 1600, come to exercise a considerable amount of influence on the political scene. This is setting the stage, now, for the Thirty Years’ War.

The Thirty Years’ War was really a series of conflicts, four…well, not distinct, perhaps, but somewhat different conflicts in different regions of Central Europe. The first was the Bohemian phase, and it went from about 1618 to about 1624; and then there was the Danish phase, which went from about 1625 to 1629; and then there was the Swedish phase that went from 1630 to about 1635; and then finally, the French phase, which went from 1635 to 1648.