Part 234

"The retreat of the French [after the battle of Allerheim] enabled the enemy to turn his whole force upon the Swedes in Bohemia. Gustavus Wrangel, no unworthy successor of Banner and Torstensohn, had, in 1646, been appointed Commander-in-chief of the Swedish army. ... The Archduke, after reinforcing his army ... moved against Wrangel, in the hope of being able to overwhelm him by his superior force before Koenigsmark could join him, or the French effect a diversion in his favour. Wrangel, however, did not await him." He moved through Upper Saxony and Hesse, to Weimar, where he was joined by the flying corps of Koenigsmark. Finally, after much delay, he was joined likewise by Turenne and the French. "The junction took place at Giessen, and they now felt themselves strong enough to meet the enemy. The latter had followed the Swedes into Hesse, in order to intercept their commissariat, and to prevent their union with Turenne. In both designs they had been unsuccessful; and the Imperialists now saw themselves cut off from the Maine, and exposed to great scarcity and want from the loss of their magazines. Wrangel took advantage of their weakness to execute a plan by which he hoped to give a new turn to the war. ... He determined to follow the course of the Danube, and to break into the Austrian territories through the midst of Bavaria. ... He moved hastily, ... defeated a Bavarian corps near Donauwerth, and passed that river, as well as the Lech, unopposed. But by wasting his time in the unsuccessful siege of Augsburg, he gave opportunity to the Imperialists, not only to relieve that city, but also to repulse him as far as Lauingen. No sooner, however, had they turned towards Suabia, with a view to remove the war from Bavaria, than, seizing the opportunity, he repassed the Lech, and guarded the passage of it against the Imperialists themselves. Bavaria now lay open and defenceless before him; the French and Swedes quickly overran it; and the soldiery indemnified themselves for all dangers by frightful outrages, robberies, and extortions. The arrival of the Imperial troops, who at last succeeded in passing the Lech at Thierhaupten, only increased the misery of this country, which friend and foe indiscriminately plundered. And now, for the first time during the whole course of this war, the courage of Maximilian, which for eight-and-twenty years had stood unshaken amidst fearful dangers, began to waver. Ferdinand II., his school-companion at Ingolstadt, and the friend of his youth, was no more; and, with the death of his friend and benefactor, the strong tie was dissolved which had linked the Elector to the House of Austria. ... {1484} Accordingly, the motives which the artifices of France now put in operation, in order to detach him from the Austrian alliance, and to induce him to lay down his arms, were drawn entirely from political considerations. ... The Elector of Bavaria was unfortunately led to believe that the Spaniards alone were disinclined to peace, and that nothing but Spanish influence had induced the Emperor so long to resist a cessation of hostilities. Maximilian detested the Spaniards, and could never forgive their having opposed his application for the Palatine Electorate. ... All doubts disappeared; and, convinced of the necessity of this step, he thought he should sufficiently discharge his obligations to the Emperor if he invited him also to share in the benefit of the truce. The deputies of the three crowns, and of Bavaria, met at Ulm, to adjust the conditions. But it was soon evident, from the instructions of the Austrian ambassador, that it was not the intention of the Emperor to second the conclusion of a truce, but if possible· to prevent it. ... The good intentions of the Elector of Bavaria, to include the Emperor in the benefit of the truce, having been thus rendered unavailing, he felt himself justified in providing for his own safety. ... He agreed to the Swedes extending their quarters in Suabia and Franconia, and to his own being restricted to Bavaria and the Palatinate. The conquests which he had made in Suabia were ceded to the allies, who, on their part, restored to him what they had taken from Bavaria. Cologne and Hesse Cassel were also included in the truce. After the conclusion of this treaty, upon the 14th March, 1647, the French and Swedes left Bavaria. ... Turenne, according to agreement, marched into Wurtemburg, where he forced the Landgrave of Darmstadt and the Elector of Mentz to imitate the example of Bavaria, and to embrace the neutrality. And now, at last, France seemed to have attained the great object of its policy, that of depriving the Emperor of the support of the League, and of his Protestant allies. ... But ... after a brief crisis, the fallen power of Austria rose again to a formidable strength. The jealousy which France entertained of Sweden, prevented it from permitting the total ruin of the Emperor, or allowing the Swedes to obtain such a preponderance in Germany, which might have been destructive to France herself. Accordingly, the French minister declined to take advantage of the distresses of Austria; and the army of Turenne, separating from that of Wrangel, retired to the frontiers of the Netherlands. Wrangel, indeed, after moving from Suabia into Franconia, taking Schweinfurt, ... attempted to make his way into Bohemia, and laid siege to Egra, the key of that kingdom. To relieve this fortress, the Emperor, put his last army in motion, and placed himself at its head. But ... on his arrival Egra was already taken." Meantime the Emperor had engaged in intrigues with the Bavarian officers and had nearly seduced the whole army of the Elector. The latter discovered this conspiracy in time to thwart it; but he now suddenly, on his own behalf, struck hands with the Emperor again, and threw over his late agreements with the Swedes and French. "He had not derived from the truce the advantages he expected. Far from tending to accelerate a general peace, it had a pernicious influence upon the negociations at Munster and Osnaburg, and had made the allies bolder in their demands." Maximilian, therefore, renounced the truce and began hostilities anew. "This resolution, and the assistance which he immediately despatched to the Emperor in Bohemia, threatened materially to injure the Swedes, and Wrangel was compelled in haste to evacuate that kingdom. He retired through Thuringia into Westphalia and Lunenburg, in the hope of forming a junction with the French army under Turenne, while the Imperial and Bavarian army followed him to the Weser, under Melander and Gronsfeld. His ruin was inevitable if the enemy should overtake him before his junction with Turenne; but the same consideration which had just saved the Emperor now proved the salvation of the Swedes. ... The Elector of Bavaria could not allow the Emperor to obtain so decisive a preponderance as, by the sudden alteration of affairs, might delay the chances of a general peace. ... Now that the power of the Emperor threatened once more to attain a dangerous superiority, Maximilian at once ceased to pursue the Swedes. ... Melander, prevented by the Bavarians from further pursuing Wrangel, crossed by Jena and Erfurt into Hesse. ... In this exhausted country, his army was oppressed by want, while Wrangel was recruiting his strength, and remounting his cavalry in Lunenburg. Too weak to maintain his wretched quarters against the Swedish general, when he opened the campaign in the winter of 1648, and marched against Hesse, he was obliged to retire with disgrace, and take refuge on the banks of the Danube. ... Turenne received permission to join the Swedes; and the last campaign of this eventful war was now opened by the united armies. Driving Melander before them along the Danube, they threw supplies into Egra, which was besieged by the Imperialists, and defeated the Imperial and Bavarian armies on the Danube, which ventured to oppose them at Susmarshausen, where Melander was mortally wounded." They then forced a passage of the Lech, at the point where Gustavus Adolphus formerly overcame Tilly, and ravaged Bavaria once more; while nothing but a prolonged rain-storm, which flooded the Inn, saved Austria from a similar devastation. Koenigsmark, with his flying corps, entered Bohemia, penetrated to Prague and surprised and captured the lesser side of the city (the Kleinsite), thus acquiring the reputation of "closing the Thirty Years' War by the last brilliant achievement. This decisive stroke, which vanquished the Emperor's irresolution, cost the Swedes only the loss of a single man. But the old town, the larger half of Prague, which is divided into two parts by the Moldau, by its vigorous resistance wearied out the efforts of the Palatine, Charles Gustavus, the successor of Christina on the throne, who had arrived from Sweden with fresh troops. ... The approach of winter at last drove the besiegers into their quarters, and in the meantime the intelligence arrived that a peace had been signed at Munster, on the 24th October,"--the "solemn and ever memorable and sacred treaty which is known by the name of the Peace of Westphalia."

_F. Schiller, History of the Thirty Years' War, book 5._

ALSO IN: _G. B. Malleson, The Battle-fields of Germany, chapter 7._

{1485}

GERMANY: The Thirty Years War: Its horrors. Its destructiveness. The state of the country at its close.

"The materials of which the armies were composed passed inevitably from bad to worse. This, which had been a civil war at the first, did not continue such for long; or rather it united presently all the dreadfulness of a civil war and a foreign. It was not long before the hosts which trampled the German soil had in large part ceased to be German; every region of Europe sending of its children, and, as it would seem, of those whom it must have been gladdest to be rid of, to swell the ranks of the destroyers. ... From all quarters they came trooping, not singly, but in whole battalions. ... All armies draw after them a train of camp-followers; they are a plague which in the very nature of things is inevitable. But never perhaps did this evil rise to so enormous a height as now. Toward the close of this War an Imperial army of 40,000 men was found to be attended by the ugly accompaniment of 140,000 of these. The conflict had in fact by this time lasted so long that the soldiery had become as a distinct nation, camping in the midst of another; and the march of an army like the migration of some wild nomade horde, moving with wives and children through the land. And not with these only. There were others too in its train, as may easily be supposed. ... It is a thought to make one shudder, the passage of one of these armies with its foul retinue through some fair and smiling and well-ordered region--what it found, and what it must have left it, and what its doings there will have been. Bear in mind that there was seldom in these armies any attempt whatever at a regular commissariat; rations being never issued except to the actual soldiers, and most irregularly to them; that the soldier's pay too was almost always enormously in arrear, so that he could not purchase even if he would. ... It was indeed the bitterest irony of all, that this War, which claimed at the outset to be waged for the highest religious objects, for the glory of God and for the highest interests of His Church, should be signalized ere long by a more shameless treading under foot of all laws human and divine, disgraced by worse and wickeder outrages against God, and against man, the image of God, than probably any war which modern Christendom has seen. The three master sins of our fallen nature, hate, lust, and covetousness, were all rampant to the full. ... Soon it became evident that there was no safety in almost any remoteness from that which might be the scene of warfare at the actual moment. When all in their immediate neighbourhood was wasted, armed bands variously disguised, as merchants, as gipsies, as travellers, or sometimes as women, would penetrate far into the land. ... Nor was the condition of the larger towns much better. ... It did not need actual siege or capture to make them acquainted with the miseries of the time. With no draught-cattle to bring firewood in, there was no help for it but that abandoned houses, by degrees whole streets, and sometimes the greater part of a town, should be pulled down to prevent those of its inhabitants who remained from perishing by cold, the city thus living upon and gradually consuming itself. ... Under conditions like these, it is not wonderful that the fields were left nearly or altogether untilled; for who would sow what he could never hope to reap? ... What wonder that famine, thus invited, should before long have arrived? ... Persons were found dead in the fields with grass in their mouths; while the tanners' and knackers' yards were beset for the putrid carcasses of beasts; the multitudes, fierce with hunger, hardly enduring to wait till the skin had been stript away. The bodies of malefactors, broken on the wheel, were secretly removed to serve for food; or men climbed up the gibbets, and tore down the bodies which were suspended there, and devoured them. This, indeed, was a supply which was not likely to fail. ... Prisoners in Alsace were killed that they might be eaten. Children were enticed from home. ... Putting all together, it is not too much to say that the crowning horrors of Samaria, of Jerusalem, of Saguntum, found their parallels, and often worse than their parallels, in Christian Germany only two centuries ago. I had thought at one time that there were isolated examples of these horrors, one here, one there, just enough to warrant the assertion that such things were done; but my conviction now is that they were very frequent indeed, and in almost every part of the land. ... Districts which had for centuries been in the occupation of civilized men were repossessed by forests. ... When Peace was at length proclaimed, and Germany had leisure to take an inventory of her losses, it was not altogether impossible to make a rude and rough estimate. ... The statistics, so far as they were got together, tell a terrible tale. ... Of the population it was found that three-fourths, in some parts a far larger proportion, had perished; or, not having perished, were not less effectually lost to their native land, having fled to Switzerland, to Holland, and to other countries, never to return from them again. Thus in one group of twenty villages which had not exceptionally suffered, 85 per cent., or more than four-fifths of the inhabitants, had disappeared. ... Of the houses, three-fourths were destroyed. ... Careful German writers assure us that there are districts which at this present day [1872] have just attained the population, the agricultural wealth, the productive powers which they had when the War commenced."

_R. C. Trench, Gustavus Adolphus in Germany, and other Lectures on the Thirty Years' War, lectures 3 and 5._

See, also, BOHEMIA: A. D. 1621-1648.

GERMANY: A. D. 1648. The Peace of Westphalia. Cession of Alsace to France. Separation of Switzerland from the Empire. Loosening of the constitutional bonds of the Empire.

"The opening of the peace negotiations between the Emperor and his enemies was ... fixed for the 25th of March, 1642, and the cities of Münster and Osnabrück as the places of the sitting; but neither in this year nor in the next did it take place. It was not until the year 1644 that in the former of these cities" were assembled the following: The Papal Nuncio and the envoy of the Republic of Venice, acting as mediators, two imperial ambassadors, two representatives of France, three of Spain, and the Catholic Electors; later came also the Catholic Princes. To Osnabrück, Sweden sent two ambassadors and France three, while the Electors, the German Princes and the imperial cities were represented. Questions of etiquette, which demanded prior settlement, occupied months, and serious matters when reached were dealt with slowly and jealously, with many interruptions. It was not until the 24th of October, 1648, that the articles of peace forming the two treaties of Münster and Osnabrück, and known together as the Peace of Westphalia, were signed by all the negotiators at Münster. {1486} The more important of the provisions of the two instruments were the following "To France was secured the perpetual possession of the Bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun, as also Moyenvic and Pignerol, with the right to keep a garrison in Philipsburg, and finally Breisach, Alsace, with its ten imperial cities, and the Sundgau. The Emperor bound himself to gain the assent of the Archduke Ferdinand, of Tyrol and Spain, to this last-named cession. France made good to the Archduke this loss by the payment of 3,000,000 francs. Although it was not expressly provided that the connection with the Empire of the German provinces ceded to France should be dissolved, yet the separation became, as a matter of fact, a complete one. The Emperor did not summon the Kings of France to the Diets of the Empire, and the latter made no demand for such summons. ... In relation to Italy, the French treaty provided that the peace concluded in 1631 [see ITALY: A. D. 1627-1631] should remain in force, except the part relating to Pignerol. ['Pinerolo was definitely put under the French overlordship.']

_G. W. Kitchin, History of France, volume 3, page 98._

Switzerland was made independent of the German Empire; but the Circle of Burgundy [the Spanish Netherlands and Franche-Comté] was still to form a part of the Empire, and after the close of the war between France and Spain, in which the Emperor and the Empire were to take no part, was to be included in the peace. No aid was to be rendered to the Duke of Lorraine against France, although the Emperor and the Empire were left free to mediate for him a peace. Sweden received Hither Pomerania, including the Island of Rügen, from Further Pomerania the Island of Wollin and several cities, with their surroundings, among which were Stettin, as also the expectancy of Further Pomerania in case of the extinction of the house of Brandenburg. Furthermore, it received the city of Wismar, in Mecklenburg, and the Bishoprics of Bremen [secularized and made a Grand Duchy] and Verden, with reservation of the rights and immunities of the city of Bremen. Sweden was to hold all the ceded territory as feudal tenures of the Empire, and be represented for them in the Imperial Diet. ... Brandenburg received for its loss of Pomerania the Bishoprics of Halberstadt, Minden, and Camin, and the expectancy of that of Magdeburg as soon as this should become vacant by the death of its Administrator, the Saxon Prince, although the four bailiwicks separated from it were to remain with Saxony as provided in the Peace of Prague. ... The house of Brunswick-Lüneberg was to renounce its right to the coadjutorship of Magdeburg, Bremen, Halberstadt, and Ratzeburg, and, in return for this renunciation, was to alternate with a Catholic prelate in the possession of the Bishopric of Osnabrück. ... To Duke Maximilian of Bavaria was conveyed the Electorate, together with the Upper Palatinate, to be hereditary in his family of the line of William, for which he, on the other hand, was to surrender to the Emperor the account of the 13,000,000 florins which he had made for the execution of the sentence against the Palsgrave Frederic. To the Palsgrave, Charles Lewis, son of the proscribed Elector [Frederic, who had died in 1632], was given back the Lower Palatinate, while a new Electorate, the eighth, was created for him. ... There were numerous provisions relating to the restoration of the Dukes of Würtemberg, the Margraves of Baden, and the Counts of Nassau and those of Hanau to several parts of the territories which either belonged to them or were contested. A general amnesty was indeed provided, and everyone was to be restored to the possession of the lands which he had held before the war. This general article was, however, limited by various special provisions, as that in relation to the Palsgrave, and was not to be applied to Austria at all. ... Specially important are the sections which relate to the settlement of religious grievances. The treaty of Passau and the Augsburg religious peace were confirmed; the 1st of January, 1624, was fixed as the time which was to govern mutual reclamations between the Catholics and Protestants; both parties were secured the right to all ecclesiastical foundations, whether in mediate or immediate connection with the Empire, which they severally held in possession on the first day of January, 1624; if any such had been taken from them after this date, restoration was to be made, unless otherwise specially provided. The Ecclesiastical Reservation was acknowledged by the Protestants, and Protestant holders of ecclesiastical property were freely admitted to the Imperial Diets. The right of reformation was conceded to the Estates, and permission to emigrate to the subjects; while it was at the same time provided that, if in 1624 Protestant subjects of Catholic Princes, or the reverse, enjoyed freedom of religion, this right should not in the future be diminished. It was specially granted for Silesia that all the concessions which had been made before the war to the Dukes of Liegnitz, Münsterburg, and Oels, and to the city of Breslau, relating to the free exercise of the Augsburg Confession, should remain in force. ... Finally, the Reformed--that is, the adherents of Calvinism--were placed upon the same ground with those of the Augsburg Confession; and it was provided that if a Lutheran Estate of the Empire should become a Calvinist, or the reverse, his subjects should not be forced to change with their Prince."

_A. Gindely, History of the Thirty Years' War,' volume 2, chapter 10._