Why Was The 30 Years War so Brutal?

The problem there is that there's no such thing as 'both sides'. Protestant states allied with Catholic states against Catholics allied with Protestants, so describing one side as Protestant or Catholic tells us nothing about who they fought or why. It's much more helpful to describe a side fighting for or against the Holy Roman Emperor, but even then, states were constantly changing sides according to which way the wind was blowing.

The proper way to put it is that the religious issues were bound up in the politics that drove everything. Religion certainly did play a direct role in the conflict -- after all, it was the Calvinist extremist Frederick V who helped set the ball rolling --, but other considerations could attain importance, too. The constitutional issues that underlay the whole conflict ultimately had to do with unhappiness from pretty much all sides with the religious settlement of the 16th century, so saying religion had nothing to do with it or was a mask is deeply deceptive.

The real truth of it is that the importance of various issues escalated and faded, so that the 'causes' of the conflict varied from period to period and actor to actor.
 
People say this too often. Obviously politics plays a part but dismissing religious sentiment is a huge mistake.

The sense, from both sides, that their religion was under siege by heretics absoloutely contributed to the fierceness of the war.

But I stand by that the lack of potatoes was a huge reason for the death toll. Grain crops are exceedingly vulnerable.

I agree with this, Religion might be overstated for the leadership, but for the Mercenary on the ground? what about the local commander in charge of an occupied village? It plays a major role.
 
Unlike more static wars, the Thirty Years' War basically raged all over Germany. You had the initial campaigns in Bohemia, then Christian of Anhalt in Central Germany, then Mansfeld rampages all over the Rhineland, then Denmark invades North Germany,Gustavus Adolphus hacks his way across the country, France intervenes in the west, and finally just before 1648 Maximilian breaks the Truce of Ulm and Swedish troops rampage all over Bavaria.

Religious hatred wasn't really what drove the destruction, though it had a marked effect on prolonging the war (especially at the beginning when this could still have been localized). The aim of most of the initial combatants (i.e. the ones most motivated by religious reasons) regarding conquered land was to expel the heretics or force them to convert, not to salt the land. Not even a fanatic like Ferdinand II desired some wanton destruction of Germany. Of course at the lower level it might have been different, but generals of a more mercenary bent, such as Wallenstein, didn't much care for religious leanings either.

Mercs were definitely the main reason for the widespread destruction. Most armies in the TYW had a small core of 'indigenous troops' with a lot of mercs and allied soldiers attached. In a period where generals did not really maintain sophisticated supply lines, pay for these mercs frequently went into arrears. And given that mercs were in such high demand, generals could ill-afford letting the mercs defect or mutiny... so they would turn a blind eye towards pillaging, which was seen as a way of 'supplementing' income. And some merc leaders (Mansfeld, for example) wanted a lot of income, even when they were ineffective at best.

The shifting nature of alliances in the TYW also encouraged late-TYW armies to resort to scorched-earth tactics. Saxony and Brandenburg, for example, are two examples of 'unreliable' German princes which switched from Protestant to Catholic (or more accurately, anti-HRE to pro-HRE) - though even loyal German states would go through varying phases of support. Eventually wholesale destruction - or the threat of it - would be seen as an ideal way to keep these princes in line, or at the very least knock them out of the war (which did work in the case of Saxony and Bavaria).

Then of course you have to factor in the fact that roving armies consume a lot of food, which meant that in areas of intense campaigning mass starvation of civilians would occur. The period also saw major peasant rebellions motivated by religion, such as in Upper Austria at the same time during the Bohemian Phase.

As for lessons? 18thC generals decided to abandon the use of mercs and rely more on drilled infantry whose quality was standardized and could be trusted not to run amok around the country. Supply lines became a major 18thC fetish as a result of experiences in the TYW as well. You could also see the fortifications of Vauban and Coehoorn as a reaction against the deep warfare of TYW, in that the enemy should be decisively stopped at the border before they get a chance to wreak havoc inside the country.
 
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Religion played a role, but attributing the devastation simply to the allegation that it was a religious conflict is a total non-starter. The army of Albrecht von Wallenstein, for example, incorporated Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Hussites, because the goal of the mercenary enterprise was to make money; the people doing the fighting were often prisoners and conscripts, not religious fanatics, and the men that led them into battle were there to make money for their company.

Furthermore, I have to challenge the notion that the war was uniquely brutal (not destructive, brutal). I have a hard time seeing the difference between the Sack of Magdeburg and the Sack of Rome, committed by Catholics against the Holy City itself during a political conflict between the Catholic Habsburgs and the Catholic Valois. Even during the era of knightly combat, you still saw episodes like Henry V's massacre of French prisoners at Agincourt outside the customs of war, and it took France decades to recover from the devastation wrought by English Chevauchée. War in the Early Modern period was an utterly horrendous affair, almost universally.

At every level of the conflict, especially after the end of the Bohemian phase, we see sovereigns, princes, commanders, and soldiers fighting along and across their religious affiliation, so we have to ask: what does calling the war religious actually do for us? It doesn't explain the immense loss of life better than food shortages resulting from cooling temperatures exacerbated by decades of roving armies, it doesn't explain the complex network of alliances and betrayals, it doesn't explain the common mercenary soldier's motivation for fighting, and you can't isolate the cause of the war's many atrocities to religious motivation.
 
the three mayor reason for Brutalty of Thirty Years' War was

Mercenaries
Disease
Murder in name of God

the first 15 years went the war quite conventional
after the major power run out of money like Spain, there Mercenaries armies start ravage and loot like the Town of Antwerp.
mostly under permission of there Commander to keep them Loyal to there side.
but for most part they looted every village, cottage for foot, leaving famishing people behind who for there part looting for foot.


what follow the Mercenaries and there entourage were disease
mostly the bubonic plague, typhus dysentery and scurvy.
the refuges from destroyed village carry the Disease to other areas, killing millions already famishing.

During Thirty Years' War, Exterminate the Enemy because of there Religious believe was consider good thing "your not Killing a christian, but a unbeliever"
see who Roman Catholic forces deal with town of Mageburg they annihilated it with inhabitans totally
next to that start Witch-hunts were Disease outbreaks or Mercenaries show up
and Inquisition executed every one suspected to be protestant, traitor, Witch or deserter
the city of Würzburg, once during one day 219 men, women and children were burned at the stake!
 
I seem to recall that after several major battles the winners conscripted enemy prisoners into their army. Obviously this would be impossible/unthinkable if both sides were primarily engaged in a war of religious extermination.
 

TinyTartar

Banned
I seem to recall that after several major battles the winners conscripted enemy prisoners into their army. Obviously this would be impossible/unthinkable if both sides were primarily engaged in a war of religious extermination.

What it came down to was food. The war began to feed on itself and continue just for the sake of continuing because nobody knew how to stop it.

The prisoners who were recruited did so because they likely would have been killed or sent into a barren wasteland of violence otherwise, and being in an army meant that you stole food from other people rather than having food stolen from you.

Marauding bands of mercenaries did not help matters, nor did the fact that the most cruel and depraved abuses of civilians was done by the most powerful factions who answered to nobody. The army of Gustavus Adolphus basically conducted itself like a Mongol Horde the farther away from the coast that it went, and the Imperial Austrian forces were so ill supported out of friendly territory that entire armies starved and degenerated into roving bands of robbers, as well as some having ties to enforcing witch trials in particularly hardcore Catholic areas like Bavaria.
 
What it came down to was food. The war began to feed on itself and continue just for the sake of continuing because nobody knew how to stop it.

The prisoners who were recruited did so because they likely would have been killed or sent into a barren wasteland of violence otherwise, and being in an army meant that you stole food from other people rather than having food stolen from you.

Marauding bands of mercenaries did not help matters, nor did the fact that the most cruel and depraved abuses of civilians was done by the most powerful factions who answered to nobody. The army of Gustavus Adolphus basically conducted itself like a Mongol Horde the farther away from the coast that it went, and the Imperial Austrian forces were so ill supported out of friendly territory that entire armies starved and degenerated into roving bands of robbers, as well as some having ties to enforcing witch trials in particularly hardcore Catholic areas like Bavaria.

Oh, I agree. I was just making the point that, if the TYW really were a war of religious extermination, it's highly unlikely that either side would have accepted people following the enemy heretical ways into their army. (Can you imagine ISIS accepting practising Christians into its ranks?)
 
I would question whether the war, as such, really was more brutal than others. If you read up on what happened in Ireland during the Civil War, on the Military Frontier with the Ottomans or in Russia duriong the Troubles, it's quite comparable. Religion probably played a role to some extent, but it is unlikely that it was instrumental in setting off an unprecedented orgy of slaughter. People were quite capable of living together when left to their own devices.

I suspect one of the more important factors was that the war lasted so long. It was 30 years, and most of the war was paid for from outside sources (French and Spanish subsidies, mainly), so no matter how badly the original combatant states were burned over, the fighting could continue. With a model of warfare that still featured economic harm as a key ingredient (stopping the enemy by taking or destroying his income sources), that made a recipe for disaster. In a local scvenario, the war would have ended far sooner and with less damage because one side would have lost, but with the outside forces paying for its continuation, no side could effectively lose.
 
No, most of the war costs were not paid by foreign subsidies. A very large part of the war costs were paid by the territories of the HRE, especially through plundering.
 
I would question whether the war, as such, really was more brutal than others. If you read up on what happened in Ireland during the Civil War, on the Military Frontier with the Ottomans or in Russia duriong the Troubles, it's quite comparable.

In fact, right next door in Poland, the Deluge (1648-1667) which immediately followed the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), also killed about 1/3 of the population.

The main factor in such high death tolls does appear to be the length of the conflicts. Year after year after year of elevated mortality, either directly by the various militaries or brigands, or through famine, disease and social breakdown.
 
Part of the cause of the population devastation is that with the size of the area involved there really isnt anyplace most of the large numbers of people could go - countries that are already near the edge/margin of sustenance/stability themselves dont want alot of refugees, and those with families even might not be allowed to take them (not let across borders and such) -- even when they are the same ethnically.

That means famine brought by disruption (and famines bring disease) for those stuck in the warzone. You still had various plagues/pestilences of lesser extent going around europe (even in the parts unaffected by the war)

I recall reading somewhere that Europe had largely wornout alot of its croplands already which would add to problems of anykind of population displacements. (why the opening of the New World was such a break)
 
No, most of the war costs were not paid by foreign subsidies. A very large part of the war costs were paid by the territories of the HRE, especially through plundering.

After a few years, there was very little left to plunder. THe belligerents would not have been able to sustain their operations without outside support - an army may still have eaten on its way through Brandenburg or the Palatinate (maybe), but it would not have been able to sustain a war on contributions and loot the way Wallenstein did in the early years.
 

TinyTartar

Banned
In fact, right next door in Poland, the Deluge (1648-1667) which immediately followed the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), also killed about 1/3 of the population.

The main factor in such high death tolls does appear to be the length of the conflicts. Year after year after year of elevated mortality, either directly by the various militaries or brigands, or through famine, disease and social breakdown.

The two wars have in common a few things, religious hatred, the presence of the Swedes (who truly in particular were some brutal motherfuckers), and it being early modern warfare, which had the kinds of army sizes that could support wide scale brutality in a way that Medieval Warfare could not, as well as incredibly indecisive fighting because of the well designed fortifications of the era, that stretched wars out over decades.

Basically, the 18th century became the "Age of Limited Warfare" for a reason. Nationstates could not survive the kind of apocalyptic brutality of the 15-1600s, which is why everyone developed professional armies and casualty counts when drastically down.
 
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I agree -- the religious angle was primarily just an alternate political one.

The key factors IMNSHO were:
- Length of the war
- Extensive use of foreign mercenaries which their employers exercise little/no control over
- Armies living largely off the land (and repeatedly the same land)

Also, those three things have a really nasty positive feedback with each other - for a very long time, various foreign mercenaries with no stake in in any settlement, are living off the land (and looting it to make up for chronically arrered pay. That really wrecks the landscape.

Also, and this more generally and not to the quoted poster, if you're going to be in lockstep with the internet standard and say that it's teh fault of teh stooopid religouzez, you may want to research the actual Thirty Years War. The evil religion rays turning people into zombie killers seems to a bad explanation when you have Protestant Czechs in Wallenstein's (or some other Imperial) army fighting for the Habsburgs against the Luthern Swedes in the pay of the Catholic King of France. I simply suggest that history is more complicated and less black and white than Reddit or Freethought Blogs will oft present it.

It was a war. Putting whole villages to the sword was SOP, stealing grain from the survivors was also SOP, and you should look at why some of the Chevaucheed areas of France in the Hundred Years didn't hit the same population again until the fin de seicle. Or read up on the War of the Roses or the English Civil War. There are very few wars neat as Warhammer battles; the dying is generally done by the people without swords because its convenient for the people with'em - no ideology required. Just the bastard side of human nature, in a world where the line between famine and survival is thin.

And that brings me to my real point. Was the Thirty Years more brutal, or simply better known? More widespread literacy and Guttenberg means that more accounts of the horror survive. The people affected don't have to be mute as the medieval peasant, or the enslaved Gaul or Anatolian who were brutalized into building the glory of Rome. The dead German peasant had someone who could write witness it and get it published; that dead Gaul got whipped to death to make the aqueduct we still oh and ah over and no-one told his story. The Thirty Years seems different because it's on the same side of the invention of movable type and wide spread literacy as we are.
 
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Also, and this more generally and not to the quoted poster, if you're going to be in lockstep with the internet standard and say that it's teh fault of teh stooopid religouzez, you may want to research the actual Thirty Years War. The evil religion rays turning people into zombie killers seems to a bad explanation when you have Protestant Czechs in Wallenstein's (or some other Imperial) army fighting for the Habsburgs against the Luthern Swedes in the pay of the Catholic King of France. I simply suggest that history is more complicated and less black and white than Reddit or Freethought Blogs will oft present it.

I'm pretty much the opposite of the angsty atheist and...this is a really dumb thing to argue. Cities could be and were sacked with particular harshness because of their religious affiliations or because of the politics surrounding their religious affiliations (a bishopric with a protestant administrator refuses to surrender to imperials coming along to re-enscone a bishop? bad news for anyone in that city). Magdeburg was a big deal and was so thoroughly destroyed because of its role as a symbol of protestant resistance to (Catholic) Imperial authority. The Protestants of the Empire were so willing to fight as long and hard as they did because of their paranoia surrounding re-Catholicization-as-Imperial-policy. The Hapsburg monarchy really did pursue the same vigorously and treat Catholicism, to some degree, as a mildly binding prerequisite of being perceived as loyal to the regime.

You can't take religion out of pretty much anything in the 17th century. It suffices everyday life, from top to bottom. There were other concerns that people had, and other reasons people made decisions, but religion was a central part of their lives that drove a great many people to do a great many of the things they did. It wasn't a binding absolute, but it was still deeply important and cannot be removed from consideration of the time period. This has nothing to do with modern politics or the culture war between New Atheism and religion, this is just the way people were in this time.

I mean, you yourself bring up the English Civil War, which was also a deeply religious conflict with a lot of the same denominational fears and goals on both sides as the Thirty Years War. This can be true because religion was incredibly important. Yes, dynasticism, personal gain, and a million other motivations were also important, but it's going way too far the other way to use those to discount religion into nothing.
 
I won't deny that religion was very important to some people in the era (most notably Ferdinand II), but I don't think it's accurate to chalk up the Sack of Magdeburg to its Protestant status; it was a strategic point on the Elbe that was offered the chance to surrender, but refused because it expected relief. The city was taken by storm, and as had happened dozens of times in other wars (cough Sack of Rome cough), the commanders lost control of their soldiers once they were over the walls and in the streets. Tilly's army also hadn't been paid, which goes far in explaining why they took to looting with such gusto.

Describing the 30 Years War as a religious war is just inaccurate when there were more powerful motivations in play; doing so just takes centuries of state-backed myth making at face value.
 
I won't deny that religion was very important to some people in the era (most notably Ferdinand II), but I don't think it's accurate to chalk up the Sack of Magdeburg to its Protestant status; it was a strategic point on the Elbe that was offered the chance to surrender, but refused because it expected relief. The city was taken by storm, and as had happened dozens of times in other wars (cough Sack of Rome cough), the commanders lost control of their soldiers once they were over the walls and in the streets. Tilly's army also hadn't been paid, which goes far in explaining why they took to looting with such gusto.

Magdeburg wasn't just sacked, though, it burned to the ground and three quarters of its inhabitants died.

Describing the 30 Years War as a religious war is just inaccurate when there were more powerful motivations in play; doing so just takes centuries of state-backed myth making at face value.

The 30 Years War started as a constitutional spat, where several princes disagreed with the Emperor on the meaning of important parts of the Empire's constitution and on what changes might need to be made. Almost every one of those had to do with religion. There's a reason issues like Donauworth were so important leading up to the outbreak of war. There's a reason it was the Calvinist extremist Frederick V that was chosen by the Bohemians as a replacement for Ferdinand.

Religion wasn't just important to 'some' people in the 17th century, it was hugely important to almost everyone. People could and did have other motivations that could make religious convictions more fluid, and religion was deeply bound up in a host of other causes, but to say that religion didn't matter except for a few people is total nonsense.
 
Many of the fires in Magdeburg were started by the garrison after the army (which outnumbered the population of the town by a wide margin) breached the walls. The sack is a tragically unextraordinary example of the brutality of Early Modern warfare.

It's useful to delineate religion as a means of state power and religion as a spiritual experience here; part of the reason many German princes took up arms for protestant faiths was because it legitimized their seizure of Church land, and with it wealth. Some put their money where their mouth was when it came to piety, but many used it as a chance to enhance their power relative to the Emperor. The Edict of Restitution, which inspired so much resistance against the Emperor, was primarily concerned with the distribution of land throughout the realm, and the prince's objected to this return of lands to the Church as an affront to their secular power.

Only a fool would deny that religion was an important part of politics in the 17th century, but it's much less clear what role faith played in shaping the decisions of the people involved, especially when the evidence shows perhaps more examples of other considerations overriding the options we'd expect in a religious conflict. An uncritical acceptance of 'religious' issues as the cause of the war also obscures the nature of more general identity politics and their relationship with conflict; in many cases, a minority simply being a minority is sufficient cause for conflict.

An interesting (and profoundly disturbing) case study is the Cagot in France; they have no common religion, no common language, and no common culture. You can't even really think of them as a group at all, but for some reason, the French picked out people with no distinct characteristics (other than descent from other Cagot) between them and shunned and oppressed them.

The awful thing is that people don't need a reason to be horrible to each other; faith was rarely the sole cause of key events in the war, and in many cases, the simple facts let us rule it out. Religious affiliation doesn't rule out the interpretation of the Donauworth conflict as one of clashing faiths, but there are other explanations of the war in general (especially after the Bohemian phase) that line up better with the evidence.
 
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