ABSTRACT
The Thirty Years War has become firmly established as a single topic in the history of the century, unified in a way other periods of complex fighting were not. It is not obvious that this is justified. The phrase was used occasionally soon after 1648, in England and in Germany. 1 But few contemporaries saw it as a distinct historical event. To the Netherlands the German conflicts were part of the Eighty Years War that began with their own revolt. To the French and Spaniards their wars with each other were more important than German affairs and were not interrupted for another decade. When the thirty years are divided into ‘periods’ of Bohemian, Danish, Swedish, and French prominence, the impression of coherence becomes less convincing still. Nevertheless, for the inhabitants of large areas of central Europe this was a generation of warfare more continuous and more devastating than they had heard of before. Armies became more significant than states. Their presence – actual or feared – dominated the life of town and country more than the landlord or the emperor ever had. They moved, in summer at least, incessantly; they lived on what’ they could seize; they spread disease, poverty, chaos. Those who initiated and tried to control their movements had an immense variety of motives, most of which were in one way or another connected with the power of the Habsburg monarchy or the Catholic Church. It was the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which appeared to settle many of the boundaries between Habsburg and non-Habsburg, Catholic and Protestant, that led to the idea that a unified period of warfare had ended. But there had been too much confusion of purpose for any settlement to be a permanent solution to it all. At every level there were motives of faith, loyalty, and tradition as well as of greed, anger, and self-aggrandisement. If religion was sometimes a prime influence, it was often to the foot-soldier a war-cry and to the statesman a factor that influenced, but not too strongly, the choice of allies.
