The 30 Years' War (1618-48) and the Second Defenestration of Prague - Professor Peter Wilson

the 30 Years War was a struggle over the political and religious order over this colorful area on the map the Holy Roman Empire Europe's largest state at the time and we're going to be focusing particularly on Bohemia which is where the defenestration of Prague took place precisely 400 years today 400 years ago right we're probably about 5 hours late it seems to being about 9 o'clock in the morning Central European Time but nonetheless we're marking this anniversary today and I'll be saying a fair bit about this map but particularly this is the boundary the red line and the sort of mustard areas are the areas that belong to thee to the Austrian Hapsburgs and it's three of their officials that were thrown out of the window in Prague Castle led by Heinrich Matthias turn a party of disgruntled bohemian aristocrats forced their way into the meeting chamber in prague castle where the councilors who represented the Habsburg monarchy Archduke Ferdinand who was absent were debating their future policy finding most of their targets absence the angry Bohemians seized two of the councillors villains Lovato and Yaroslav burrito from Martin it's the two that they held most responsible for a series of policies that have been implemented over the previous year after a short altercation both of these were bundled swiftly out of the window so swiftly in fact that several of those present really didn't know what was what was going on they're actually thrown out of the same window which is that one they're not added to separate windows as the contemporary the famous contemporary engraving shows and they were followed shortly thereafter by their secretary Philip debris seus you can see him there in the middle he's thrown out really is a kind of afterthought but amazingly despite some injuries all three of them survived the fall and Fabricius was able to race to Vienna to warn the Emperor Emperor Matthias it was the / overlord of the entire empire and Fabrizio's for this for this feat was subsequently enabled as fun horn fell which means from the high fall of course this was an this is a deliberately staged event and I'll say something in a moment about the reasons why this took place but it was of course hugely controversial is intended to be as such and it produced diverging interpretations you see on the on this side of the screen here this is the Habsburg Catholic interpretation of how the three individuals survived the fall the Madonna unfurl so cloak one of them does cry out Maria as he falls and she responds by saving the three of them these three diminutive black figures in the sort of bohemian Protestant version they land in a rubbish heap what's likely to have happened is they actually slide most of the distance down there they were it was actually a much colder day they were all wearing thick cloaks and clothing and you may remember from the previous slide there is a slope so they basically bang onto the slope and slip into the ditch this event starts a war that lasts 30 years and there's a war that is primarily about the Holy Roman Empire but it draws in pretty much the rest of Europe other European countries are drawn in either directly because they become belligerents Spain France Denmark Sweden and Transylvania which is now part of Romania which was then an autonomous principality or indirectly as in the case of Britain the Dutch Republic Poland Lithuania the Ottoman Empire the papacy in various Italian states all of which supplied either troops or finance this war is related to a series of other Wars which are going on at the same time the most important of which was known as the eighty years war or Dutch Revolt this is the revolt of the northern Netherlands against Spanish rule at the same time as a sequence of wars in France known as the French Wars of Religion and if you think of the three musketeers this is set in that era of the rebellions of the Hyuga nose and their struggle for political and religious autonomy within France alongside that there are Wars that Britain fights against France and Spain rivalry in the Baltic a major conflict between France and the Spanish monarchy which begins during the 30s war is related to it and ends some considerable time afterwards and of course there are other kind of connections between these struggles not just them diplomatic every think of our own civil wars many of the soldiers who fought in the civil wars in Britain had had direct experience and Prince Rupert one of the commanders is somebody who's directly bound up through his own family will meet his family again we think of him as Rupert he's actually christened refresh'd harking back to one of the German Kings that his family were trying to recapture the influence and so on that they had once had so the question is really why are we marking this today why are we here today what is the significance of this conflict what does it mean so I want to say something about that then I'm going to concentrate really on the causes why is it that this event in Bohemia leads to such a long struggle so what causes the war and then briefly what I will say something about why it lasts so long and how it ends what I want to do is really try to place the defenestration into context the conventional view and the one that's most accessible in popular books will suggest that rather like Luther nailing his ninety-five thisis a century or so before the defenestration is event that the spark that ignites the tinder this is one of the metaphors that's commonly used and so in other words we seem to be something an event that starts a seemingly inevitable war and what I want to do is I want to say that it is actually the culmination of much more specific and immediate factors so the real question is why do they contemporaries fail to contain what should have remained a localized crisis and stop it first of all from spreading and then secondly from continuing for so long so why are we talking about it today and why do we remember this war from 400 years ago well it's the most destructive conflict in European history prior to the two twentieth century world wars probably the estimates vary but probably around five million people in the Empire died the overall reduction of the Empire's population was around about a fifth although that took place over a much longer period obviously than the Second World War to put that into perspective the proportional loss of the Soviet Union in the Second World War the country that lost the highest proportion of its population was 12% compared as I say to about 20% in the Empire and we have to remember that we're talking about a pre-industrial age where it was much more difficult to replace the missing human labor with machinery and there is an inordinately long and slow recovery the pre-war population levels were not really recovered until around about 65 years later so until the beginning of the 18th century and this is one of the things that helped embed the war in the memory of people at the time and sort of subsequent generations the scale and the persistence of the destruction H this war into the memory as a kind of benchmark conflict to which later wars were then to be measured and it entered that the central European consciousness as a traumatic if far exceeding later disasters so just to give you one example in opinion surveys conducted in Germany after the Second World War Germans placed the 30 Years War ahead of Nazism or the Black Death as a country's greatest disaster and the horror stories from the war were kept alive kept alive in folktales and embedded in literature johann jakob Christoffel from criminal's Heusen wrote a semi-autobiographical noir novel he was caught up in the war himself and served as a soldier and he published The Adventures of simplices Imus sometime after the war he's also the person who creates the the figure Mother Courage who of course is then later reworked by by Brest and the discovery or rather the rediscovery of grimmelshausen's literature at the towards the end of the 18th century inspired other German writers notably Schiller who wrote both a general history of the war which is still in print as well as a drama trilogy about the Imperial General Valentine and this again keeping this alive in the popular consciousness this was made into the most expensive TV production of West German television in the 1970s and there are more documentaries and dokdo dramas either in production or being shown at the moment so we have this idea that this is a this is as I say a major conflict and all of this has heightened than the idea that it is a profound historical event it's become a marker for key changes in European and indeed in world history it's associated for example with wider shifts in other developments such as economic change the shift towards a more capitalist form of production for example or in military practice with the notion of the military revolution that somehow warfare was being transformed during this period and it's seen as the birth of a modern international order the Peace of Westphalia politicians today are talk about the world as the vest falen system composed of sovereign states sovereign national states which supposedly originates in the peace treaty second settle in the thirty years war and lastly it's seen as a culmination of a whole age of religious wars and again commentators referring to the situation in the Middle East have often said that the problems there are the due to the fact that that part of the world hasn't somehow had its vest fail e'en moment to supposedly to take religion out of politics so let's turn then to the actual causes of this war and there of course there are numerous interpretations and what I want to do is really concentrate on just one the leading one which is in other words that this is somehow SSA a religious war and what I want to do is I want to put religion into its perspective so I want to go into some of the context about how people at the time thought about religion and how religious issues were bound up with a whole host of other problems because we need to get away from the simple idea that we we tend to have about a religious war which is somehow sharply distinguished from secular issues the Empire was the first European state to have to deal with the problem of the Reformation Luther you can see here from a painting in the fit made in the 1560s after his death Luther of course came from Saxony which was in the heart of the Empire and so it was the empire that dealt first of all with the political fallout of what became a permanent schism in Western Christianity the Reformation posed a fundamental problem because it broke the unity of faith and law there were now competing versions of what constituted the true religion which of course then meant were competing versions of what was truth and early modern Europeans were simply not prepared to accept that they wanted one truth as a source of all legitimacy as the source for morality as the basis for law and the foundation for politics and toleration with that frame of mind toleration in our modern concept was impossible because it it entailed recognizing the potential validity of opposing views thus for early modern Europeans toleration was basically a license to serve the devil if you tolerated opposing views you were endangering your own salvation so most European states employed what can be described as a monarchical solution to this problem so we're very familiar in this country with the process of the Reformation under Henry the eighth's where basically it's the monarch that decides which of the various competing versions of Christianity is the right one and then uses political authority to impose this and any toleration is basically a very much limited and special dispensation for dissenters now this solution is was hugely was politically explosive on the one hand it represented an enormous increase in the power of the central authorities the monarchy was getting to decide what was essentially a matter previously left to the church what was true doctrine and also if you held a faith of you that was different from that of your monarch you immediately became a political subversive and this is why religion indeed was a crucial factor in the civil wars that were engulfed much of Western Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century those in the Netherlands and in France and those that affected parts of Europe in the first half of the 17th century including of course Britain and it's civil wars the Empire however adopted a different solution to this problem enshrined in the Peace of Augsburg which was agreed in 1555 this is actually a commemorative engraving made a hundred years later and this agreement extended legal recognition to Lutheran's as well as Catholics and it devolved the decision about which faiths which of these two equally legally equally faiths official faiths it devolved the decision about which of those could be adopted to the princes that ruled the various territories that collectively made up the Empire in other words the Empire's solution to the religious problem reflected its own political character as a mixed monarchy it was a state in which the Emperor was head of the Empire but had to share the exercise of key powers with the princes and also to a lesser extent with the Imperial cities now generally this settlement the Peace of Augsburg has been presented as simply a truce postponing the seemingly inevitable conflict which then makes as I say the defenestration as that spark igniting the tinder and yet if we stand back from this as I indicated at the beginning this is a turbulent age where much of Western Europe is engulfed in religiously inflected civil wars and yet this doesn't happen in the Empire in fact the period from 1555 until the outbreak of the 30 Years War 63 years is the longest period of peace in modern German history only surpassed in 2008 and 8 by the period since 1945 and yes there are some disturbances in the Empire they're localized and there is nothing on the scale of what is happening elsewhere for example the massacre of st. Bartholomew one of the key events of the French Wars of Religion in which at least 10,000 people were killed across France nothing like this in the Empire and more importantly when war broke out when it did in 1618 the belligerents within the Empire and surrounding the Empire do not line up neatly along confessional lines in fact most of the German Lutheran princes struggled to remain neutral and those that didn't some of those that didn't in fact sided with the Emperor from their Catholic Habsburg family the Calvinists Germany's equivalent of the Puritans who had emerged after 1560 did in fact largely oppose the Emperor but individual Calvinists such as the gentleman whose effigy you can see here count hots hurtful individual Calvinists like this like him served in the Imperial Army in fact he is one of the commanders of the Imperial Army just before the end of the thirtieth war and the man who lets the Defenestrator z-- into prague castle and the castle captain was in fact a Catholic and we can enumerate numerous other examples where things on the ground are much more mixed-up but the same is also true for the International dimension yes Catholic Spain supports the Emperor but does so inconsistently Catholic France backs us a succession of Protestant protagonists within the Empire culminating with Sweden and then ultimately becomes involved itself fighting the Emperor and perhaps more fundamentally still none of the authorities including the churches call for a holy war everyone tries to fight this war conventionally with paid professional soldiers rather than trying to mobilize their own subjects so what we're looking at then is that the role of religion is complex it was very much a matter of perspective some people certainly saw this as a religious war many of the clergy and those who were driven into exile reflect on this and express feelings that are very much would be those of a religious war but religion mainly served as a rallying call something that could be used to persuade others certainly other countries that's really your cause was the same as theirs and they should come and help we should not however and say misinterpret this to mean that religion was simply an excuse it was not used simply to mask what were otherwise secular aims rather it was that the actors and most of the actors most of those involved regarded religious goals as something that was more were more distant and were much more pragmatic about how they were to pursue them okay so if we stand back from this and we and we see that this is not in any simple way caused by religion what does cause this conflict well the root cause is rather a paradox it lies in the emperor empires character as a mixed monarchy so the very thing that enabled the Empire to stand away and aside from religious violence actually leads to a constitutional conflict and the problem was not so much the basic structure it wasn't the fact that the Empire was a mixed monarchy and something that was heavily criticized by 19th and early 20th century historians who sort of blamed the outbreak of the war on the Empire's weakness rather it was that some of the key players within this complicated patchwork wanted not to adjust the system itself but to adjust their own position or to tinker with it to suit themselves and the problem was really that the shares of power within the Empire were unevenly distributed amongst the princes some at the top wanted a rather more power and in particular two members of another family the vital spark family the Empire second family after the Habsburgs were divided we have here Prince Rupert's father Frederick v the elector Palatine the man who marries James the first daughter Elisabeth and he wishes to recover his family's traditional influence which is why he names his son after the last member of the family who had been a German King and his relation Duke Maximilian of Bavaria wishes to improve his position he's the from the junior branch of the family and wishes to improve his position within within the Empire and there's a whole host of other minor princes Kent's and knights all who felt disadvantaged in what was a hierarchical structure and they wished to level some of these distinctions they wished the Empire to be much more structured along the lines of an aristocracy where they wouldn't be bossed around by the princes ruling the big principalities and part of the problem was that religious differences sharpened some of these political and constitutional issues the elector Palatine was a Calvinist so technically then an inherent of a faith that was illegal with under the Imperial Constitution whereas Maximilian was a Catholic but the religious difference is nonetheless never did never intervened in a way that totally polarized politics or split the Empire neatly into confessional kemp's Maximilian for example wanted to improve his own position but not that of the Catholic Habsburg family who held the imperial title so what was it then you might ask that they are actually arguing over what is it that concerned them well the primary issue was the fate of the so called church lens it is after all the Holy Roman Empire and 1/7 of the Empire was composed of ecclesiastical principalities where the ruler of each principality was chosen by the Cathedral or the abbey chapter so these principalities belong to the Catholic Church and didn't belong to any particular family and you can see them they're marked here there this map separates them all out there the purple areas and so they're the ones here and those of you've got good color eyesight will notice that some of them are missing from the top because this is from 1648 some of those lands gets swallowed up in the peace settlement the problem was that these lands have been regarded traditionally since the early Middle Ages as they preserves at the major princely and aristocratic families you have younger sons you have daughters once you've married them off once you have enough to ensure your hereditary succession in your own principality what do you do with the spares you create you get careers for them in the imperial church where they have the status of a prince and they can also then advance your own family influence this had been going on for four centuries and the Protestant families were simply not prepared to pass up on these opportunities just because they had converted to Lutheranism and they also quite rightly feared that if these lands remained permanently in their grasp of the Catholics then they would be permanently outvoted in the Imperial institutions because although they were individually small there were a lot of these lands so it gave the potentially gave the Catholics an inbuilt political majority in the Empire's institutions so this in itself was not sufficient however to cause a major conflict after all the Empire had been grappling with this problem for 50 years or 60 years or so before the 30 Years War breaks out so we need to look further into this wider context and the other key factor in the mix is the weakness or relative weakness within the Habsburg dynasty although the princes collectively had considerable influence in the Empire they lacked the final say in important matters which still rested with the Emperor and since the early 15th century the senior Prince's the so-called electors had always chosen member of the Habsburg family as Emperor the Hapsburgs had the most land they ruled directly around about one third of the Empire and since the early 16th century that included Bohemia and so they were well placed to carry out their primary task which was to defend the Empire against the ever-present threat posed by the Ottoman Turks to the southeast unfortunately the participation of the Habsburg possessions into separate Spanish and Austrian branches in the middle of the sixteenth century had left the Austrian branch technically the most senior because they're the ones with the imperial title it had left them the poor relations the kings of Spain kept the overseas colonies with their supplies of silver and Austria was relatively speaking the poor relation and the Austrian Hapsburgs needed money to pay for the border defenses which you can see this is a section so this purpley area is the southeast corner of their territories this area is the Ottoman possessions and they have this tiny strip of Hungary which they'd held on to where their border defenses were and that consumed pretty much the bulk of their ordinary revenue they had to appeal to their own nobility who were represented in the different Assemblies of their provinces for further taxes and as these Nobles converted to Protestantism they bargained political autonomy and religious rights in return for tax grants that were paid in fact by their peasants even more concessions were granted during the so-called brothers quarrel between about 1608 and 1611 when the Austrian Hapsburgs imploded over at succession dispute over this man here emperor rudolf ii he was perfectly capable of fathering children unfortunately none of them legitimately and his refusal to marry and to designate his successor opened up a succession dispute thus the Emperor was permanently distracted at the time when this dispute was growing over who should have access to the Catholic Church lands in the Empire and yet there was still no inevitable slide to war the Bohemian crisis de-stemmed in fact not simply from weakness but actually a relative revival in Habsburg strength which began with Emperor Matthias and continued with his successor designate from the styrian branch Archduke Ferdinand who had been made bohemian King in 1617 Ferdinand in particular sought to reassert his family's power by making Catholicism a test for political loyalty Protestants were not immediately removed from office but new appointments to court and military posts were now reserved for Catholics and the leading Protestant Nobles in Bohemia felt threatened by Ness and particularly the minority who were directly losing out turn the leader of the Defenestrator had just lost a lucrative caught post he'd been compensated with another one but these were people who felt that they were on the backfoot and they were concerned that the moderate majority of nobles were not going to take a tough enough stand so they wanted to push things through an open breach to force a confrontation which is why they staged the defenestration however neither they nor the Habsburgs wanted a protracted conflict and both parties hoped that our initial show of strength would be sufficient to end at the crisis so that we're left with a question then of why it took 30 years to resolve this and then to understand this we need to think ourselves back into what the principal actors were trying to achieve we need to examine what their objectives were and for Ferdinand and for his successor the third they were kind of not very original when it came to children's names this was not really a war this was a rebellion as rebels their opponents were automatically in the wrong they had forfeited their rights and thus the habsburg felt entitled to deprive them of their titles and their property whenever they could and it was the near unbroken string of victories that the hapsburgs achieved during the 1620s that made this possible and these victories began with the battle that you can see here the Battle of White Mountain in November of 16 2014 Prague which crushed the Bohemian revolt drove Frederick v into exile and initiated the largest transfer of private property in Central Europe prior to the expropriation ironically of the descendants of the beneficiaries by the communists after 1948 to give you an indication of the scale half of all Marion's changed landlord as a result of the seizures from those who had supported the no mobiles who supported the rebellion and their transfer of these lands to those Nobles who had remain loyal or to compensate army officers who couldn't be paid so the Habsburgs regained control of their own lands remember they had been largely opposed by the nobility prior to the war now those assemblies were packed with families who owed their own good fortune to having stayed loyal to the Habsburgs and it's really this alliance that cements and stabilizes the Habsburg monarchy until it collapsed in the wake of the first world war and what the Habsburgs do is that they roll this policy out to the rest of the Empire when they defeat each successive opponent within the Empire beginning with Frederick the fifth you can see here a contemporary cartoon he's looking rather sick travelling on a barrel he's mocked as the winter king his reign in Bohemia lasts barely more than a winter once he's driven into exile his lenz which are the purpley bits here are transferred to Duke Maximilian of Bavaria who provides the bulk of the troops that win the Battle of White Mountain so the problem is that these moves this policy creates a large number of embittered exhales we have the Bohemian the Austrian and the German Nobles all who lose their lands in the wake of they these defeats thus any power intervening in the Empire had a ready pool of support people who were able to raise troops to facilitate that intervention but also people who provided a cause to legitimate that intervention each of the foreign powers intervening said that they were there not to conquer but to restore what they claim to be the proper balance within the Empire so now we can understand how this war which begins as a crisis in Bohemia spreads to the rest of the Empire assumes the character of a more general European conflict the supporters of Habsburg Austria want this war to be over quickly especially Spain related to the Austrian Habsburgs of course and who are facing a similar rebellion in the northern Netherlands so the Spanish provide military assistance not primarily to extinguish Protestant and Tisza min the Empire they actually want the emperor to make concessions all they want is this war to be over quickly so that Austria can assist them against the Dutch and of course that gives the Dutch a very good reason to make sure the 30 Years War lasts as long as possible so they provide financial assistance especially to the Bohemians and France who feared encirclement from the Spanish Habsburg lands copies Dutch policy and the French back anyone who is going to intervene in the Empire to try and keep this war going as long as possible to ensure that there isn't a sort of full Spanish Austrian alliance the Danes who intervene first is the first major European power intervene actually have a stake in the empire they have a stake in these German church church lands they're playing the same game as the princes once they are defeated by 1629 this opens up in fact opportunities for Sweden it creates the Swedes have their own problems they are at loggerheads with the family ruling Poland and they are concerned that the Polish vassa's will form an alliance with the Emperor and therefore they're intervening largely out of security concerns and when this gentleman here Gustavus Adolphus the king of Sweden after his death in 1632 the war is essentially stalemated until the Battle of nerdling and two years later when it looks as if Sweden is about to collapse and so the French have been providing financial assistance to the Swedes fear that the Emperor last will gain a complete and outright victory so they intervene incrementally to keep the war going and to prevent that the further reason for the long duration of this conflict are a succession of military factors a host of practical factors including the accumulative effects of destruction hinder military operations military operations usually shown as this sort of tangled web here we have this is being reconstructed from a contemporary diary by a man who is probably called Peter ha Gandalf unfortunately the first pages of the diary and the last pages of the diary are missing so we can't be certain but he tramps 22,000 kilometers around the empire serving in the Catholic League forces so usually you get the idea that the war snakes around in this way in fact we have to imagine it's been fought in different regions and so the conflict becomes regionalised as a series of struggles between the main protagonists backed by their local supporters in each region and so the problem is that the victory in one region is usually offset by a defeat in another so it's very difficult to gain the overall military preponderance in this and the war is linked very much to diplomatic moves to try and settle it what the belligerents are trying to do is to not to exterminate their opponents but to use military force to compel their opponents to make what was considered an honorable peace in other words a peace that would involve and concessions that would establish the basis for a lasting peace that would adjust of course things in your favor but nonetheless would mean that you could accommodate yourself with the with your previous enemy and so military operations are about gaining a sufficient advantage so that when you make peace and you have to hand over concessions it doesn't look as if this is coming from a sign of weakness and it's the problem about getting that right that right balance ultimately France and Sweden are able to evolve a military partnership that targets the Emperor's supporters so successively they knock out the different principalities that have been backing the Emperor and Empress and the third who succeeded is rather more intransigent father ferdinand ii skillfully offers just enough concessions to persuade France and Sweden that they have mortem to gain by making peace now in 1648 rather than risking losing these gains and fighting on unfortunately for the peacemakers of Europe France and Spain felt both felt that they had sufficient advantages to continue fighting and they end up fighting another 11 years their own separate war to settle basically for terms that were on the table in 1648 with very little change so what is the outcome then of 30 years of fighting well the general picture is usually presented as a Protestant victory because much of the history of the war was written by Pro Protestant historians in the 19th century certainly Calvinism was recognized as a third official religion within the Empire but by 1648 it was largely spent as a religious movement we have to remember this is the middle of the seventeenth century this is the age of the Baroque and across the next 50 years or so around 50 German princes convert from Protestantism to Catholicism it is Catholicism that is the dynamic cultural in the political force it's the Austrian Hapsburgs that emerged as a major great power through defeating the Turks outside Vienna in 1683 and re conquering Hungary so the recognition of Calvinism is not so much a Protestant gain particularly when we also remember that the Calvinists had made most of their conversions at the Lutheran's expense and the Lutheran's bitterly resented many Lutheran's bitterly resented this acceptance of Calvinism within the Empire in terms of the territorial redistribution and you'll see here this is a map of the Empire in 1648 and it looks pretty much like the Empire in 1618 you can see here shaded the various areas that get exchanged it's not so much of a grand exchange of territory Sweden does gain lands they're the ones shown here in yellow which actually make it a member of the empire consolidate Sweden's power in the Baltic but that is going to end at the beginning of the 18th century with the emerge full emergence of Russia repeated the great what exercise German nationalists in the 19th century was the transfer of Austria's bit of Alsace to France and that was really not what the French were actually concerned about at the time what was far more important was the promise written into the peace treaty that Austria would not help Spain in the ongoing war so all of those things are of less lasting impact than we might then we might think what was perhaps more significant were the gains of the supposedly losing side Bavaria in fact kept most of its gains that the pala tonight's expense and remains a major player within the Empire the Hapsburgs importantly kept the settlement that they had achieved in their own lands which as I say stabilized their monarchy and into the 20th century and the Empire itself is usually presented as been having left an empty shell the German princes supposedly being independent in fact the Peace of Westphalia actually curtailed some of the princely rights princes could no longer change the confession of their own territories this was now permanently fixed and to make that a workable settlement and the Imperial Constitution enshrined the whole wide range of personal rights and for example the right to bring up your children in a different faith and all kinds of other rights that were considerably ahead of those of other European countries and with the complex constitutional adjustments that tend to get lost in the descriptions of the Peace of Westphalia that allowed the Habsburgs to rebalance their authority yes their position in the Empire had changed but they nonetheless remain the leading power in Central Europe and the Empire survives into the early 19th century the perceptions of this so were rather different the it's a kind of two-track perception the idea of this as a truly dreadful event was certainly present and kept alive it was kept alive in the official commemorations of the war which begin immediately the with by about 1650 the Peace of Westphalia is being marked and has continued to be marked indeed its parts of Germany it's still a public holiday and the memory of the war was of a truly terrible event that had been sent by God to punish the sins of the population so in that sense it was seen as a religious conflict so the sinful Germans should be pious and obedient and diligent subjects of their Prince's so part of the impact of the war was to increase princely power relative to thee to the subjects but in the longer term this war was remembered as a national disaster something that has been that had left Germany used anachronistic aliy divided and weak and is therefore woven into explanations for the causes of later conflicts thank you [Applause]

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Keywords: gresham, gresham talk, gresham lecture, lecture, gresham college, gresham college lecture, gresham college talk, free video, free education, education, public lecture, Event, free event, free public lecture, free lecture, Thirty Years War, 1618, 1648, 17th century, prague, defenestration, Peter Wilson, University of Oxford, The Holy Roman Empire, catholic, protestant, religion, Europe, Germany, ottoman empire, French Civil War, 1620s, The Three Musketeers, Prince Rupert, Ruprecht

Id: R7vxXfy09EA

Length: 44min 59sec (2699 seconds)

Published: Thu May 24 2018