To get a general sense of an historical period one learns much by looking at what generated its legacy, which in the case of the seventeenth century is nothing less than the world – apart from China and Japan – that we know today.
In the seventeenth century Galileo, Newton and others laid the basis of modern science, Descartes and Spinoza altered the history of philosophy, Hugo Grotius founded international law, and Hobbes and Locke set the terms of modern political theory. A reorganisation of independent and centralised European states competed for empire abroad and fought each in their home continent, in almost continual and ever more costly and complicated ways that required rapid advances in military technology – advances which at the same time gave the European powers superiority over the peoples they colonised in America, Asia and Africa.
The seventeenth century saw the decline of Spain and the rise of France as great powers. Spain had based its might in the previous century on the flood of bullion from its transatlantic possessions; by the end of the seventeenth century France was the new superpower, its language the international language and its culture dominant to such an extent that two centuries later the aristocratic elites of Europe were still speaking French as the language of diplomacy and polite life.
But France’s power, based partly on the devastation of the German-speaking regions of Europe in the Thirty Years War and partly on the personal rule and influence of Louis XIV in the century’s second half, united others in Europe against it. France dragged Europe’s economic and political centre of gravity westward, but the major beneficiaries of the shift were the United Provinces of the Netherlands and England. The accumulation of wealth in the latter led the way in the following centuries to the agricultural and industrial revolutions that made Britain a greater superpower than the France of Louis XIV.
Among the central facts explaining many of the seventeenth century’s transformations and innovations are its wars, principally the Thirty Years War in the heart of the continent, and afterwards the conflicts which might variously be denominated the Dutch Wars. The Anglo-Dutch aspect of these latter wars was fought almost exclusively on the high seas as befitted two powers with colonial interests; they ended with an alliance between the two countries which by far benefited England more, though England cannot be characterised as the clear military victor in the actual fighting that went before.
All these conflicts were messy and complicated affairs. But it is important to have an overview of them to hand, particularly of the Thirty Years War, giving a sense of the roots, the course and the outcome of what was a devastating and horrific series of struggles, back and forth across an increasingly ravaged Europe in which millions died from fighting, famine, disease and rapine. The various opposed parties alternated success with failure, the fortunes of the struggle going back and forth without definitive result, their armies swarming up, down and across Europe, trampling on crops, burning towns, raping and murdering civilians, stealing and looting – and for thirty long, exhausting, appalling years.1
The Thirty Years War was the last fully international religion-inspired conflict in Europe (to date at any rate), and was made all but inevitable by the Reformation in the preceding century. By contrast, the wars later in the century were, though frequent, more limited in objective and duration. This was the case with the Anglo-Dutch Wars fought to achieve the maritime mastery necessary for control of overseas trade and possessions, the prelude to increased imperial expansion by both parties, and especially by England. All these conflicts, with the continual bicker of fighting elsewhere in all corners of Europe and the Civil War in England, achieved a reconfiguration of Europe’s mind and character in sometimes inadvertent ways, as so often happens in unsettled times.
The claim that the Thirty Years War was the last major religious conflict in Europe is elegantly expressed by C. V. Wedgwood in her remark that when the war ended with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, people at last ‘grasped the essential futility of putting their beliefs of the mind to the judgment of the sword. Instead, they rejected religion as an object to fight for, and found others.’2 This applies to Europe and the world it influenced; alas it is not true for the more zealous among today’s devotees of Islam, and perhaps never has been. Of course the Thirty Years War was not exclusively about religion – there were dynastic and economic considerations in play too, to say nothing of demographic and climatic factors; but it was so closely annexed to the desire of the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, egged on by his Jesuit confessor Wilhelm Lamormaini, to reclaim for Catholicism what had been lost to Protestantism, that all but one of the major alignments in the war ran on religious lines. The exception was France, a Catholic country reluctant to see Habsburg influence grow, which is why it sided with the Protestant side of the argument, though not for the Protestants’ reasons.
This view is contrary to that of the major Thirty Years War historian Peter H. Wilson, whose huge and magisterial account of the war has as one of its interpretative bases the claim that the war was not primarily religious.3 With due deference to his expertise, and while accepting that there were other important factors involved, his claim is difficult to accept. Take just three from very many examples substantiating the reason why (the first two shortly to be discussed, the third pervasive throughout this book): the causes of the Defenestration of Prague, which was the proximate trigger for the war; the Edict of Restitution, which prolonged the war; and the general background evidenced in the struggle by Europe’s intellect to free itself from the demands of religious orthodoxy. It is impossible to make sense of the conflict without appealing to the framework of confessional divisions which, by their nature, explain it. All the war’s contemporaries, and almost all of its historians since, have seen matters this way. In the case of the former especially, perception is reality.
The Thirty Years War falls into two distinct chapters. It was triggered in 1618 by the Bohemian revolt, in which the famous Defenestration of Prague was a salient moment; and for a decade thereafter it ran so much the Habsburg way that it prompted Emperor Ferdinand II and Lamormaini to make a major mistake of policy. This was the issuing of the Edict of Restitution on 6 March 1629. The Edict required that property originally belonging to the Catholic Church, but sequestered by Protestants since the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, should be restored to Catholic ownership. This retroactive effort to enforce the Augsburg provisions implied a change of control of Bremen, Magdeburg, a dozen bishoprics and more than a hundred religious houses scattered over the various German states. Even though it was not in the event fully implemented, its immediate effect was the uprooting of many thousands of Protestants who fled to Protestant states from their new masters, who were keen to enforce Catholic orthodoxy among any who stayed. The Edict upset the two most powerful Protestant electors, Georg-Wilhelm of Brandenburg and Johann-Georg of Saxony, who therefore refused to attend an Imperial meeting in 1630 called by Ferdinand to have his son recognised as King of the Romans (and thus by tradition as heir to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire).
The tensions induced by the Edict of Restitution encouraged King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden to see an opportunity in a duty. The duty was to come to the aid of the Protestant cause, but it simultaneously offered the opportunity to enlarge his possessions and therefore his (then compromised) revenues. He invaded Pomerania in northern Europe in 1630, and by doing so turned the course of the war – not by giving the Protestant cause the edge, but by blunting the edge of the better-organised Catholic cause. In one sense his intervention might be regarded as prolonging the war by another eighteen years, but the eventual failure of the Habsburg–Jesuit project to recover all Europe for Catholicism might be said to have made his intervention worthwhile.
As these events show, the origins of the war lie – as too often with wars – in a peace treaty: that selfsame Peace of Augsburg, concluded long before in September 1555. This was a jerry-built affair, viewed by the then Emperor, Ferdinand I (who had just succeeded his abdicated brother Charles V), as a temporary measure to end disputes engendered by the Reformation’s great sectarian split. It was not so viewed by the Lutherans under the leadership of the then Elector of Saxony, who regarded it as a permanent settlement of the Lutherans’ right to exist in the Empire. It was the outcome of mounting tensions over many years, typical of the effects of the Reformation everywhere.
In an effort to mute the tensions between his Catholic and Lutheran subjects, Charles V had earlier – in 1548 – instituted an even more temporary settlement known as the Augsburg Interim, which he hoped would give time for the opposed religious parties to resolve their differences and reunite. But in allowing that priests could marry and that communion could be taken in both kinds (bread and wine), the Interim in effect entrenched differences rather than paved the way to overcoming them. This was because the Interim was seen by Lutherans as too Catholic in its emphases, despite the liberalising compromises about priestly marriage and communion.
Seventeen years earlier the Protestant princes of the Empire had formed a defensive alliance, under the leadership of the electors of Hesse and Saxony, to protect the interests of their Reformed religion. It was known as the Schmalkaldic League. In the following years members of the League confiscated much Catholic property and expelled many Catholic clergy, by these means successfully promoting Lutheranism in northern Germany. While Charles was distracted by long-drawn-out hostilities with France and the Ottoman Empire, the Schmalkaldic League spread Lutheranism unimpededly. But as soon as Charles concluded treaties with both his major enemies, he was able to turn his attention to the League, defeating it in battle and obliging its members to accept the Augsburg Interim.
The pacifying effects of the Interim were short lived. Within a very few years dissatisfaction prompted the Schmalkaldic League to revolt openly against Charles, and this time he was obliged to make terms less congenial to himself, first in the Peace of Passau of 1552 – in more ways than one a capitulation, a result of the fact that he had spent three exhausting decades fighting on too many fronts – and then in 1555 in the Peace of Augsburg itself.
This latter settlement was of immense historic significance, in that it granted official recognition to Lutheranism in the Empire, and established the principle of cuius regio, eius religio – the religion of the ruler is the religion of the state. Note the words ‘to Lutheranism’; at that time there were no Calvinist princes, as there were soon to be, and tensions between Calvinists and Lutherans were to prove at times as great as those between Protestants and Catholics.
The sharpest stone left in the shoe, however, was the part of the Peace of Augsburg known as the ‘Ecclesiastical Reservation’. It provided that no more Catholic lands would pass to Protestant control after the date of the treaty’s acceptance by the Imperial Diet then being held at Augsburg. It was a clause that quickly came to be honoured more in the breach than the observance, for when heads of states converted to Lutheranism they applied the cuius regio principle in making their possessions conform to their own confessional preference, so that by the beginning of the Thirty Years War the Reservation was a dead letter. The danger it represented was plain to all – at the Diet of Regensburg in 1608 the Protestant princes demanded a reaffirmation of the Augsburg principles in the face of an Imperial demand that formerly Catholic property be returned, and when the assurance was refused they walked out. They did so again at the Diet in 1613, the last time an Imperial Diet was held until 1630. Habsburg successes in the first ten years of the war gave Ferdinand II and Lamormaini enough misplaced confidence to enforce the Reservation unilaterally and retroactively, which they did by issuing the aforementioned Edict of Restitution.
The effect of the Edict was, in the long run, disastrous for the Habsburgs’ cause and therefore the cause of Catholicism. The transfer of wealth and property back into Catholic hands, the appointment of Imperial supervisors in areas of the Empire which had been free of direct Imperial control for a century, the enforcement of Catholic requirements on Protestants who therefore fled to Protestant states taking their grievances with them, the alignment of previously neutral princes with the Protestant cause, the decision by France to become more active in opposing any increase of Habsburg power, and most of all the encouragement to Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus to invade Pomerania, combined to make the Habsburg cause at length and at last unwinnable. Thus was the tide of affairs turned, though much suffering lay in the twenty years that had yet to elapse before the war ended.
But though the Edict was the occasion for a change in the course of the war, there was another and more germane way that the previous century’s Peace of Augsburg served as a major factor in causing the war in the first place.
In 1606 an incident occurred in the little Lutheran city of Donauwörth on the banks of the Rhine. The city council issued a decree prohibiting members of the city’s Catholic minority from making public manifestations of their faith. The Catholics held a demonstration, which turned into a riot. The then Emperor, Rudolf II, took punitive action; he revoked the city’s privileges and purged the council of its Lutheran members, putting Catholics in their place. This was in direct contravention of the cuius regio terms of the Peace of Augsburg.
Rudolf II then removed Donauwörth from the ‘Swabian Circle’ – one of the ten ‘circles’ or administrative districts of the Empire – and placed it in the ‘Bavarian Circle’ instead. The Swabian Circle’s director was a Lutheran, the Bavarian Circle’s director was a champion of the Emperor and the Catholic cause, Duke Maximilian of Bavaria.
Rudolf’s measures alarmed and enraged not only the citizens of Donauwörth but all of the Empire’s Protestant princes and peoples. Whatever their other differences on matters of opinion, doctrine or politics, the princes were united in opposing the breach of those Augsburg principles that suited them, and they therefore decided to form a new protective league – the ‘Evangelical Union’. It came formally into existence in 1608, with Frederick V, Elector of the Palatinate, as its leader.
To all outward appearances Frederick V was the natural choice for the role, because he was both an Imperial elector and a Calvinist determined to resist Catholic encroachments. But in fact Frederick was not a good choice. He was hesitant, timid, not very intelligent, and heavily dependent on the opinions of others, not least on his chief counsellor, Christian of Anhalt. Generally speaking, an insufficient ruler lucky enough to have a wise counsellor can leave matters to the latter, and the arrangement works well because the counsellor can, like Teucer behind the shield of Ajax, act all the more effectively for being partly invisible. But alas, Christian was not much more astute than Frederick, and although he had great charm and a large amount of self-confidence, he was not a match for the complexities of the time, which in fact he made worse by his over-ambition.
The electors either of Saxony or of Brandenburg would have been better leaders of the Evangelical Union, but the problem was that the first was a Lutheran and the second a Calvinist, and their dislike of each other was as great as their dislike of Catholics – this was particularly so in the case of Johann-Georg of Saxony’s dislike of Calvinists. Moreover neither of them thought that the threat of a Catholic attempt on Protestant lands and privileges was as serious as Frederick V and others represented it to be.
In 1608 Henri IV of France agreed to serve as the Evangelical Union’s patron, not because he was reverting to his former Protestant allegiance (he was by then, having originally been a Huguenot, in his second and final phase as a Catholic on grounds of pure expediency: ‘Paris is worth a Mass’ he had said when securing the French crown) but because he saw the utility to France of using the Union as a balance to Habsburg power. Naturally, this increased the stakes, so by way of reaction the Empire’s Catholic princes set up their own organisation, the ‘Catholic League’, choosing the most obvious person to serve as their leader, Duke Maximilian of Bavaria. It had as its official sponsor Rudolf II’s cousin Philip III of Spain. Until his actions over Donauwörth upset his Protestant subjects, Rudolf had appeared to be neutral between all sides of the religious divisions in his Empire, eager not to polarise his subjects’ sentiments further. The change of tack posed a threat to the unstable equilibrium. But it did not trigger general war at that point because, having grown increasingly mad and out of control, Rudolf was no longer fully in the Empire’s driving seat. He was bit by bit being moved aside by his brother Matthias, who eventually, in 1612, replaced him as emperor.
But deeper polarisation was the unavoidable result of there being two opposed Leagues founded on religious differences. An immediate illustration of the danger occurred in 1609 when the Duke of Jülich and Cleves died. The two Leagues disagreed not about which prince but which religion should inherit the territory. The late Duke had been a Catholic, but his closest blood-heirs were both Protestants – the Elector of Brandenburg and Philip Ludwig of Neuberg. To make matters worse, the duchy of Jülich and Cleves straddled the tenuous land route connecting Spain’s Italian possessions with its Low Country possessions, a route known as the ‘Spanish Road’. It was a vital asset for the Habsburg cause, for along it passed troops and supplies for the Spanish Netherlands. The Habsburgs were accordingly anxious not to see the duchy fall into Protestant hands.
In this flammable situation the Catholic League looked to Philip III of Spain for support, while the Evangelical Union looked to Henri IV of France, and war threatened. At this crucial moment Henri IV was assassinated by a lunatic Jesuit – a terrible irony, given that he had allowed the Jesuits back into France after his predecessor had expelled them, and had even given them the palace in which he was born – La Flèche – to serve as a school where they could breed up more of their kind. (René Descartes was a pupil of that famous institution, and was indeed present when Henri’s heart was taken there to be buried. Marin Mersenne was also a pupil there.)
Henri’s widow Marie de’ Medici became regent because their son Louis XIII was still an infant. Marie immediately effected a rapprochement with Spain, thus removing at a stroke the Evangelical Union’s chief support. Without France the Union had little appetite for continuing to confront the Catholic League militarily, and perhaps not much of a realistic chance of winning if it had done so.
But there was soon enough another twist: Philip Ludwig of Neuberg, following Henri IV’s example, himself decided to convert to Catholicism, and capped the move by offering to marry the daughter of Duke Maximilian. This neatly created the possibility of a compromise: in the Treaty of Xanten signed in 1614, the duchy of Jülich and Cleves was divided between the newly Catholic Philip Ludwig and the still Protestant Elector of Brandenburg, the former receiving Jülich for his son, while Cleves passed to Brandenburg.
The outcome of this perilous sequence of events did not prevent war, only delayed it. All that was lacking for a more general conflict to begin was a triggering set of events. One aspect of this was waiting in the Palatinate where the Elector Frederick V and Christian of Anhalt were reading Rosicrucian prognostications of a Protestant saviour for Europe, and astrological prognostications of Frederick’s own impending greatness. Together these indicators, as they saw them, made them all the more disposed to believe reports by Christian’s intelligence agents that the Holy Roman Empire would collapse when the Emperor Matthias died. Christian believed this because it seemed that the divisions and tensions within the Empire had not been overcome – indeed had not even been properly managed – by Matthias’ efforts since 1612. A cursory look at a map of the Empire at that time seemed to show why: the Imperial possessions sprawled as widely over differences of faith, culture and language as they did over geography, for they comprised not only the German electorates and duchies but Austria itself, and alongside it Carinthia, Carniola, the Tyrol, Styria, Bohemia, Hungary and part of Transylvania. At that period much of Hungary was in Ottoman hands, and the remainder formed an almost completely independent fiefdom under the Magyar nobility.
But the most complicated problem of all was Bohemia. Bohemia and its three dependent provinces of Moravia, Lusatia and Silesia each had its own capital city, so there were four capitals each with its own independent Diet. The population of all four regions was mainly Slav and Protestant, with some admixture of Protestant and Catholic Germans. What perennially irritated the Habsburgs was the fact that the Bohemian monarchy was elective. This meant that the Habsburgs had to pay careful attention to local traditions in order to keep hold of the Bohemian crown. Until then the Habsburgs had generally succeeded; now the stresses in the Empire were making Bohemians and everyone else less certain that the Habsburgs could count on precedent and custom as usual.
None of the emperors in the decades before 1618 had managed to establish unitary control over all of their diverse Empire, nor genuine authority in any of its more autonomous parts. They alternated between strong-arm and concessive tactics, each bringing its own set of usually unwanted consequences. Repression was Rudolf II’s choice in Donauwörth, concession was his choice in dealing with the Bohemian Diets, to whom he gave a ‘Letter of Majesty’ reinforcing their independence. Both choices merely weakened the Empire. When Matthias was ousted from the throne, therefore, Christian of Anhalt and Frederick thought their hour of advantage had come. They were wrong; they had completely misjudged the nature of the man who replaced Matthias in 1617. This was Archduke Ferdinand of Styria, soon to be officially crowned Emperor Ferdinand II. He was a far more single-minded character, not interested in concessions, and he was under the influence of his ambitious Jesuit confessor, the aforementioned Wilhelm Lamormaini.
Ferdinand took power just as the situation in Bohemia ran out of control from the Imperial point of view, thus offering the trigger for war. Matthias had angered his Bohemian subjects by appointing Catholics to leadership positions on the Council of Regents in Prague. The regents’ first act – prefiguring the Edict of Restitution ten years later, and with no more pacific an outcome – was to press on the perennial sore point: they ordered that all religious bodies must revert to the terms of their original foundation. This meant that all Protestant churches, complete with their endowments and properties, had to return to Catholic control. The Bohemians immediately rebelled. On 22 May 1618 a crowd of them marched to Prague Castle, led by the ‘defensors’ under the command of Count Matthias Thurn. They seized two of the leading regents and threw them out of a window. This was the famous ‘Defenestration of Prague’. The terrified regents fell into a rubbish dump twenty metres below the window, suffering injuries more to their dignity than to their limbs. (Subsequent Catholic propaganda said that they had been caught in mid-air by angels or the Virgin Mary, and gently lowered into the rubbish dump. This detail – why lower them into a rubbish dump? – did not receive an explanation in the propaganda.)
The resulting damage suffered by Bohemia was immensely greater than that suffered by the regents. The sacred laws of diplomacy and Imperial representation had been impugned, and this was a direct insult to the Imperial authority itself. The Bohemians realised that they had cast a die, and had no option but to follow through. They set up a board of deputies to administer the kingdom, called on the other three provinces to join them, and raised an army. They sent the Emperor a letter demanding that the four provinces should henceforth be autonomous, and that only Protestants should occupy official posts. These were not demands likely to be met by an emperor, still less the soon to be crowned Ferdinand.
Matthias died in March 1619, and the process of Ferdinand’s election began. He believed himself to have in his pocket all seven votes required for gaining the Imperial throne, as had almost always been the case in what was a formulaic and notional exercise. He certainly had the three archbishop-electors in his pocket, he had been elected King of Bohemia in 1617 and therefore had that vote in his own gift already, and as usual the three Protestant electors of Saxony, Brandenburg and the Palatinate were at odds with one another, and in no position to seek an alternative to Ferdinand. There was no obvious alternative to him anyway.
But Ferdinand’s confident expectations were in process of being upset by the Bohemian Estates, who were reconsidering their relationship with Ferdinand. The new circumstances created by the Defenestration offered them the opportunity to take an independent path and get themselves a Protestant for king. This they did: they voted to depose Ferdinand and chose Frederick V of the Palatinate in his place.
Frederick asked his father-in-law, James I of England, whether he should accept the crown. He asked his fellow members of the Evangelical Union for their advice also; and he asked his own council. They were all of one unequivocal and emphatic mind: they discouraged him. Frederick should have had the wit to heed such unity of opinion. But he was far more swayed by the views of two people closer to him in every way: his wife, Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England, and his chancellor Christian of Anhalt. Invoking the sincerity of his commitment to Protestantism, and citing the prophecies and prognostications of greatness they had come across in their study of arcana, Elizabeth and Christian urged Frederick to accept the Bohemians’ invitation. He therefore did so, grandiloquently announcing that he felt a divine call to lead the Protestant cause, and was obliged to obey it.
Bohemia’s revolt from Imperial authority was thereby complete, and the Thirty Years War had begun. Ferdinand II announced that Frederick’s electorship and his Palatine territories were forfeit because of his treason. He offered the electorship and Upper Palatinate to Duke Maximilian of Bavaria. He pledged the Lower Palatinate, the area lying to the west of the Rhine, conveniently for the Spanish Road, to his Spanish Habsburg relatives. He offered Lusatia to its next-door prince, Johann-Georg of Saxony, thus dividing the Protestant cause. The armies of Maximilian, Spain and Saxony thereby became available to him.
Frederick V arrived in Prague while these armies were gathering. With him came his entourage of German Calvinists. Bohemia’s Lutherans immediately took a powerful dislike to them; the doctrinal differences between Lutherans and Calvinists were sharp. As a way of manifesting opposition to Ferdinand II, several states – Sweden, Venice, Denmark and the United Provinces of the Netherlands – had recognised Frederick’s elevation to the Bohemian throne, but none of them had any intention of sending armies to keep him in it. His father-in-law James I of England abandoned him. Frederick’s timid and hesitant manner, his Calvinist principles, his uncongenial German courtiers and his lack of international support quickly showed the Bohemians that they had made a grievous error in choosing him for their king.
Frederick is known as ‘the Winter King’ because he occupied his throne for a very brief time, from the winter of 1619 to the autumn of 1620, which is when the campaign to oust him began. His possessions in the Palatinate succumbed without a fight to the plundering troops of Spain and Duke Maximilian. Johann-Georg of Saxony enjoyably and without effort helped himself to Lusatia. On 8 November 1620, in a single morning on the White Mountain on the outskirts of Prague, Maximilian’s 20,000-strong army under the astute command of Count Tilly overwhelmed Christian of Anhalt’s 15,000 soldiers. It took just two ignominious hours for Frederick and Christian to be defeated, and those two hours represented the last vestige of Bohemian resistance.
Frederick fled into exile in the United Provinces, there to try to win back the Palatinate with Dutch help. He left behind him a Bohemia and Moravia at the mercy of Maximilian’s savage repression of Protestantism combined with punishment for the lèse-majesté of their revolt. The Bohemian rebel leaders were put to death in the main square of Prague, those who had blasphemed as well as revolted having their tongues nailed to the scaffold before they were killed. Protestant clergy were outlawed and their chapels destroyed. The Jesuits swarmed in behind the army, taking control of schools and universities. The entire country was returned to Catholicism at sword-point. The philosopher Descartes was with the Imperial troops under the comte de Bucquoy when they captured and destroyed the Moravian town of Hradisch which, like other towns on Bucquoy’s destructive progress, was subjected to horrors: rape and massacre were commonplace as a technique of terrorisation and subjugation, breaking any resistance to the Habsburgs’ aim of seeing Catholicism flourish again.
Although these events appeared to be a victory for Ferdinand II and Catholicism, in fact it was a pyrrhic one. Neither France to the west, nor in the far north of Europe the burgeoning power of Sweden, would be able to stand aside permanently while Habsburg strength grew. Sweden’s ambitious king was uneasy at the danger represented by Ferdinand to his Protestant co-religionists – and, as mentioned, he saw at the same time opportunity for himself and his kingdom in that danger. Ferdinand II had stirred the hornets against himself by his too easy early victories; instead of setting course for the recovery of Europe for Catholic dominion, he had set going events that, over the next thirty years, would permanently result in its loss.
As these events unfolded in the heart of Europe in the years 1618–20, equally consequential events were happening far across the world, on the margins of European consciousness. In May 1619 troops of the Dutch East India Company captured the city of Jayakarta, burned it to the ground, expelled its residents, and thereby asserted the beginnings of control over the entire region of what became the Dutch East Indies.
The Dutch had arrived in the East Indies twenty-five years before, intent on getting a foothold in the spice trade. Tensions with English traders in the region, and with the ruler of the port of Jayakarta on the Ciliwung River, led to the military action in question. The new town and trading post that rose on the ruins of Jayakarta was named Batavia by the Dutch, in honour of the ancient Germanic Batavi tribe from whom the Dutch claimed descent. The new name stuck for the next 300 years.
At the same time, in the West Indies on the other side of the world, African slaves were beginning to arrive in increasing numbers to work the sugar plantations. The original native populations, first enslaved by Spanish settlers, had been driven to extinction, and the African slaves who took their place were dying faster than they could be replaced. English and French colonies began to be founded in the Caribbean from 1612 onwards, increasing the demand for slaves as tropical agriculture rapidly spread across the islands in response to demand for their products in Europe.
Perhaps one of the most significant if then little-noticed events of this period was the first settlement of pilgrims on the east coast of North America, just south of Massachusetts Bay. The group, which called its new home Plymouth Colony, faced serious hardships and failed to flourish; it was not until better-organised settlements were established at Cape Ann and then Salem, where the ‘Winthrop Fleet’ arrived in 1630, that the settlers’ foothold in New England was secure. But a train of events had been put in motion which neither the Algonquin ‘Indians’ of Massachusetts, nor the contending parties in Europe itself, could possibly then have foreseen.
Back in Europe the war of belief was continuing alongside the shooting war. In February 1619 Lucilio Vanini (known also as Giulio Cesare Vanini) was put to death as an ‘atheist and blasphemer’ in Toulouse. His tongue was cut out before he was strangled and burned in the city’s Place du Salin, a victim of the Church’s intolerance of views that contested orthodox doctrine. His story is more fully told later in these pages.