The Edict of Restitution, 1629
The edict of Restitution was a significant moment in the war, but it was of course not the only significant moment in the century. Three years before the Edict was promulgated, the Dutch bought themselves another island. In exchange for a pile of fish hooks and trinkets they were given the island of Manhattan off America’s east coast by the Lepane tribe of the Wappinger Confederacy. A year before the Edict of Restitution, William Harvey announced the results of his researches into the circulation of blood. In the same years as the Edict, hundreds of witches were burned to death in various parts of Ferdinand’s Empire. In their different ways these occurrences are as emblematic of the century as the Thirty Years War itself.
Manhattan Island had been visited by Europeans long before. In 1524 Giovanni di Verrazzano, in command of a French ship called La Dauphine, had explored the narrows leading to the island’s south-eastern coast, and the coast itself, and in that same year the Portuguese navigator Estêvão Gomes sailed up the island’s west coast. But serious interest in its possibilities only began in 1609 when an English navigator in Dutch employ, Henry Hudson, sailed his ship the Half Moon up what therefore came to be called the Hudson River, and anchored on the northern tip of the island. This event took place on the now resonant date of 11 September in that year.
The Dutch who secured the island from the natives with their trinkets – allegedly worth $24 in total – called it New Amsterdam. In 1626 they began to build a fort overlooking the harbour; in the succeeding decades it proved useful in the wars with the Algonquin Indians who soon began trying to expel them. However it proved unavailing against the English, who captured the fort in 1664 and renamed it New York after the Duke of York, later James II. Despite New York’s propensity for uncomfortable extremes of weather – horribly hot and humid in summer, very cold in winter – the settlement became an important trading port because of its large natural harbour and its central position on the continent’s eastern seaboard. By the end of the following century it was America’s largest city, and remains so to this day.
Blood was spilled repeatedly in and because of New York, but the circulation of unspilled blood was not understood until the empirical work of scientist and physician William Harvey. Harvey was born in Kent in 1578, and studied at the universities of Cambridge and Padua, which latter had a famous medical school. After qualifying as a physician he practised at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. While at Padua he was taught by Hieronymus Fabricius, a physician and anatomist who had noticed that veins have one-way valves in them, but could not work out their purpose. Harvey became interested in this puzzle and dissected animals in pursuit of solving it, which he soon enough did; he announced his findings in the course of delivering the Lumleian Lectures on anatomy at London’s College of Physicians in 1616. But it was not until 1628 that he published his book Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (An Anatomical Study of the Motion of the Heart and of the Blood in Animals), bringing it out at the Frankfurt Book Fair to ensure its widest possible dissemination in the world of learning.
It is not surprising that his findings were first regarded as controversial. Other physicians simply disbelieved him, having been brought up on Galen’s theories which they were reluctant to abandon. Galen thought that the liver produced venous blood, that venous and arterial blood were separate systems, that the function of the heart was to produce heat while that of the lungs was to cool the heart, and that the arteries sucked in air and then expelled it as vapours through the pores of the skin. The medical practice of bloodletting was premised on this view; Harvey’s account of blood circulation called that practice into question.
Despite the meticulous care of the empirical work reported in his De Motu Cordis and the logic of its arguments – for example, on the impossible quantity of blood that the liver would have to produce each day on Galen’s view – the negative view prevailed for a time, resulting in a diminution of Harvey’s medical practice. His reputation recovered; he became physician to Charles I, and as microscopes grew more powerful Harvey’s conjectures about capillaries (he was not able to see them, having lenses too weak) were shown to be correct.
Harvey dissected an extraordinary range of animals, fishes and birds and conducted an extraordinarily clever range of experiments in his effort to understand the cardiovascular system. It was no mean feat to work out the different contributions of the ventricles of the heart given that they had to be observed in operation – hence, through vivisection – and in small creatures the rapidity of the heart’s motions made it nigh impossible to distinguish the different functions of the heart’s four chambers, their interconnections, and their respective connections with the lungs and venous and arterial systems. But he did it; and all Europe wondered. In a letter written in the 1640s Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia mentions that she had spent the previous evening discussing Harvey’s theories with friends – one small mark of how scientific developments were as striking to contemporaries and near-contemporaries as the events of the war.
The third matter mentioned, the witch burnings, also involved Harvey in a not insignificant way. He did not believe in witchcraft, and was a sceptical participant in the examination of witches in trials held in Lancashire in 1634. The four women involved were acquitted as a result of his assessment of them. On another occasion he visited a woman alleged to be a witch, and, pretending to be a wizard to gain her confidence, asked her if she had a familiar. She put down a saucer of milk and a toad came and drank it. While the woman was engaged elsewhere Harvey dissected the toad – he appears to have been an incontinent dissector – but found nothing unusual about it. The woman was very annoyed to find that he had killed her toad.
The many unfortunates involved in the witch trials of the years 1626–31 in the Empire, at the climactic peak of the witch scares of the period between 1580 and 1630, could have done with Harvey’s help. The worst excesses were at Würzburg and Bamberg. The Würzburg trials resulted in the deaths of some 900 people, those at Bamberg nearly 600. Witch scares followed the Catholic reconquests of Protestant territory, and were often instigated by Jesuits or by the ‘prince-bishops’ who ruled small states of the Empire, such as Prince-Bishop Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg of Würzburg, and the Archbishop-Elector of Mainz. When Baden was reconquered for Catholicism by Tilly in 1627 a persecution of alleged witches followed, lasting until 1629; scores were killed. Eichstätt, Reichertshofen, Coblenz, Mainz, Cologne, Bonn – all were visited by the same madness as had killed the hundreds at Würzburg and Bamberg.
Such was the mass hysteria that prompted the trials that accusation or suspicion could fall on anyone – children as young as seven were executed, along with people from all ranks and walks of life, and of both sexes. The superstition was thoughtless beyond belief: Ehrenberg of Würzburg credulously wrote that there had been a satanic mass outside the city at which 8,000 followers of the devil had committed blasphemies and obscenities, and had ‘vowed not to be enrolled in the Book of Life’.
A Jesuit who witnessed the trials and executions at Würzburg came to the horrified conclusion that accusations of witchcraft were spurious, and that none of the victims was guilty. He was Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, and his book questioning the conduct and content of the trials in which he participated, the Cautio Criminalis, helped to bring the witch-hunting craze to an end. Persecution of alleged witches did not stop until the eighteenth century, but by then executions were rare (the Salem witch-hunts resulted in the executions of six women and two men in September 1692; the last person executed in Britain for witchcraft was the Scottish victim Janet Horne, in 1727).
Tragic and foolish as the witch executions were, the numbers involved were insignificant in comparison to the deaths both in battle and resulting from famine and plague that followed the footsteps of war. Travelling in Europe during this period Harvey wrote,
I can complain that by the way we could scarce see a dog, crow, kite, raven or any other bird, or anything to anatomize, only some few miserable people, the relics of the war and the plague where famine had made anatomies before I came. It is scarce credible in so rich, populous, and plentiful countries as these were that so much misery and desolation, poverty and famine should in so short a time be, as we have seen. I interpret it well that it will be a great motive for all here to have and procure assurance of settled peace. It is time to leave fighting when there is nothing to eat, nothing to keep, and nothing to be gotten.1
One result of the military successes of the Imperial and Catholic cause, and the consequent Edict of Restitution’s promulgation, was the ‘Leipzig Colloquy’, a meeting of the Protestant Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg. Realising the dangers they faced in the impending clash between the Swedish and Catholic armies approaching their territories from north and south respectively, the two princes – one Lutheran, the other Calvinist – wished to overcome their differences and make an alliance, constituting a neutral ‘third force’. They brought their university professors and theologians with them to work out the doctrinal differences between their respective Protestant confessions so that these would not prevent an agreement.
A leading figure in these discussions was Johannes Bergius, an ‘irenicist’ (‘peace-maker’) who argued that the doctrines of the two confessions were not in fact so far apart. His arguments were accepted by the theological representatives of both sides in the case of twenty-six out of the twenty-eight articles proposed for discussion. The two remaining articles, relating to the Eucharist and the very thorny matter of predestination, were postponed for later debate. Historians of the religious debate in the seventeenth century regard the Leipzig Colloquy as the period’s ‘greatest moment for any irenical attempt’.2
Two years earlier, in July 1630, some of the Empire’s Catholic electors had also engaged in conversation – but with a much less irenic tendency – at the Diet of Regensburg. The Archbishop-Elector of Mainz, witch-hunter and Wallenstein’s most vociferous critic, had requested that the Diet be called. Because of the Edict of Restitution neither of the Protestant electors agreed to go, but the importance of the Diet was such that it was attended by ambassadors from France and Spain. Their interest was in one of the side-theatres of the Thirty Years War, the War of Mantuan Succession, then being fought in northern Italy.3 France did not want to see Imperial forces combining with Spanish forces in the dispute over who should hold Mantua, so their desideratum was a reduction in the size of the armies at the disposal of Ferdinand II and the Catholic League.
The quarrels between the Catholic electors about the division of the war’s spoils, and their complaints about the egregious power that Wallenstein now wielded, played into French hands. In their dislike of Wallenstein the Catholic princes were motivated not just by jealousy but by fear. Ferdinand II found himself opposed by the electors in his desire to have his son, the Archduke Ferdinand, named King of the Romans, the titular position of the heir to the Imperial crown. He was forced to do three things: to drop the Dutch war plan on which his Spanish cousins were so keen, to agree to dismiss Wallenstein, and to reduce the size of the Imperial army.
Dropping the Dutch war project was a difficult choice because Spain, which was keen to recover the United Provinces, was a major source of income for the Empire through its subsidies, and the Spanish wished for a vigorous prosecution of war against the Dutch. Dismissing Wallenstein to placate the Catholic electors was more easily done. It carried risks in view of the huge army he commanded, but this army was a major drain on Ferdinand’s resources, and the Spanish subsidies played a role there too: they were vital to keeping the army in the field, and because Madrid was at one with the Catholic electors in disliking and mistrusting Wallenstein, the argument of money won.
So Ferdinand reduced the Imperial army to 39,000 men, the Catholic League army to 20,000, and put both under the command of Tilly. The Habsburgs had just captured and sacked Mantua, which made Ferdinand think he did not need a Wallenstein-sized army after all. Moreover Ferdinand, despite this victory, gave the French good terms over Mantua in the Peace of Regensburg which he concluded with them even as the Diet was being held. His reason was that it enabled him to extract a promise from France not to meddle in the Empire’s affairs, which to him was worth more than the question of succession to the now devastated duchy. Mantua accordingly went to France’s choice, the duc de Nevers.
While the Catholic electors were quarrelling in Regensburg, and while Ferdinand was signing the Mantuan peace treaty with the ambassadors of France and Spain, something happened that rudely disrupted all their calculations: the Swedes invaded Pomerania. The aged Duke Bogislav XIV of Pomerania capitulated, and accepted a Swedish occupation and even (with great unwillingness) alliance. By the end of the year Gustavus Adolphus had gained control of a considerable part of the Oder valley and the southern Baltic coast. He hoped that the people of Mecklenburg would rise to join him, but they liked the good government of the usurper Wallenstein too much and did not want their old rulers back, which is what Gustavus promised them. This was a setback, but in other respects Swedish arms were successful, forcing the Imperial troops to retreat to Frankfurt an der Oder and Landsberg.
On the fateful day of 1 August 1630 the rich and beautiful city of Magdeburg, which by the Edict of Restitution had been forced to re-Catholicise, revoked its allegiance to Ferdinand II and entered an alliance with Gustavus. The Magdeburgers rallied their neighbours and gathered troops to fight alongside the Swedes, but before they could properly organise themselves they were attacked and routed by the cavalry of Tilly under the command of Gottfried Graf zu Pappenheim, who then laid siege to their city. This was the prelude to the Sack of Magdeburg and the terrible atrocity accompanying it. Gustavus sent a small garrison to help with Magdeburg’s defence, telling its commander that the Swedish army would arrive within three months to raise the siege. In the event, no Swedish army came.4
Impressed by Gustavus’ successes, Richelieu sent an ambassador to negotiate a Franco-Swedish alliance: so much for the terms of the Peace of Regensburg in which he had promised the Emperor to do no such thing. The ensuing Treaty of Bärwalde, signed on 13 January 1631, provided substantial French subsidies in return for Gustavus’ undertaking to maintain an army in northern Germany. Part of the deal was that Gustavus would concentrate on fighting the forces of Ferdinand II but not, if it remained neutral, the army of the Catholic League, and that the Swedes would not impose their Protestant ways on any Catholic territory they occupied.
In his characteristically duplicitous way, while Richelieu was concluding this deal with Gustavus he was simultaneously negotiating another treaty with Maximilian I of Bavaria, head of the Catholic League. The resulting Treaty of Fontainebleau, signed on 30 May 1631, was a paradigmatic piece of Thirty Years War conceptual architecture: even as France – a Catholic power – supported a Protestant army resisting the expansion of Habsburg power, so it supported Maximilian in the Palatinate possessions that had been awarded him by the Emperor, at the same time agreeing that Maximilian could vary the treaty if any of its provisions conflicted with his first allegiance, which was to the Emperor. The secret deal’s main thrust was a mutual defensive pact between France and Bavaria, which, given the reservation about which obligation had the greater importance for Maximilian, looks like a peculiarly empty provision.