The Thirty Years War was devastating. On some estimates one in every three German-speaking people died because of it. Some of the states lost as much as three-quarters of their populations, others a half. Overall figures for deaths directly attributable to the war vary widely, from 3,000,000 to 11,500,000.1 Fighting, famine and disease were the causes; towns and countrysides were ravaged, many of them taking more than a century to recover. The Swedish armies alone are said to have been responsible for the destruction of 1,500 towns, nearly 2,000 villages and 2,000 castles. A principal reason for the devastation was the actions of marauding mercenary armies. ‘Rape and pillage’ is a mere phrase; the actuality it denotes is dire beyond telling. Refugees took disease with them as they flooded into neighbouring towns when their own towns were sacked. Typhus, dysentery and plague were the commonest diseases, but injuries suffered from beatings, rape and general atrocity exacted a toll besides.
The social and psychological effects took horrific turns also, as witness the increase in witch-hunts. The failure of crops, military defeat, pestilence and epidemic disease – the general suffering of the time – were often blamed as much on supernatural causes as on the depredations of mercenary troops. Purges, torture and mass burnings of witches occurred in many of the Empire’s states, particularly in the first phase of the war, as noted earlier; they followed the routes of the Imperial armies’ successes, and had an explicit sectarian aspect, Catholics treating Protestants as a source of satanic influence.
The economic and social dislocation of the war, worse in some areas where destruction was near complete, was exacerbated by the huge expense incurred by the raising and maintaining of armies. The tax burden on peasants and working people was onerous, and occasioned frequent riots.
One of the sources of contention about the aftermath of Westphalia is whether it shifted the focus of politics from the religious to the secular, with decreased influence of the former not just on national but on international politics. A cursory view across the landscape of the centuries since Westphalia would suggest that this is emphatically so; the contentions profession of history being what it is, naturally this has been challenged.2
What was the world like in the years 1648–50, in the immediate aftermath of the war? A few indicators hint at the changes that had taken place independently of its direct results. Estimates of population say that by then Istanbul had became the largest city in the world, taking over from Beijing. The English Civil War was coming to an end, with defeats of Charles II at the battles of Inverkeithing in Scotland and Worcester in England. Jews were allowed to return to France and England. René Descartes died in Sweden in 1650, where he had briefly been Queen Christina’s Court philosopher. Nell Gwyn, future mistress of Charles II, was born in that year, and so was John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, and William III of Orange, future King of England. All these events point forward, not just to the later part of the seventeenth century but to the century beyond. When one thinks of the War of Spanish Succession in the years 1701–13 – the first world war, if one thinks of how many international powers were involved in it, and how widespread the fighting was – and Churchill’s part in it, one is thinking of a different history altogether; the beginning of the eighteenth century is so utterly unlike the end of the sixteenth as to prove every point about the transformative nature of the century between.
But many of the elements of that new history were shaped by events at the end of the Thirty Years War. For one major example, Louis XIV of France was twelve years of age in 1650, shaken by the danger to his mother and himself in the revolution of 1648 known as the Fronde, and by the experiences of his uncle Charles I and first cousin Charles II of England in being ousted by Parliament. When he attained his majority he was determined that matters would be very different under his rule, and so it proved.
Who now remembers that Charles II sold the town of Dunkirk to Louis XIV for £400,000 in 1662, having no use for it any longer, and needing money? People talk of Mary I having the name ‘Calais’ inscribed on her heart after its loss in 1558, but Calais was not the last English possession in continental Europe, and one wonders what sentiment would be in Britain today if parts of the continent still belonged to it. In any event, such a sale would have been unthinkable before the Thirty Years War. That is another measure of the war’s impact on the mind of the time.