The Thirty Years War
The most bloody of the religious wars was without doubt the Thirty Years War. It was called such because it lasted thirty years, from 1618 to 1648. It all started when the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II (1578-1648), tried to suppress Protestantism in his empire. The Protestants resisted and formed the Protestant Union. The Catholics in their turn, formed the Catholic League.
At first, the Protestant army was no match for the Catholics. A large scale slaughter of the Protestants ensued. Things would have ended there had Ferdinand been satisfied with what he had accomplished. But this victory in battle was not enough, he wanted to eradicate Protestantism completely from his land. He outlawed the religion and initiated cruel and systematic persecutions of Protestants. The Protestants appealed for foreign help. Eventually Denmark, Sweden and France joined the war. With this the war entered a phase where the more or less evenly match forces could not achieve much except slaughter one another. [10]
An example of the cruelty which was characteristics of the German religious wars, can be seen in the massacres of the Protestants of Magdeburg. The city who had a population of thirty thousand, was almost completely Protestant. After the a six month siege the Catholic forces managed, on May 20th 1631, to over-run the city. [11] The description of the carnage by Brain Bailey, from his excellent book Massacres, is given below:
The enraged Catholic League troops then set about annihilating Magdeburg...Children were thrown into flames and women were raped before being butchered. Fifty-three women were beheaded in a church. No one was spared, regardless of age or sex, and twenty-five thousand of the city’s population were either massacred or burnt to death...[Count von] Tilly [1559-1632; commander of the Catholic forces] held a solemn mass in the cathedral [of Magdeburg] and boasted that no such great victory had occurred since the destruction of Jerusalem. [12]
The loss of life in this war was tremendous. It reduced the population of Germany, according to conservative estimates by at least a third; this put the death toll at six million. Some estimates put the number as high as fourteen million. Peace was finally negotiated in Westphalia in 1648. The positive contribution of this peace was that it finally secularized the western politicians. After this, the pope no longer wielded the secular power that his predecessors had enjoyed. The power of the religion to do harm was reduced tremendously.
:bugeye: