1648-50]

Conclusion of the Peace.

Papal protest

415

decrees, prevented any real assimilation of its procedure to that of the Kammergericht. The Ratisbon Diet of 1653-4 was largely busied with these matters; but they were not brought to a conclusion by it.

France and Sweden would gladly have lessened the prestige of the House of Austria by introducing into the constitution of the Empire a provision that henceforth no election of a Roman King should be held during the lifetime of an Emperor. They were also desirous of augmenting the power of the Estates at large, among whom Sweden was now herself to be numbered; and France hoped to exercise an enduring influence, by making their assent requisite for the holding of any such election, and for the settlement of a permanent Wahlcapitulation limiting the Imperial authority. But the Austrian diplomacy succeeded in holding over the consideration of these matters for the next Diet. On the other hand the two Powers were able to delay the actual conclusion of the Peace for some time after its articles were complete by long discussions as to the proper ways of executing and of securing it. The Peace was actually signed at both Münster and Osnabrück on October 27, 1648; but, though the Emperor's edicts for its execution were issued a fortnight afterwards, the ratifications were not exchanged till February 8, 1649. Meanwhile the exchange of prisoners and other matters appertaining to the execution of the Treaties had been taken in hand by the military commanders, and were not wound up till June, 1650, at Nürnberg. The protest which the Papal Nuncio had offered against the Peace immediately after its conclusion, was reiterated a month later by Pope Innocent X in the Bull Zelo Domus Dei (November 26, 1648); but its validity had been denied beforehand in the Peace itself, and no proceeding could have demonstrated more palpably the complete estrangement which now prevailed between the Imperial and the Papal authority. As a matter of fact, the Papal protest is not known to have been ever invoked by any Power against any stipulation of the Peace of Westphalia.

Each of the two Powers, whose alliance had prolonged the War, might now seem to have achieved its ends. The statesmanship of Sweden, hardly less than the heroic deeds of her great King and a succession of eminent commanders, had obtained for her the position of a great European Power. But her losses in men were so serious, that a war on a similar scale could hardly be contemplated by the living or the next generation; while the monarchy could only defray the financial cost of the effort by processes which ended in changing the bases of Swedish constitutional life. The Swedish Crown had acquired a fair German province which provided the security desired by both Gustavus Adolphus and Oxenstierna for the kingdom itself and for the sufficiency of its share in the control of the Baltic. Sweden hereby also secured a permanent right to a participation in the affairs of the Empire, which might at any time be used for the purpose of once more gaining the control of them. But she had to reckon with the jealousy of her new

416

Political and religious results of the Peace

neighbour Brandenburg as well as with old Scandinavian enmities; and the maintenance of the position which she at present held among the States of Europe could not be regarded as definitely assured.

Far different was the case with France, who, though her sacrifices had relatively been far less than those of Sweden, had reaped a far ampler reward. Besides the recognition of the three sees, she had, by acquiring Breisach and the right of garrisoning Philippsburg, secured direct access to the German south-west; and she had taken Austria's place as the chief Power in Elsass. Though she had not herself acquired a place in the system of the Empire, the relations into which she had entered with certain of its Estates furnished arguments for the support of future claims to an extended sovereignty. And-most important of all- besides opening future opportunities of intervention in the affairs of the Empire, the War and the settlement which ended it enormously increased her moral ascendancy in western Germany and in the Empire at large.

By consenting to these losses the House of Austria and the Empire which had so long accepted its headship had purchased a necessary peace. To the House of Austria this meant the preservation to it of the great mass of its dominions, and of so much authority as in the eyes of Europe and of the Empire still remained inseparable from the tenure of the Imperial Crown. But to the Empire at large it meant the settlement of the grievances for the redress of which Catholics and Protestants alike had, sooner or later, appealed to the decision of war, or responded to that appeal when it presented itself before them. The religious settlement, however imperfect from the point of view of later times, secured to the Protestants-and to the Calvinists as well as to the Lutherans - the "equality" for which they had been so long contending, though the point of time which determined the partition of rights and possessions between them and the Catholics had to be more or less arbitrarily fixed. The maintenance of this "equality" within the Empire was guaranteed by a constitutional change of the highest importance introduced into the procedure of the Diet; and the opportunities of the Counter-reformation had passed away for ever. On the other hand, the provision made for individual freedom in the exercise of any one of the recognised religions was insufficient; and from the dominions of the House of Austria as a whole Protestant worship was deliberately excluded.

Among the changes introduced by the Peace of Westphalia into the political life of the Empire, and contributory to that complete establishment of their liberties" which its Estates had consistently striven to secure, the most important was the full recognition of their right to conclude alliances with foreign Powers. The Empire thus in point of fact came to be except in name little more than a confederation; but inasmuch as its Estates were numerous and a large proportion of them

Economic and social effects of the Peace. Agriculture 417

petty and powerless, with few securities for their rights and an endless divergence of interests, the dissolution of the bond that held them together must sooner or later follow; more especially if the historic ascendancy of the House of Austria and its traditional tenure and transmission of the Imperial dignity should cease to endure.

But the political losses and gains which the Peace of Westphalia entailed upon the Empire and its Princes sink alike into insignificance, and even the undeniable advance towards religious freedom marked by the adoption in that Peace of the principle of equality between the recognised religious confessions is obscured, when we turn to consider the general effects of the War now ended upon Germany and the German nation. These effects, either material or moral, cannot be more than faintly indicated here; but together they furnish perhaps the most appalling demonstrations of the consequences of war to be found in history. The mighty impulses which the great movements of the Renaissance and the Reformation had imparted to the aspirations and efforts of contemporary German life, were quenched in the century of religious conflict which ended with the exhausting struggle of the Thirty Years' War; the mainspring of the national life was broken, and, to all seeming, broken for ever.

The ruin of agriculture was inevitably the most striking, as it was the most far-reaching, result of this all-destructive war. Each one of those marches, counter-marches, sieges, reliefs, invasions, occupations, evacuations, and reoccupations, which we have noted, and a far larger number of military movements that we have passed by, were accompanied by devastations carried out impartially by "friend" or foe. For the peasants who dwelt upon the land there was no personal safety except in flight; their harvests, their cattle, the roof over their heads, were at the mercy of the soldiery; and, as the War went on, whole districts were converted into deserts.

Bohemia, where the War broke out, had the earliest experience of its desolating effects, above all in the sorely tried north-west of the kingdom; but its sufferings reached their height-long after the Bohemian rising had been crushed, as it seemed, for ever-early in the last decade of the War. The destruction of villages, from which most parts of the Empire suffered, was probably here carried to the most awful length; of a total of 35,000 Bohemian villages, it is stated that hardly more than 6000 were left standing. The sufferings of Moravia were in much the same proportion, and even more protracted; those of Silesia only ended when it was made over by Saxony into the Emperor's care at the Peace of Prague. Upper and Lower Austria also enjoyed some relief during the last part of the War, when the main anxiety of the Emperor was to keep it out of his hereditary dominions. The inflictions to which Maximilian's electorate was subjected during the victorous campaigns of

C. M. H. IV.

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418

Devastation and depopulation

Gustavus Adolphus and the subsequent invasion of Bernard of Weimar were followed by far more grievous treatment by the troops of Banér and Königsmarck. During the concluding years of the War no other German land underwent more terrible sufferings than Bavaria, whereespecially in its eastern part-famine and desolation stalked unchecked. Franconia and Swabia, too, were made desolate by the ravages of war, famine and disease, especially after the catastrophe of Nördlingen; the pasture-lands of the Schwarzwald and the vineyards of the Upper Rhine and Neckar country were alike desolated. The Lower Palatinate, when this portion of his patrimony was at last recovered by the Elector Charles Lewis, was little better than a desert; so utterly had war, anarchy, and emigration changed the face of the garden of Germany. The regions of the Middle Rhine were in little better plight than those of the Upper; Nassau and the Wetterau had suffered unspeakably, especially during the latter part of the War, and the Hessian lands but slightly more intermittently. In the north-west neither the Brunswick-Lüneburg lands nor even remote East Frisia had escaped the scourge of military occupation; in Calenburg (Hanover) whole forests had been cut down by the Swedes. In central and north-eastern Germany, Brandenburg and Saxony had during nearly two-thirds of the War been at no time free from occupation or raids, especially on the part of the Swedes; the Anhalt principalities had suffered as if to atone for Christian's share in lighting the flames of war; and the Mecklenburg Dukes on their return home found the land desolate and depopulated.

The depopulation of Germany was an even more ominous feature in the aspect of the Empire after the War than the devastation of its soil. The statistical data at our command rest on no very satisfactory bases; but a comparison of statements as to particular territories seems to show that the population of the Empire had been diminished by at least twothirds from over sixteen to under six millions. In accounting for the loss it was reckoned (but how could this reckoning be verified?) that not far short of 350,000 persons had perished by the sword; famine, disease, and emigration had done the rest. In particular territories the loss of population had been enormous. In the Lower Palatinate only one-tenth (for the much-quoted figure of one-fiftieth must be dismissed as fictitious), in Württemberg one-sixth survived; in Bohemia, where, as in the Austrian duchies, emigration had largely helped to depopulate the country, it was reckoned that already before the last invasions of Banér and Torstensson the total of inhabitants had since the opening of the War diminished by more than three-fourths.

Notwithstanding the terrible sufferings which the War had inflicted upon the unprotected peasantry in by far the greater part of the Empire, this unfortunate class were by no means relieved from the burdens ordinarily imposed upon them. The poll-tax and the taxes on articles of consumption were exacted where it was possible to levy them; the

The peasantry and the towns

419

services (Frohnen) were raised to so enormous a height during the War as to convert the position of a large proportion of the peasantry into one of serfdom, without the advantages of a fixed tenure which there was no legal means of ensuring. An inevitable result of the devastations due to the War was the practical afforestation of large tracts of arable land, and the imposition on the peasantry of a fresh burden of services, besides the infliction of endless damage, arising out of the chase. To these evils was added the insecurity of life and property due to vagabondagethe inevitable accompaniment and the long-enduring consequence of wars carried on by mercenaries, and more especially of one conducted on an unprecedented scale and extending over so large a part of Europe.

The economic effects of such a condition of things upon the soil and its cultivators need not be discussed at length. During more than a generation after the conclusion of the War a full third of the land in northern Germany was left uncultivated. Cattle and sheep diminished to an extraordinary extent, and many once fertile districts became forests inhabited by wolves and other savage beasts. The cultivation of many products of the land passed out of use in particular districts or altogether. Prices fell so low that in Saxony, for instance, the average price of wheat during the first twelve years after the Peace was a little less than half what it had been before the War, and that of rye even proportionately lower. Nor was there any prospect of agriculture recovering from so terrible a depression unless in regions where, as in the Palatinate, the exceptional fertility of the soil coöperated with the solicitude shown by the territorial rulers here and in Württemberg, as well as under less favourable conditions in Saxony and Brandenburg, for the interests of the rural population.

If the War reduced agriculture to an almost hopeless depression, and lowered the condition of the peasantry to a level at which it remained for the better part of two centuries, its effects were hardly less disastrous upon the middle or burgher class, and upon the trade and industry to which the members of that class had primarily owed their prosperity. The population of the towns, as a whole, is estimated to have diminished during the War in a ratio less by one-third than that of the country districts. As to property, though the townsmen had more to lose, they were of course on the whole far better protected, and the wealthier among them had opportunities of securing their capital in banks at a distance, or investing it in foreign trade. At the same time the fall in the production of raw material which might be worked at home or exported, together with the disturbance of all trade routes and lines of communication with foreign countries, were prohibitive of any revival of German industry and commerce.

Their chief centres had from of old been the free Imperial towns; but among these only the three great northern cities, which practically represented the remains of the Hanseatic League - Hamburg, Bremen,