2 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
the lands of the Bohemian crown had long been decidedly ambiguous.
Thus defined, the Empire comprised principally Germany and Austria,
and indeed contemporaries, including many in Austria itself, often used
‘Empire’ loosely to mean simply Germany, as distinct from the Habsburg
lands. This is relevant because much of the discussion of the background
to the Thirty Years War concerns events in the Empire in this narrower
but more meaningful sense.
The term ‘Thirty Years War’ is itself still not absolutely clear.
Steinberg’s thesis that the war is a construct invented by historians has
long since been discredited, but accounts are nevertheless not always
precise about the extent to which conflicts outside the core of the
Empire were part of the war, or were only peripheral events which
impinged upon it from time to time.^3 Gustavus Adolphus contended
in 1628 that all the wars taking place in Europe, from La Rochelle in
south-western France to his own involvement in Poland, had become
parts of a single whole, but this was even then an extreme view, while
in the years around 1618 any such unity is much harder to perceive.^4
Shortly before the Bohemian revolt the later Emperor Ferdinand II, then
archduke of Styria, was fighting Venice in the Uzkok war, while the
duke of Savoy was fighting the Spanish in northern Italy in the second
stage of the Mantuan War of Succession, and Gustavus Adolphus was
already fighting the Poles in Livonia. Between 1619 and 1621, during
the war in Bohemia, there was civil war in France, Poland was skir-
mishing with the Turks and with Bethlen Gabor, prince of Transylvania,
who was himself fighting the emperor, and the Spanish were occupying
the Valtelline in the Swiss canton of Graubünden. Particularly prob-
lematic in this context is the status of the war between Spain and the
United Provinces, which commenced in 1568 after the initial revolt in
the Spanish Netherlands two years earlier, but which was in abeyance,
at least on land in Europe, during a truce from 1609 to 1621. The
years leading up to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War were thus also
the years leading up to the widely expected resumption of war in the
Netherlands, but whether these were separate issues or different facets
of the same one posed interpretational problems for contemporaries and
subsequent historians alike.
The international situation
The rivalry between France and Spain was the most important single
aspect of international relations in Europe throughout most of the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries. This rivalry had its own history, but