6 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
and expensive. The main Swiss passes were barred to the Spanish by the
determinedly neutral cantons of the confederation, so the original road
ran west from Milan, through the duchy of Savoy and into the Spanish-
held Franche Comté, then via the duchy of Lorraine into Luxembourg
and the Spanish Netherlands. This route had been established and first
used following the original rebellion in the 1560s, but it ran uncomfort-
ably close to French borders and territories, as well as being vulnerable
to the changeable polices of the independent duchies through which it
passed. By the early 1600s the ambitious, assertive and generally anti-
Habsburg Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy posed a particular problem in
this respect, so that an alternative had to be found. This led north from
Milan to the head of Lake Como, and then east through the Valtelline
and over the Stelvio pass into the Habsburg territory of Tyrol, before
turning west through southern Germany to the Rhine. The Valtelline is
now in northern Italy, but it was then in the territory of Graubünden, a
Protestant-controlled independent canton, although the population of
the valley itself was both Catholic and rebellious. In 1603 the Spanish
fortified their end of the valley, and after disturbances and repression
in 1618, followed by a Habsburg-encouraged Catholic uprising in 1620,
they occupied it completely, albeit only temporarily, as they were forced
by French-led pressure to withdraw in 1623.^6
Elsewhere in Europe there were also conflicts in which religion
and politics were intermingled. In England in 1605 Catholic plotters
attempted to blow up the Protestant King James I, together with his par-
liament, despite which, and regardless of anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic
opposition at home, James later sought unsuccessfully for almost a
decade to marry his son and heir to a Spanish infanta, although by
then he had already married his daughter to the Calvinist elector of
the Palatinate.
The circumstances leading up to Sweden’s major involvement in the
Thirty Years War date back to 1587, when the Catholic Sigismund inher-
ited the crown of the predominantly Lutheran country and in the same
year was elected to the throne of his mother’s native Poland. In 1600
he was deposed in Sweden by his Protestant uncle, who became Charles
IX, although Roberts comments that in the early years of the Counter-
Reformation ‘it was not difficult for Charles to beat the Protestant drum
and represent what was really a struggle for power as essentially a reli-
gious issue’.^7 Charles promptly invaded Livonia, a territory recently
secured by Poland against Russian claims, and adjacent to Estonia,
which had been extracted from Russia by Sweden at around the same
time. The subsequent long-running although intermittent war between