12 Epilogue
When asked ‘What do you work on?’, a historian whose subject is the
Thirty Years War knows that after ‘When was that?’ the almost inevitable
follow-up question is going to be ‘Well, what was it about?’ Whether
there are simple answers in respect of other wars is debatable, but there
certainly is not for the Thirty Years War. As noted in the opening to
Chapter 1, even the definition of the war is not firm, as some historians
confine the term to the core struggle in and around Germany, regarding
hostilities during the same period in territories further afield as possibly
related but none the less peripheral, while others view them as part of
a single all-embracing conflict. Both concepts are arguable, but even for
the simpler case it is hard to pinpoint a common cause or central issue,
other than in terms so broad as to be almost meaningless. The problem
is well illustrated by considering three commonly accepted components
of the wider Thirty Years War, first the revolt and war in Bohemia in 1618
to 1620, a rebellion of Protestant aristocrats against their Catholic king,
secondly the war of the Mantuan Succession in Italy from 1628 to 1631,
a proxy battle over the inheritance fought mainly by France, Spain and
the emperor, all Catholic, and thirdly the war between Denmark and
Sweden of 1643 to 1645, a struggle for regional dominance between the
two kingdoms, both of which were Protestant. The problem is further
compounded by the long duration of the war, as not only the main
participants but also the apparent issues changed over time. Thus while
religion and the fate of the Palatinate were significant in the early stages,
by the later years religion was much less central, as the key belligerents
were the Catholic Habsburgs on one side and Catholic France on the
other, the latter aided and abetted by Protestant Sweden, while Elector
Friedrich V, the ‘Winter King’, was long since dead and his Palatinate
was only one of many devastated territories.
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