262 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
simply, each successive phase arose more from the outcome and conse-
quences of the previous one than from any pre-existing and enduring
sources of the conflict as a whole.
This concept of the Thirty Years War as a chain reaction leads back
directly to the thesis of this book, namely that its origins lie principally
neither in the inter-confessional stresses in Germany nor in the wider
international tensions in the years leading up to 1618, but in the revolt
in Bohemia, the consequences of which subsequently embroiled the
wider Empire. As has been observed at various points, the most striking
feature of the situation in Germany, not only before 1618 but for some
years afterwards, was not the readiness but the reluctance of the two
main confessional groups to resort to war. The most dangerous point
was back in 1610, and had Henri IV not been assassinated a larger war
than the relatively minor fighting around Jülich might have ensued,
but although that is a common speculation it is also possible that fur-
ther conflict might instead have been limited or even avoided by the
king’s major show of force. As it was, it might be thought surprising that
the situation did not escalate further, with both sides having recently
resorted to the formation of military organisations and recruited sub-
stantial armies, but as Albrecht rightly comments, ‘both alliances shrank
back from a breach and recognised that their own advantage lay in the
maintenance of peace’.^5
That remained true throughout the following years, and even in 1619,
when although the Union and the League again recruited armies in
Germany they were intent on defensive sabre-rattling rather than plan-
ning an actual inter-confessional war. The Cold War analogy employed
in Chapter 2 is relevant. Both sides armed and placed themselves on a
war footing not in order to prosecute a war but to deter the other side
from doing so. As with the Cold War of the 1960s, this carried with
it the risk of a miscalculation giving rise to a war which neither side
intended, but that did not in fact happen, as the war which ensued was
not between Union and League, and it arose from the fall-out of the
Bohemian conflict, not from the stand-off in Germany.
The significance in Germany of the enduring strife over secularised
church properties remains fundamental, as this rather than religion in
the doctrinal sense lay at the heart of all the major inter-confessional
disputes, whether over the courts, the Reichstag procedures, or other
contentious issues. That apart, Maximilian of Bavaria was in essence
right, despite his obvious ulterior motive, when he told Johann Georg
of Saxony that Lutherans and Catholics had lived together without
major conflict on the basis of the religious peace of Augsburg ‘until