The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618

An Inevitable War? 65

containing other elements....C.V. Wedgwood, writing in 1938, ini-

tiated an important change by moving towards a more European

conception. Displacing religion as the basic issue, she identified the

Franco-Habsburg enmity as the most important factor in the structure

of European politics, and there is no doubt that she was right.^78

Sutherland herself goes further, however, following Steinberg by describ-
ing the Thirty Years War as ‘a largely factitious conception which has
nevertheless become an indestructible myth’. Instead she regards the
war as only a part of ‘phase three’ of a struggle between Spain and France
which extended over more than two hundred years, from the beginning
of the Italian wars in 1494 to the end of the War of the Spanish Succes-
sion in 1714. Hence she observes critically: ‘No historian of the Thirty
Years War has paid systematic attention to its origins. Most have con-
tented themselves with taking the Imperial civil war as the real starting
point. This approach confines the search for origins to the causes of that
particular conflict.’ Consistent with her long-term approach, she con-
tends: ‘Both the Austro-German and the wider European origins of the
seventeenth-century wars date from the reign of Emperor Maximilian I,
and more particularly from the Reformation and the election of Charles
V, king of Spain, to the Imperial throne in 1519.’^79 Nevertheless she
does also review the more proximate origins of the Thirty Years War of
1618 to 1648, albeit briefly and largely in line with the conventional
interpretation.
In an earlier article the distinguished British historian Hugh Trevor-
Roper also addressed the origins of the war, which he unhesitatingly
placed in Spain:

The Thirty Years War is generally thought of as a German war; it was

indeed fought out in Germany; but it was the Spanish Habsburgs

who dominated their cousins in Vienna and Prague, and it was the

Spanish renewal of the war against the Netherlands in 1621 which

turned the German war, which might have been local and brief, into

a long, general, European war.^80

He does not, however, explain how the German war might have been
local and brief, nor how or why the war in the Netherlands, once
renewed, supposedly became a general war when it had not done so in
the forty years before the truce. Instead, and maintaining that the Thirty
Years War ‘was not created by the Bohemian and German incidents
which officially began it’, he concentrates upon the reasons why Spain