66 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
decided not to continue the truce with the Dutch, which he attributes
principally to the newly powerful men in the Spanish government fol-
lowing the death of Philip III in 1621, and their conviction that ‘Spain
was losing the peace’.^81
Hence there are two contrasting views. Trevor-Roper barely mentions
France, seeing Spain and the Netherlands as the central issue, whereas
for Sutherland Franco-Spanish hostility is the key factor, and she specif-
ically notes that in 1621 ‘these old struggles’ in the Netherlands, north
Italy and within France itself ‘resumedalongsidethe German war’ (her
emphasis).^82 A third writer on the origins of the war, Gutmann, con-
siders both these wider conflicts to be significant, but relegates the
problems before 1618 in the Habsburg lands and Germany respectively
to one paragraph each, while he classifies the revolt in Bohemia as ‘a
domestic problem’.^83 All three give precedence to European issues in
the origins of the Thirty Years War, while implicitly or explicitly play-
ing down the significance of events and tensions in the Empire itself.
Parker too sees the war as deriving principally from the Spanish–Dutch
struggle, and although he generally provides a more balanced view he
nevertheless concludes that ‘the events of 1618 in Bohemia merely
anticipated that general conflict, bringing together the incipient but sep-
arate crises which had already polarised opinion in the Empire and in
the Habsburg heartland’.^84
The problem with these and other internationalist approaches, as
well as with some more German-oriented analyses, is that they describe
broad historical situations in which a warcouldoccur, rather than exam-
ining the specific reasons why this onedidoccur, and more particularly
why it occurred when and where it did. The Cold War after 1945 is again
a good parallel. Had it developed into an open war, historians would
have been able to find ample origins in the preceding circumstances
and events. But it did not. In 1618 the conflicts both internationally and
within Germany were not so very different from what they had been for
much of the previous forty years. The war in the Netherlands started in
- Spanish interference in the French Wars of Religion went on for
decades before the open war of 1595 to 1598. The series of confronta-
tions in Germany dates from 1582 or earlier. Of course it is possible to
provide reasons why these circumstances did not coalesce into a general
war at earlier points, but this makes it all the more necessary to explain
what was different in 1618.
A further difficulty with the internationalist emphasis is that it is more
relevant to the development of the Thirty Years War than to its origins,
although even here it tends to overlook the fact that the war was not a