Advances in Europe’s Art of War, 1600–1750 119The German situation differed from the earlier Italian experience in
one important respect. Beginning in 1517, German politics came to
be colored by envenomed religious controversy. Lutherans, Catholics,
and various radical sects were soon challenged also by Calvinism. Each
religion commanded passionate loyalties of diverse social groups, so
that secular conflicts commonly found expression in theological de
bates. Italy, too, had experienced acute social conflicts two centuries
earlier; and the lower classes regularly had met defeat wherever and
whenever military force came to be professionalized and put on a
permanent basis. In Germany a similar development occurred, though
in its initial stages the theological diversity of the Reformation
sanctified and thereby probably intensified class collisions.
At any rate, something like stability came to the Germanies only
after a century and a half of widespread violence, climaxing in the
brutalities of the Thirty Years War (1618–48). By the time it ended,
Germany and Bohemia had been caught up with a vengeance in the
European military-commercial complex; and the lower classes, along
with German city-states, had been firmly subordinated to princely
power based on control over standing, professional armies. As bu
reaucratization spread and religious fanaticism dissipated, the German
lands became religiously divided according to the principle cuius regio,
eius religio.
At the commencement of this painful process, local, ecclesiastical,
princely and imperial jurisdictions overlapped in an exceedingly con
fused fashion. The political complexity was like that which had existed
in Italy before city-states asserted their territorial sovereignty by hir
ing armies and garrisoning border strongpoints. In the Germanies, not
cities but princely courts consolidated effective sovereignty at the
expense of more local rivals as well as of pope and emperor. Merce
nary armies provided them with the sinews of sovereignty, just as had
happened earlier in Italy. But the atmosphere of a German prince
ling’s court was poles apart from that of an Italian city of the renais
sance era. So despite all the parallels that can be drawn between Italy
from 1300 to 1500 and Germany from 1450 to 1650, the upshot of
the process in the two countries was profoundly divergent.
At the beginning of this evolution the French king’s recent success
in centralizing the administration of his kingdom offered the German
emperors a most enticing model. What a French king had done to
Soldnertums, 2 vols. (Munich, 1936, 1937); Fritz Redlich, The German Military Enter
priser and His Work Force. 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1964); Carl Hans Hermann, Deutsche
Mihtdrgesckichte: Eine Einführung (Frankfurt, 1966), pp. 58 ff.