War brings death and destruction to everyone who is involved in it – from soldiers in
the armies, to sailors and merchants.
Nevertheless, it is the civilian population that suffers the most.
This is especially true for the Thirty Years’ War.
Although the effects that the war had on religion, warfare, and politics are thoroughly covered,
its effects on the general populace are often overlooked.
This is even more surprising considering the fact that millions of people died and that
the Holy Roman Empire lost between a quarter and a third of its population, with some areas
having lost more than half.
A variety of factors contributed to the devastation and we will discuss them in this video.
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As the Thirty Years’ War lasted for 3 decades between 1618 and 1648, the fighting varied
in intensity and scope depending on the region and the year in question.
During the initial phase of the war, the action was concentrated along the Danube, Upper Hungary,
Bohemia, and Moravia.
Although all of the horrors of the war are largely associated with the final phase of
the conflict, they were already present in the beginning.
Plunder, plague, and the murder of civilians were widespread in the affected areas.
Bohemia also saw an additional loss of population, as all non-Catholics who refused to convert
were forced to leave.
Following the battle of White Mountain and the pacification of Bohemia, war operations
continued in the territories of the Palatinate and in Lower Saxony.
It is at this point that Frederick V decided to employ the services of Ernst von Mansfeld,
a mercenary leader.
While serving under Frederick, Mansfeld’s mercenaries plundered Alsace and Hesse.
Not limiting themselves to the territories of their enemies, the mercenaries also ravaged
the lands that they were supposed to protect.
Mansfeld proved to be a shrewd leader, as after leaving Frederick’s service, he subsequently
entered the service of Christian of Brunswick and ravaged Lorraine, the United Provinces,
and East Frisia while campaigning for his new employer.
On paper, mercenaries seemed expensive to hire and maintain and not many rulers would
have the resources to hire them, however, they turned out to be one of the main causes
of suffering and devastation during the war.
The Protestants were on the cusp of defeat after the battle of Stadtlohn.
The possibility of a complete change in the religious balance in Central Europe worried
King Christian IV of Denmark, and he would enter the war in 1625.
Seeing this as a serious threat, the Emperor asked Albrecht von Wallenstein for military
assistance.
The ever-ambitious Wallenstein, not satisfied with the gains that he had made during the
Bohemian campaign, agreed to help only if he was allowed to plunder the territories
that he would capture.
Wallenstein’s army ravaged lower Saxony for much of late 1625 and 1626.
The Danish were soundly defeated by both Tilly and Wallenstein, however, Wallenstein’s
insatiable ambition also led him to want a Baltic Sea port.
To that end, he sought to capture Stralsund, and on the way to the city his forces pillaged
Mecklenburg and Pomerania.
Besides the mercenaries, another important factor was the forces of the Catholic and
Protestant Leagues.
These armies were indeed easier to finance than mercenaries, and in any ordinary war
that would not have been a major problem.
For the first few years of the Thirty Years’ War it was not a problem either, but, as time
passed and the economies of the realms involved in the wars began to diminish, so did their
ability to pay the soldiers.
By the end of the Danish involvement in 1630, the states involved in the war could only
finance the recruitment and equipment of their new soldiers.
Meanwhile, the soldiers’ salaries and supplying the armies fell upon the civilians of the
regions where the armies were.
During the 1620s, armies frequently relied upon so-called “contributions”, when either
the governors of the affected areas would pay a certain amount of money, or the army
itself would extort funds from the civilians in an organized manner.
At times, the amount of money that the armies demanded was extraordinary, forcing the people
to sell their stores of grain, wine, and other essentials in desperate attempts to satisfy
mounting demands.
The only two countries which were able to both pay and supply their soldiers for the
entirety of the war were Spain and the United Provinces.
Therefore, it should be no wonder that the population of the Spanish and Dutch Netherlands
escaped relatively unharmed from the war.
The troops, of course, were suffering from a constant lack of supplies as well.
As a result, they frequently took whatever the civilians had left in their stores.
Production also declined as seed corn was consumed and vital assets, like tools or mills,
were destroyed.
The majority of the trade routes in the Holy Roman Empire were affected, and trade ground
to a halt; there were no alternative ways for people to acquire food.
This left many areas of the Empire with famine and many people simply starved to death.
The Swedish landing in Pomerania, in 1630, initially did not change this pattern.
Active operations resumed after a year’s lull, but remained contained in Pomerania
and Mecklenburg.
Imperial and Catholic League units were withdrawn from other parts of Germany, either to confront
the Swedes or to join the siege of Mantua.
This much-needed respite for the people of the Empire, along with the great harvests
of 1630 and 1631, cushioned the rising troop numbers for a time.
The full effects were delayed until the Swedish exploitation of their victory at Breitenfeld
rapidly spread the war into all parts of Germany by 1632.
Total troop numbers reached an unprecedented 250,000 thanks to the new regional armies
formed in Westphalia, Lower Saxony, the Upper Rhine, and Swabia, as well as the main forces
campaigning in Bavaria, Franconia, and electoral Saxony.
The poor maintenance of the Imperial and Catholic League armies was quite evident by this point.
Following the siege of Magdeburg in 1631, the ill-disciplined, hungry, and unpaid army
led by Tilly sacked the city.
The city was almost completely burned down and widespread looting, rape, and murder occurred.
Of the 25,000 inhabitants of the city at the beginning of the siege, between 20,000 and
24,000 were dead.
Unfed and unpaid soldiers proved difficult to control, even for a commander of Tilly’s
caliber, and he was only able to stop the sacking after 4 days.
The ravaging of large, walled cities was still an exception to the rule, rather than the
rule itself.
Other than the sack of Magdeburg, large cities were quite rarely ravaged by armies as they
proved invaluable to each side.
On the other hand, the people of smaller towns and the countryside bore the brunt of the
war, with many of them ending up as refugees in those larger cities.
Gustavus Adolphus famously remarked “war will pay for war”, indicating that mobility
was crucial for an army’s survival, as staying for too long in one place would lead to starvation.
The Scottish mercenary captain Robert Munro mentions in his memoirs that Gustavus Adolphus
sympathized with the civilian population and wished to lessen the burden on them as much
as he could.
As starved soldiers were prone to take their frustrations out on the general populace,
the Swedish King ensured that his army was paid a regular salary, and that it would be
supplied regularly.
As bad as the situation was for the civilian population, after the death of Gustavus Adolphus
things only became worse.
The commanders who took charge of the Swedish armies were far less concerned with the wellbeing
of the commoners than their late King.
Moreover, the soldiers were also rarely paid, as the commanders kept the money for themselves,
and also suffered from food shortages.
Much like in future wars, the Swedish army was forced to “live off the land”, leaving
peasants with very little food, if any at all.
Though sources offer diverging numbers, they all agree that the Swedes were responsible
for the destruction of thousands of villages, towns, and other smaller settlements.
The years from 1632 to 1640 are considered to be the deadliest period of the war.
This coincides with the death of the Swedish King, along with the beginning of French operations
within the Holy Roman Empire.
The three armies were exhausted from years of constant warfare.
All semblance of order broke down and the armies ravaged the countryside in the areas
where they were stationed.
In comparison to this brutal and indiscriminate raiding, the “contributions” of the 1620s
seemed rather benign at this point.
The historian Ronald G. Asch mentions that, quite paradoxically, the civilians were also
responsible for each other’s suffering during the 1630s.
As armies raided, they took everything of value from each household, only to later sell
it in the neighboring town for a tenth of its real price or exchange it for food.
In addition, due to the constant marauding of the armies, many peasants resorted to banditry
or formed militias, attacking civilians and soldiers alike.
The Imperial army was especially under pressure, as it now faced two very formidable foes.
Desperate, they began employing scorched earth tactics to make sure that the opposing armies
would find absolutely nothing of use in involved areas.
The quick Swedish retreat from southern Germany left the Protestant provinces there vulnerable.
As the Imperial armies took Wurttemberg, their treatment of the population, and their desire
to leave nothing for the Swedish army, led to severe depopulation, with some estimates
ranging to even 69% of the population.
The Swedish and French armies, themselves not in an envious position, followed suit
and started using scorched earth tactics too, however, their involvement in the war brought
respite to some areas.
As the lands west of the Rhine were under French control much of the time, they had
a chance to recover after 1636.
The Habsburg Monarchy also saw some peaceful years, and the majority of Northern Germany
also went through recovery before the Swedish invasion of Denmark in 1643.
Until the end of the war, the only areas that were significantly affected were the areas
with a large military presence.
Southern Germany was severely devastated, as that is where the Bavarians and French
frequently fought.
Bohemia and Moravia, after nearly 20 years of relative peace, once again became a battleground
after the Swedes invaded.
The population of Pomerania and Brandenburg, although not affected by war directly, was
subjected to the cruelty of the Swedish garrisons which were posted there for prolonged periods
of time.
Although it is widely known that armies also decreased in size during this time, that proved
to be a misconception, as the number of troops that each state fielded during the war gradually
increased until 1648.
Another effect which the war had on the Holy Roman Empire was of an ecological nature.
There was an explosion in the rodent population during 1636 that lasted several years and
exacerbated the food shortage.
Wolves roamed south-western Bavaria during 1638, returning in the early 1640s, while
packs of wild pigs destroyed crops in 1639.
Other animals disappeared as they became alternative sources of food.
A Bavarian soldier marching along the Lower Rhine in February 1636 recorded that there
‘was neither cat nor dog’, while there are numerous accounts of urban populations
consuming both types of animals during the hunger years of the 1630s.
Prolonged war, as always, also brought disease.
Soldiers from various parts of Europe brought unfamiliar microbes with them to the Empire.
The civilian population, often starving, was susceptible to the various diseases that engulfed
the lands.
For example, Wallenstein’s campaign down the Elbe brought the plague to those areas
and Northern Italy also suffered from a bubonic plague epidemic after the Mantuan War.
Scores of refugees, crowding into large, walled cities only exacerbated the spread of disease,
both by contributing to the famine and by contagion.
Furthermore, the aforementioned proliferation of rodent populations only made things worse
for the cities which were overflowing with people.
Although most sources only mention the plague, it is quite plausible that dysentery and typhus
caused many deaths too, as they became endemic to Germany in the final years of the war.
By sheer numbers of casualties, the war was, quite possibly, the deadliest war in Europe
until then.
Total deaths in the Empire may have surpassed 8 million, given the relatively high number
of military casualties and the fact that the true extent of civilian losses is often masked
by the presence of wartime births recorded in overall population totals.
However, if we take into account the percentage of population loss, this war remains the most
destructive war in European history.
By comparison, the Soviet Union, which suffered the heaviest casualties of the Second World
War, lost less than 12 percent of its population.
Both twentieth-century world wars were of course briefer, with the casualties each year
correspondingly higher.
Nonetheless, around 20 million of those lost during the First World War were due to the
influenza outbreak at its end.
A significant proportion of the victims of the Second World War were killed in deliberate
genocide, a feature mercifully absent from the Thirty Years’ War, that was also waged
with much less-potent weaponry.
The population of the Empire recovered slowly over the following decades, however the most
profound effect that the war had was that it created a sense of unity within the German
nation.
With the people spending most of their lifetime at war and two generations completely lost
to warfare, there was still a silver lining in all of this - the survivors were left with
a significantly higher standard of living, much like the English peasants after the Black
Death.
With the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, the Thirty Years’ War had finally ended.
One of the most brutal and devastating conflicts that Europe had seen was over and the civilians
of the Holy Roman Empire could breathe a sigh of relief.
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