History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0096/00960.txt

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$Title{"Defenestration" At Prague, The Thirty Years' War
'Defenestration' At Prague, The Thirty Years' War}
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$Author{Gardiner, Samuel R.;Horne, Charles F.}
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$Subject{emperor
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wallenstein
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bohemia
ferdinand
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Title:       "Defenestration" At Prague, The Thirty Years' War
Author:      Gardiner, Samuel R.;Horne, Charles F.

"Defenestration" At Prague, The Thirty Years' War

1618

   As the last great struggle between the contending sects of Europe for
political as well as spiritual power the Thirty Years' War was one of the most
important conflicts of the modern age.  It was mainly carried on in the German
states, but during its later stages all the great European powers were
involved.  The horrors of its battles and sieges have often been painted.

     Among the direct causes of the war - the great general cause being the
standing antagonism between Catholics and Protestants - was a clause in the
Peace of Augsburg (1555) which remained a source of friction.  It provided
that any ecclesiastical prince who became Protestant must surrender the lands
as well as the authority of his office.  In many instances this clause was
disregarded by the Protestants, who from the first felt it to be unjust. Until
the accession of Rudolph II (1576) as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, there
was no imperial intolerance, and Protestantism rapidly spread.  But the harsh
dealings of Rudolph with the Protestants provoked resentment.  In 1607
Donauworth, a free Protestant city, was seized by the Catholic Duke of
Bavaria.  Next year the German Protestants formed the defensive Evangelical
Union.  Meanwhile Rudolph's policy only reacted in favor of the Protestant
nobles.  In 1611 his brother Matthias supplanted him as King of Bohemia, and
in 1612 Rudolph died and Matthias succeeded to the imperial throne.

     The outbreak of the Thirty Years' War followed upon a revolution in
Bohemia, which was precipitated by Rudolph's attempt to evade the Royal
Charter, extorted from him in 1609 by the estates.  Its chief feature was a
guarantee of freedom of conscience to Bohemians so long as they adhered to
certain recognized creeds; but it also involved questions of authority over
lands with respect to their use for religious purposes.  The difficulties with
the Royal Charter, which had led to Rudolph's downfall in Bohemia, were left
to confront Matthias.

By Samuel R. Gardiner

     Whether it would have been possible in those days for a Catholic king to
have kept a Protestant nation in working order we cannot say.  At all events
Matthias did not give the experiment a fair trial.  He did not, indeed, attack
the Royal Charter directly on the lands of the aristocracy.  But he did his
best to undermine it on his own.  The Protestants of Braunau, on the lands of
the Abbot of Braunau, and the Protestants of Klostergrab, on the lands of the
Archbishop of Prague, built churches for themselves, the use of which was
prohibited by the abbot and the archbishop.  A dispute immediately arose as to
the rights of ecclesiastical land-owners, and it was argued on the Protestant
side that their lands were technically crown lands, and that they had
therefore no right to close the churches.  Matthias took the opposite view.

     On his own estates Matthias found means to evade the charter.  He
appointed Catholic priests to Protestant churches, and allowed measures to be
taken to compel Protestants to attend the Catholic service.  Yet for a long
time the Protestant nobility kept quiet.  Matthias was old and infirm, and
when he died they would, as they supposed, have an opportunity of choosing
their next king, and it was generally believed that the election would fall
upon a Protestant.  The only question was whether the Elector Palatine or the
Elector of Saxony would be chosen.

     Suddenly in 1617 the Bohemian Diet was summoned.  When the Estates of the
kingdom met they were told that it was a mistake to suppose that the crown of
Bohemia was elective.  Evidence was produced that for some time before the
election of Matthias the Estates had acknowledged the throne to be hereditary,
and the precedent of Matthias was to be set aside as occurring in
revolutionary times.  Intimidation was used to assist the argument, and men in
the confidence of the court whispered in the ears of those who refused to be
convinced that it was to be hoped that they had at least two heads on their
shoulders.

     If ever there was a moment for resistance, if resistance was to be made
at all, it was this.  The arguments of the court were undoubtedly strong, but
a skilful lawyer could easily have found technicalities on the other side, and
the real evasion of the Royal Charter might have been urged as a reason why
the court had no right to press technical arguments too closely.  The danger
was all the greater, as it was known that by the renunciation of all
intermediate heirs the hereditary right fell upon Ferdinand of Styria, who had
already stamped Protestantism out in his own dominions.  Yet, in spite of
this, the Diet did as it was bidden, and renounced the right of election by
acknowledging Ferdinand as their hereditary king (1617).

     The new King was more of a devotee and less of a statesman than
Maximilian of Bavaria, his cousin on his mother's side.  But their judgments
of events were formed on the same lines.  Neither of them was a mere ordinary
bigot, keeping no faith with heretics.  But they were both likely to be guided
in their interpretation of the law by that which they conceived to be
profitable to their church.  Ferdinand was personally brave; but except when
his course was very clear before him, he was apt to let difficulties settle
themselves rather than come to a decision.

     He had at once to consider whether he would swear to the Royal Charter.
He consulted the Jesuits, and was told that, though it had been a sin to grant
it, it was no sin to accept it now that it was the law of the land.  As he
walked in state to his coronation he turned to a nobleman who was by his side.
"I am glad," he said, "that I have attained the Bohemian crown without any
pangs of conscience." He took the oath without further difficulty.

     The Bohemians were not long in feeling the effects of the change.
Hitherto the hold of the house of Austria upon the country had been limited to
the life of one old man.  It had now, by the admission of the Diet itself,
fixed itself forever upon Bohemia.  The proceedings against the Protestants on
the royal domains assumed a sharper character.  The Braunau worshippers were
rigorously excluded from their church.  The walls of the new church at
Klostergrab were actually levelled with the ground.

     The Bohemians had thus to resist in 1618, under every disadvantage, the
attack which they had done nothing to meet in 1617.  Certain persons named
"defensors" had, by law, the right of summoning an assembly of representatives
of the Protestant Estates.  Such an assembly met on March 5th, and, having
prepared a petition to Matthias, who was absent from the kingdom, adjourned to
May 21st.

     Long before the time of meeting came, an answer was sent from Matthias
justifying all that had been done, and declaring the assembly illegal.  It was
believed at the time, though incorrectly, that the answer was prepared by
Slavata and Martinitz, two members of the regency, who had been notorious for
the vigor of their opposition to Protestantism.

     In the Protestant assembly there was a knot of men, headed by Count Henry
of Thurn, which was bent on the dethronement of Ferdinand.  They resolved to
take advantage of the popular feeling to effect the murder of the two Regents,
and so to place an impassable gulf between the nation and the King.

     Accordingly, on the morning of May 23d, the "beginning and cause," as a
contemporary calls it, "of all the coming evil," the first day, though men as
yet knew it not, of thirty years of war, Thurn sallied forth at the head of a
band of noblemen and their followers, all of them with arms in their hands.
Trooping into the room where the Regents were seated, they charged the
obnoxious two with being the authors of the King's reply.  After a bitter
altercation both Martinitz and Slavata were dragged to a window which
overlooked the fosse below from a dizzy height of some seventy feet.
Martinitz, struggling against his enemies, pleaded hard for a confessor.
"Commend thy soul to God," was the stern answer.  "Shall we allow the Jesuit
scoundrels to come here?" In an instant he was hurled out, crying, "Jesus,
Mary!" "Let us see," said someone mockingly, "whether his Mary will help him."
A moment later he added, "By God, his Mary has helped him." Slavata followed,
and then the secretary Fabricius.  By a wonderful preservation, in which pious
Catholics discerned the protecting hand of God, all three crawled away from
the spot without serious hurt.

     There are moments when the character of a nation or party stands revealed
as by a lightning flash, and this was one of them.  It is not in such a way as
this that successful revolutions are begun.

     The first steps to constitute a new government were easy.  Thirty
directors were appointed, and the Jesuits were expelled from Bohemia.  The
Diet met and ordered soldiers to be levied to form an army.  But to support
this army money would be needed, and the existing taxes were insufficient.  A
loan was accordingly thought of, and the nobles resolved to request the towns
to make up the sum, they themselves contributing nothing.  The project falling
dead upon the resistance of the towns, new taxes were voted, but no steps were
taken to collect them, and the army was left to depend in a great measure upon
chance.

     Would the princes of Germany come to the help of the directors?  John
George of Saxony told them that he deeply sympathized with them, but that
rebellion was a serious matter.  To one who asked him what he meant to do he
replied, "Help to put out the fire."

     There was more help for them at Heidelberg than at Dresden.  Frederick IV
had died in 1610, and his son, the young Frederick V, looked up to Christian
of Anhalt as the first statesman of his age.  By his marriage with Elizabeth,
the daughter of James I of England, he had contracted an alliance which gave
him the appearance rather than the reality of strength.  He offered every
encouragement to the Bohemians, but for the time held back from giving them
actual assistance.

By Charles F. Horne

From The Story of the Greatest Nations

     Ferdinand had crushed Protestantism in every estate he owned.  In 1615 he
and Matthias began, or at least permitted, measures for its repression in
Bohemia.  There were tumults, uprisings, and on May 23, 1618, a party of angry
citizens of Prague burst into the council hall, seized Slavata and Martinitz,
the two most obnoxious of the Catholic leaders, and hurled them from the
window.  It was an ancient form of Bohemian punishment, which had been used by
Ziska and by others.  The window this time was over eighty feet from the
ground, yet the fall did not prove fatal.  The men landed on a soft rubbish
heap below, and one was unhurt; the other, though much injured, survived.
Their secretary was hurled after them, and is said to have apologized to his
masters, even as he landed, for his unavoidable discourtesy in alighting upon
them.

     This semicomic tragedy opened the Thirty Years' War.  At first the
struggle was confined to Bohemia and Austria.  The other states, secure in the
fact that four-fifths of the populace of the empire was Protestant, looked on
with seeming indifference.  The Bohemians drove the scattered imperial troops
from their country.

     Meanwhile Matthias died, and Ferdinand was elected to the imperial throne
as Ferdinand II (1619-1637).  The Bohemians besieged him in Vienna. The
Protestant Austrian nobles turned against him, and a deputation forced its way
into the presence of the helpless Emperor, and insisted on his signing for
them a grant of political and religious liberty.  Ferdinand resolutely
refused; the deputation grew threatening.  One fierce noble seized the Emperor
roughly by the coat front, crying, with an offensive nickname for Ferdinand,
"Sign it, Nandel!" A trumpet from the castle yard interrupted them.  It
signalled the arrival of a body of imperial troops, who had slipped through
the lines of the besiegers, and come to the Emperor's rescue.

     The Austrian nobles withdrew.  Spanish and Cossack troops were called by
Ferdinand into the country to crush all opposition.  The Bohemians, wasted by
famine and plague, retreated into their own land, and the war continued there.
The people offered the Bohemian throne to Frederick, the elector of the
Rhenish Palatinate, and a son-in-law of the English King, James I.

     Frederick accepted, went to Bohemia in state, and tried to draw the other
Protestant princes to his help.  But he was a Calvinist, so the Lutherans
refused to join him.  His new subjects were mainly Lutherans also, and his
impolitic effort to enforce his religious views upon Prague soon roused the
citizens to a state of revolt against him.

     The Catholic princes of the empire had long been united in a "League,"
with Bavaria at its head.  Bavaria was, next to Austria, the most powerful
state of the empire, and it had become the stronghold of the Roman faith in
Germany.  Now, the army of this League, under its chief, Maximilian of
Bavaria, offered its services to the Emperor against the disunited and
wavering Bohemians.  A portion of the Bohemian army was defeated at the battle
of White Mountain, just outside of Prague.  Frederick, the newly elected
Bohemian King, saw his troops come fleeing back to the town, and their panic
seems to have seized him also.  Abandoning the strong walled city, he swept
such of his possessions together as he could and fled in haste from Bohemia.
"The Winter King" his enemies called him in derision, because his kingship had
lasted but one short winter.

     The citizens, disheartened by his flight, terrified by the overwhelming
forces arrayed against them, surrendered to Ferdinand.  Executions,
proscriptions, banishments, followed without number.  Every person of the land
was compelled to accept Catholicism.  Many burned their homes with their
hands, and fled to other countries.  Seldom has liberty been so utterly
trampled under foot; seldom has a land been so completely subjugated.  The
Bohemians, who had been one of the most intellectual, energetic peoples of
Europe, here practically disappear from history as a separate nation.

     We turn now to the second period of this deplorable war.  Its scene
shifts to the domain of the unhappy Frederick upon the Rhine.  He himself fled
to Holland, but his land was considered as forfeited, and was deliberately
desolated by Spanish troops in the service of the Emperor.  The Bohemians had
employed a well-known leader of mercenary troops, Count Mansfeld.  When their
cause was lost, Mansfeld, with most of his army, amused the Catholic forces by
negotiations, till he saw his opportunity, when he slipped away from them, and
led his army to the Rhine.  There he continued the war in Frederick's name,
though really for his own sake.  His troops supported themselves by pillaging
the country, and the wretched inhabitants of Frederick's Palatinate were
treated almost as mercilessly by their pretended friends as by their open
foes.

     The peasants of Upper Austria also rebelled against Ferdinand's efforts
to force his religion upon them.  For a time it seemed they would be as
successful as the Swiss mountaineers had been.  Under a peasant named Fadinger
they gained several impressive victories; but he was killed, and their cause
collapsed into ruin.  In its last stages their struggle was taken up by an
unknown leader, who was called simply "the Student." But it was too late.
Remarkable and romantic as was the Student's career, his exploits and
victories could not save the cause, and he perished at the head of his
followers.

     Meanwhile, the war along the Rhine assumed more and more the savage
character that made it so destructive to the land.  Mansfeld, driven from the
Palatinate, supported his ferocious troops almost entirely by plundering.
Tilly, the chief general of the Catholic League, followed similar tactics,
and, wherever they passed, the land lay ruined behind them.  Some of the
lesser Protestant princes joined Mansfeld, but Tilly proved a great military
leader, and his opponents were slowly crowded back into Northern Germany. The
Emperor forced his religion upon the Rhine districts, as he had upon Bohemia
and Austria.  The Protestant world at last began to take alarm.  Both England
and Holland lent Mansfeld support.  The King of Denmark, drawing as many of
the Protestant German princes as possible to his side, joined vigorously in
the contest.

     This Danish struggle may be considered the third period of the war.  It
lasted from about 1625 to 1629, and introduces one of the two most remarkable
men of the period.

     Albert of Waldstein, or Wallenstein, as he is generally called, was a
native of Bohemia, who joined the Catholics, and won military fame and
experience fighting on the imperial side in the Bohemian war.  He acquired
vast wealth through marriage and the purchase of the confiscated Protestant
estates.  Proving a remarkably capable financial manager, he was soon the
richest subject in the empire, and was created Duke of Friedland, a district
of Bohemia.

     All of these successes were to Wallenstein mere preliminary steps to an
even more boundless ambition.  He studied the political outlook, and his keen
eye saw the possibility of vastly expanding Mansfeld's barbaric system of
supporting his soldiers by plunder.  The Emperor Ferdinand had but few troops
of his own, and they were needed for quelling rebellion within in personal
domains.  For carrying on the war along the Rhine, he was entirely dependent
upon the princes of the Catholic League and their army under Tilly.

     Wallenstein now came forward and offered to supply the Emperor with a
powerful imperial army which should not cost him a penny.  This offer, coming
from a mere private gentleman, sounded absurd; and for a time Wallenstein was
put aside with contemptuous laughter.  At last the Emperor told him, if he
thought he could raise as many as ten thousand men, to go ahead.  "If I have
only ten thousand," said Wallenstein, "we must accept what people choose to
give us.  If I have thirty thousand, we can take what we like."

     The answer makes plain his whole system.  His troops supported and paid
themselves at the expense of the neighborhood where they were quartered.  If
it was a district which upheld the Emperor they took "contributions to the
necessity of the empire." If the land opposed him, no polite words were needed
to justify its pillage.  Within three months Wallenstein had nearly fifty
thousand men under his standard, drawn to him by the tempting offers of
plunder that his agents held out.  If the war had been terrible before,
imagine the awful phase it now assumed, and the blighting curse that fell upon
unhappy Germany!

     Modern justice can find little to choose thereafter between the methods
of the opposing armies.  We speak, therefore, only of the martial genius which
Wallenstein displayed.  He completely outmanoeuvred Mansfeld, defeated him,
and drove him to flight and death.  Then Wallenstein and Tilly proceeded to
destroy the high military reputation of the Danish King.  He was overcome in
battle after battle, and his land so completely devastated that he prayed for
peace on any terms.

     Peace seemed indeed at hand.  The remaining Lutheran states of Saxony and
Brandenburg, which had been neutral and were as yet almost unharmed, dared not
interfere.  The Emperor Ferdinand might have arranged everything as he chose
had he used his power with moderation.  But his hopes had grown with his
fortunes, and he seems to have planned the establishment of such an absolute
power over Germany as had been the aim of his ancestor, Charles V. Ferdinand
passed laws and gave decrees, without any pretence of calling a council or
seeking the approval of the princes.  His general, Wallenstein, was given one
of the conquered states as his dukedom; and Wallenstein declared openly that
his master had no further need of councils; the time had come for Germany to
be governed as were France and Spain.

     The Catholic princes, with Maximilian of Bavaria at their head, became
frightened by the giant they themselves had created, and began to take
measures for their own preservation.  They demanded that Wallenstein be
removed from his command.  The Emperor, perhaps himself afraid of his too
powerful general, finally consented.

     There still remained, however, the serious question whether Wallenstein
would accept his dismissal.  His huge and evergrowing army was absolutely
under his control.  His influence over the troops was extraordinary.  A firm
believer in astrology, he asserted that the stars promised him certain
success, and his followers believed him.  Tall and thin, dark and solemn,
silent and grim, wearing a scarlet cloak and a long, blood-red feather in his
hat, he was declared by popular superstition to be in league with the devil,
invulnerable and unconquerable.  No evil act of his soldiery did he ever
rebuke.  Only two things he demanded of them - absolute obedience and unshaken
daring.  The man who flinched or disobeyed was executed on the instant.
Otherwise the marauders might desecrate God's earth with whatsoever hideous
crimes they would.  His troops laughed at the idea of being Catholics or
Protestants, Germans or Bohemians; they were "Wallensteiners" and nothing
else.

     Even Ferdinand would scarcely have dared oppose his overgrown servant had
not Wallenstein failed in an attempt to capture Stralsund.  This little Baltic
seaport held out against the assaults of his entire army.  Wallenstein vowed
that he would capture it "though it were fastened by chains to heaven." But
each mad attack of his wild troopers was beaten back from the walls by the
desperate townsfolk; and at last, with twelve thousand of his men dead, he
retreated from before the stubborn port.  A superstitious load was lifted from
the minds even of those who pretended to be his friends.  Wallenstein was not
unconquerable.

     He accepted the Emperor's notice of removal with haughty disdain.  He
said he had already seen it in the stars that evil men had sowed dissension
between him and his sovereign, but the end was not yet.  He retired to his
vast estates in Bohemia, and lived at Prague with a magnificence exceeding
that of any court in Germany.  His table was always set for a hundred guests.
He had sixty pages of the noblest families to wait on him.  For chamberlains
and other household officials, he had men who came from similar places under
the Emperor.

     Meanwhile a new defender had sprung up for exhausted Protestantism.
Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, invaded Germany in 1630 and called on the
Protestants to help him in the fight to save their faith.  All Europe had
grown afraid of the tremendous and increasing power of the Hapsburg Emperor.
Not only was Protestant England in league with the Swedes, but Catholic
France, under its shrewd minister, Richelieu, also upheld them.  Still the
burden of actual fighting fell upon Gustavus Adolphus, who proved himself the
greatest military leader of the age, and, in the eyes of Protestant Europe,
the noblest and sublimest man since Luther.

     It is not our province to analyze the motives of the Swedish King, the
"Lion of the North," as he is called.  How much he was actuated by ambition,
how much by religion, perhaps he himself might have found it hard to say. His
coming marks the turning-point of the contest; his brilliant achievements
constitute the fourth period of the war.

     Tilly opposed him with the army of the Catholic League - Tilly, the
victor of thirty desperate battles.  The Emperor and his court laughed, and,
thinking of the Bohemian King and the Dane, said: "Another of these snow kings
has come against us.  He, too, will melt in our southern sun."

     The Protestant princes hesitated, fearing to join Gustavus; he was
hampered on every side.  Tilly in his very face stormed the great Protestant
city of Magdeburg, and sacked it with such merciless brutalities as raised a
cry of horrified disgust, even in that age of atrocities.  "Never was such a
victory," wrote Tilly to the Emperor, "since the storming of Troy or of
Jerusalem.  I am sorry you and the ladies of the court were not there to enjoy
the spectacle." A heap of blackened ruins, hiding a few hundred famished and
broken outcasts, was all that remained of a splendid and prosperous city of
forty thousand souls.

     Tilly's object in this bloody deed seems to have been to terrify the rest
of Protestant Germany into submission.  If so, he failed of his purpose.
Gustavus promptly abandoned gentle measures, and by a threat of force
compelled the Saxon elector to join him.  He then met Tilly in a fierce battle
near Leipsic and utterly defeated him.  Tilly fled, and his army was almost
annihilated, the fugitives who escaped the Swedes falling victims to the
vengeance of the enraged Protestant peasantry.  Few men who had taken part in
the sack of Magdeburg lived long to boast of their achievement.

     Gustavus swept victoriously through all the Rhineland.  One Catholic
prince or bishop after another was defeated.  The advance soon became little
more than a triumphal procession, city after city opening its gates to welcome
him.  The Saxon army conquered Bohemia; Gustavus reached Bavaria.

     There on the southern bank of the River Lech the Bavarian army under
Tilly and Prince Maximilian was drawn to oppose the passage of the Protestant
troops.  It seemed impossible to cross the broad and deep stream in the face
of such a force and such a general.  Gustavus kept up a tremendous cannonade
for three days.  He burned great fires along the shore, that the smoke might
conceal his movements.  Tilly was struck down by a cannon-ball, the whole
Bavarian army fell into confusion, and the Swedes rushed across the river
almost unopposed.  Maximilian fled with his army; and Bavaria, which as yet
had escaped the horrors of the war, was in its turn plundered by an enemy.

     The stars in their courses seemed indeed to fight for Wallenstein.  From
the moment that he was deprived of his command, the triumphant cause of the
Emperor had fallen, fallen until now it lay in utter ruin.  The Saxons held
Bohemia; all Western Germany was in Gustavus' hands; nothing interposed
between the conquerors and defenceless Austria - nothing but Wallenstein.

     Messenger after messenger sped from the Emperor to his offended general,
entreating him to reaccept his command.  Wallenstein dallied, and postponed
his consent, until he had wrung from his despairing sovereign such terms as
never general secured before or since.  Practically Wallenstein became as
exalted in authority as the Emperor himself, and wholly independent of his
former master.  He was to carry on the war or to make peace entirely as he saw
fit, without interference of any sort.  Certain provinces of Austria were
given him to hold as a guarantee of the Emperor's good faith.

     The mere raising of the great general's standard drew around him another
army of "Wallensteiners," with whom he marched against Gustavus.  Two of the
ablest military leaders in history were thus pitted against each other. There
were clever marches and countermarches, partial, indecisive attacks, and at
last a great culminating battle at Luetzen, in Saxony, November 6, 1632.

     Gustavus won; but he perished on the field.  He was always exposing
himself in battle, and at Lutzen he galloped across in front of his army from
one wing to another.  A shot struck him - a traitor shot, say some, from his
own German allies.  He fell from his horse, and a band of the opposing cavalry
encircled and slew him, not knowing who he was.  His Swedes, who adored him,
pressed furiously forward to save or avenge their leader.  The Wallensteiners,
after a desperate struggle, broke and fled before the resistless attack.

     Wallenstein himself, his hat and cloak riddled with bullets, rushed in
vain among his men, taunting them furiously with their cowardice.  It was only
the night and the death of Gustavus that prevented the Swedes from reaping the
full fruits of their victory.  The imperial troops retreated unpursued.
Wallenstein held a savage court-martial, and executed all of his men whom he
could prove had been among the first in flight.

     From this time the war enters on its fifth stage.  Wallenstein did little
more fighting.  He withdrew his troops into Bohemia, and it is hard to say
what purposes simmered in his dark and inscrutable brain.  He certainly was no
longer loyal to the Emperor; probably the Emperor plotted against him.
Wallenstein seems to have contemplated making himself king of an independent
Bohemian kingdom.  At any rate, he broke openly with his sovereign, and at a
great banquet persuaded his leading officers to sign an oath that they would
stand by him in whatever he did.  Some of the more timid among them warned the
Emperor, and with his approval formed a trap for Wallenstein.  The general's
chief lieutenants were suddenly set upon and slain; then the murderers rushed
to Wallenstein's own apartments.  Hearing them coming, he stood up
dauntlessly, threw wide his arms to their blows, and died as silent and
mysterious as he had lived.  His slayers were richly rewarded by Ferdinand.

     All Germany was weary of the war.  The contending parties had fought each
other to a standstill; and, had Germany alone been concerned, peace would
certainly have followed.  But the Swedes, abandoning Gustavus' higher policy,
continued the war for what increase of territory they could get; and France
helped herself to what German cities she could in Alsace and Lorraine. So the
war went on, the German princes taking sides now with this one, now the other,
and nobody apparently ever thinking of the poor peasantry.

     The spirit of the brutal soldiery grew ever more atrocious.  Their
captives were tortured to death for punishment or for ransom, or, it is to be
feared, for the mere amusement of the bestial captors.  The open country
became everywhere a wilderness.  The soldiers themselves began starving in the
dismal desert.

     The Emperor, Ferdinand II, the cause of all this destruction, died in
1637, and was succeeded by his son, Ferdinand III (1637-1657).  The war still
continued, though in a feeble, listless way, with no decisive victories on
either side, until the peace of Westphalia, in 1648.  This peace placed
Protestants and Catholics on an equal footing of toleration throughout the
empire.  It gave Sweden what territory she wanted in the north, and France
what she asked toward the Rhine.  Switzerland and Holland were acknowledged as
independent lands.  The importance of the smaller princes was increased, they,
too, becoming practically independent, and the power of the emperors was all
but destroyed.  From this time the importance of the Hapsburgs rested solely
on their personal possessions in Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia.  The title of
emperor remained little better than a name.

     Indeed, Germany itself had become scarcely more than a name.  During
those terrible thirty years the population of the land is said to have
dwindled from fifteen millions to less than five millions.  In the Palatinate
less than fifty thousand people remained, where there had been five hundred
thousand.  Whole districts everywhere lay utterly waste, wild, and
uninhabited.  Men killed themselves to escape starvation, or slew their
brothers for a fragment of bread.  A full description of the horrors of that
awful time will never be written; much has been mercifully obliterated.  The
material progress of Germany, its students say, was retarded by two centuries'
growth.  To this day the land has not fully recovered from the exhaustion of
that awful war.