Furies (32 page)

In 1625, Ferdinand and Maximilian drew two militant Jesuits into their immediate orbit. William Lamormaini, a Belgian, became the confessor to Ferdinand in Vienna; and the German Adam Contzen entered Maximilian's intimate circle as his confessor in Munich. They were chosen in part because their religious attitudes conformed with those of their penitents, the two princes. Maximilian, as it happened, was also the founder of Germany's Catholic League. Meanwhile, the re-Catholicizing of Bohemia added fuel to the ongoing war, turning several of the Empire's Protestant princes against Ferdinand and Maximilian. The war entered an even sharper phase in June 1625, when Christian IV, king of Denmark, seeing himself as the defender of the Protestant cause, invaded Germany with an army of mercenaries, only to be defeated in several battles.

Catholic victories in northern Germany fired Ferdinand's ardent Catholicism, in the wake of which he issued the Edict of Restitution (March 1629), calling for the Protestant restitution, within the Empire, of all properties seized “illegally” from the Catholic Church
since the Peace of Augsburg (1555). In effect, the document challenged the ownership of vast stretches of landed wealth, confiscated from bishoprics, monasteries, churches, and women's convents. The duchy of Württemberg alone stood to lose the lands of fourteen large monasteries and thirty-six convents.

The edict was profoundly divisive, and Ferdinand lost the support of the Protestant electors of Brandenburg and Saxony. But the aims of the edict also split Catholics, including the Jesuits themselves. Militants favored it, while moderates feared that it would intensify the war's burning hatreds. In Rome the pope himself, Urban VIII, was dubious about the edict, fearing that it would pose a challenge to the diplomacy of realpolitik statesmen like the powerful Cardinal Richelieu. Nor could the king of Spain be happy with it, because it would cause grave troubles in Germany and thus undermine Habsburg alliances in Spain's fight for the Low Countries.

As it turned out, the edict opened the way for the entry of the king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, into Germany in 1630. Although the war had already been widened by Christian IV and by France's string-pulling, only now did it really become an all-European storm. And while its beginnings had holy-war roots, opponents of the edict now also saw it in the light of power politics, of new territorial ambitions, and of a domineering Habsburg emperor who aimed to tear up the traditional liberties of Germany's princes and free cities. Cardinal Richelieu himself, fearful of having France surrounded by Habsburg might, had no qualms about putting his Catholicism to one side and throwing his weight behind Germany's Protestant princes. In the cockpit of politics, politics came first, not religion.

Encouraged and then partly bankrolled by France and Richelieu, Gustavus now stepped into the fray both as the upholder of German liberties and champion of the Protestant faith. He had his army pastors preach holy war to his soldiers. They heard prayers twice daily, sermons once a week, and sang hymns as they marched into battle. The king aimed to lend force to the religious motors of the war: There could be no doubt of this. Important sectors of the
German Protestant population regarded Gustavus as an “anti-papist” warrior sent to them by God. The city of Magdeburg passed quickly to his side. But it was some time before he was able to secure the allegiance of any major German prince. Wherever he met resistance, his armies turned into battering rams. Rulers, he declared, must be for or against him, for God or for the Devil—that is, for or against the Protestant cause. There was no third way. As for neutrality, said he to the ambassadors from Brandenburg, that “is nothing but rubbish which the wind raises and carries away.”

At the sound of Gustavus's drums, we cannot help remembering that the power of the kings of Sweden was based, to a large extent, on their dismantling of the Roman church in Sweden in the sixteenth century. This achievement was completed, like its parallel in England, by the royal sequestration of all ecclesiastical property, a vast patrimony that had been built up over centuries.

Holy war, like all major wars, was fought on two fronts: at the level of leadership and policy, and out in the villages and cities under siege, where religious differences could mutate into wild furies.

Heartened by their militant Jesuit confessors, Ferdinand II and Maximilian of Bavaria dreamed of seeing a re-Catholicized Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. When Lamormaini and Contzen, the two confessors, came under fire both from leading Catholic clerics and statesmen, the general of the Order of Jesuits, the Italian nobleman Muzio Vitelleschi, tried to protect them. Personally, he approved of the Edict of Restitution and could envisage a Europe of restored Catholicism. In prudence, however, he concealed his views and made no attempt to turn the edict into official Jesuit policy, which would have released a storm of political criticism in Spain and France as well. The Order, after all, had more than sixteen thousand Jesuits, most of them in Catholic Europe.

The edict generated a blaze of diplomatic activity at the princely courts: a war of words, outrage, legal sparring, recrimination, and varieties of blackmail. But out in the world of field armies, in the different theaters of operation, holy war meant panicky flight, plunder,
murder, arson, rape, and strange atrocities. There, too, adversaries used and suffered a hail of words, such as in the cascades of broad-sheets and pamphlets that spewed forth a toxic propaganda, and in the sermons of priests and pastors. Calvinists in particular argued that Habsburg imperialist policy posed a threat to all Protestant Europe.

On rare occasions, the two front lines of holy war—parish violence and the making of high policy—met, remarkably so in Paris, in the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, August 24, 1572. With the likely connivance of the king himself, Charles IX, several of France's top noblemen had the great Huguenot leader, Gaspard de Coligny, brutally assassinated in conditions that fell just short of being public. The murder took on the appearance of a license to kill and instantly set off a spree of killings. In the succeeding days, about two thousand Huguenots were massacred in Paris, many of them in their own houses. The virus then raced through the provinces. In the weeks that followed, provincial France saw the slaughter of hundreds of other Huguenots; and streams of refugees from beleaguered towns wound their way into Huguenot strongholds to find safety. The sieges of La Rochelle and Sancerre came directly out of that cutthroat climate, a frenzy stirred up by the court nobility itself. Searing, self-righteous passion had no measure. When news of the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day reached Rome, there was rejoicing, and Pope Gregory XIII celebrated with a hymn of praise, the
Te Deum
.

Holy war in Germany seldom reached the emotional pitch of the French Wars of Religion. The fact that these were out-and-out civil wars, with the bitterness that often attends such conflict, may explain the difference. The battles of the Thirty Years War involved too many foreign armies for this epochal conflict to be seen as a civil war. And seventeenth-century Germany was not, in any case, a nation-state. It was a loose confederation of states and quasi-states, many of them tiny political entities.

I HAVE SUGGESTED THAT WAR at its most bloody-minded was in the sieges and blockades driven by religious passion. Here, in stark hunger
and under a rainstorm of missiles, is where men were most likely to stop counting the dead, while wanting to believe that God was on their side. The sieges of Augsburg, Magdeburg, La Rochelle, Sancerre, and Paris attest to this, particularly in the anguished testimony of survivors. Day and night, working as a stimulus, the infernal workings of famine opened the way for priests and parsons to argue that it was better to die, better for the sake of one's immortal soul, than to comply with heresy. Or, as a Protestant, better to die than to make peace with papists and fall under the heel of the Whore of Rome.

The experience of Magdeburg underlines the extremes of holy war in Germany. It was the first city to side with Gustavus Adolphus in his opening campaign against Ferdinand II and Roman Catholicism, and he was delighted by this alliance, although it was one that would all but cost the city its life. Yet less than a year later, he expressed no gratitude and little pity over its having been stormed and burned. On the contrary, he blamed others for the tragedy, and he charged the people of Magdeburg with “incompetence, carelessness, lack of energy, [and] even treachery.” In the weeks leading up to the storming, he was in a position to move and deploy his army in its defense. But in addition to juggling other priorities, he was checked by the feeling that the Imperial army was superior; and he had no wish to risk a defeat so soon after his invasion of Germany.

Proud Magdeburg was regarded as the citadel of the evangelical stance in Germany. Passing to Luther's side in 1531—one of the first large cities to do so—it came to be known as “the chancellery of God and Christ.” Two acts of collective heroism enhanced the city's reputation: successful resistance to a siege laid by the forces of the Duke of Saxony, Moritz, back in 1550–1551, and then very recently, in 1629, the city had again foiled a siege, this one imposed by Wallenstein. Songs and the makings of an urban myth had thus collected around the city, turning it, in the public mind, into the quintessential Protestant stronghold. And something of all this had been filtered into the self-image that drove and inspired Magdeburg to resist Tilly,
Pappenheim, and their Imperialist troops in the winter and spring of 1631.

The storming of the city was therefore all the more shocking when the news broke, casting an immediate penumbra of fear over all the centers of German Protestantism. In the first seven months alone, no fewer than 205 pamphlets and 41 flyers turned the news into a kind of “media event.” Yet the catastrophe had been brought on by an unbending minority of evangelicals in the city: by their repeated rejection of Tilly's offer of peaceful terms, by their hard but vain belief that God would send Gustavus Adolphus to them, and by the most die-hard of all the Protestants in Magdeburg, the garrison commander, Dietrich von Falkenberg, who kept assuring the town council that the king was on his way. Right to his final hour, this soldier proved that he was ready to sacrifice his life for godly religion. His readiness to be a martyr, however, also entailed the possible sacrifice of all others in Magdeburg. In the event, about twenty thousand people perished.

IT SEEMS A HARD AND unwelcome thing to say in a democratic ethos, but the bald truth is that terror can wipe out religious differences and impose orthodoxy, or at least this was the case in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Terror put an end to the spread of the Calvinist “heresy” in France. In the early 1560s, it was moving out and winning converts so fast and easily, in the towns above all, that many Huguenots looked forward to engulfing the whole of France. The civil war, however, halted their advance, and the massacres of 1572 began to reverse the process. Shaped by compliance and accommodation, forced conversions back to Catholicism—conversions made out of fear—were likely to become the real thing in the next generation. Of course many Huguenots emigrated, abandoning France for the Low Countries, for Germany, and for England; but the many who stayed, and who clung to their Calvinism, were gradually worn away in the seventeenth century, and then put outside the law by Louis XIV's Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

In Germany and the Empire, the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) laid it down that princes had the right to determine the religious faith of their lands, Catholic or Lutheran. The arrangement entertained no toleration for Calvinism or other Protestant sects. In law, in the give-and-take of international relations, the will of one prince could now impose religious practice and doctrine on millions of people. This bond between ruler and the accepted form of worship jibed fully with the desires of the Habsburg emperors, but also with those of the kings of Spain, France, Sweden, and England. In their realms, the wrong religious view was treason.

America's military adventures are paid for with borrowed money.
John Gray
, BLACK MASS

War on a large scale was impossible without bankers, and early modern banking, with its daring operations, would have been impossible without war.

In our day, the state may step in to save a country's banks from insolvency. In early modern Europe, on the contrary, bankers stepped in on occasion to keep the state from defaulting.

To raise an army called for cash and a line of credit. This is what paid for mercenaries, as well as for food, artillery, pack animals, fodder, wagons, and the web of services required to deliver them. But taxes (the “sinews of power”) could not be collected in a day. In affairs of this kind, even efficient administrations require time, and the early modern state was far from being efficient, especially since war could easily devour, in a few months, two or three years of public revenue. How lay hands on the like?

Enter bankers and moneylenders.

Indeed, they had appeared on the scene long before, and, like prosperous merchants, were almost a natural feature of the European urban landscape. The explosive rise of cities in the late middle
ages, together with the long-distance trade in luxury cloth, spices, grain, and precious raw materials, had given birth to banking. It was already a complex activity, as was the financing of war, by the beginning of the fourteenth century, when double-entry bookkeeping made its first appearance. Early bankers often became billionaires, in our terms, on the profits of lending to princes and to cities. Thus the Medici, Strozzi, Fuggers, Welsers, Doria, and many others, whose loans were usually secured by their proprietary hold over runs of taxes and other rights. Long before 1500, princes and urban oligarchs were drawing on a sophisticated system of moneylending and on international financial networks. A king could borrow money in Antwerp or Lyon, to be paid out in Milan or Naples; or, having borrowed it in Madrid, he could arrange to have it disbursed in Brussels and Vienna. Bankers sat, so to speak, at the key points of these operations, taking in deposits from noblemen, bishops, merchants, high-ranking officials, nuns, widows, monasteries, cities, princes, and even small-time moneylenders such as pawnbrokers. Often, indeed, syndicates of bankers pooled their resources to make mammoth loans to kings.