Table Of ContentThe Thirty Years War
A Documentary History
The Thirty Years War
A Documentary History
Edited and Translated, with an Introduction, by
Tryntje Helfferich
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Indianapolis/Cambridge
Copyright © 2009 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
22 21 20 19 18 17 2 3 4 5 6 7
For further information, please address:
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
P.O. Box 44937
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www.hackettpublishing.com
Cover design by Deirdre Helfferich
Composition by Agnews, Inc.
Map by David E. Chandler
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Thirty Years War : a documentary history / edited and translated, with
an introduction, by Tryntje Helfferich.
p. cm.
Documents in English; translated from Early New High German, French,
Swedish, and Latin.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-87220-940-4 (cloth)—ISBN 978-0-87220-939-8 (pbk.)
1. Thirty Years’War, 1618-1648—Sources. I. Helfferich,Tryntje,
1969—
D251.T457 2009
940.2'4—dc22
2008048354
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum standard requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
CONTENTS
Map: The Holy Roman Empire, 1618-1648 vii
General Introduction ix
I. Outbreak of the Thirty Years War (1618-1623) 1
1. The Defenestration of Prague (May 23, 1618) 14
2. Apology of the Bohemian Estates (May 25, 1618) 20
3. Declaration of Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate
(November 7,1619) 31
4. Edict of Ferdinand II Annulling the Bohemian Election
(January 29, 1620) 39
5. The Treaty of Ulm (July 3, 1620) 46
6. The Battle of White Mountain (November 8, 1620) 49
7. Terrifying and Piteous News from Bohemia (1621) 56
8. Kipper and Wipper Time (1621) 58
9. Letter of Archbishop Ferdinand of Cologne (July 6, 1622) 60
10. Letter of Elector John George of Saxony (February 23, 1623) 63
II. The Intervention of Denmark and Sweden (1623-1635) 67
11. Letter of King Christian IV of Denmark (February 21,1626) 77
12. The Austrian Peasants’Rebellion (1626) 82
13. General Wallenstein on Two Fronts (August-November 1627) 86
14. The Edict of Restitution (March 6, 1629) 91
15. Gustavus Adolphus’ Invasion of the Empire
(July and October 1630) 98
16. The Sack of Magdeburg (May 20, 1631) 107
17. The Battle of Breitenfeld (September 17, 1631) 113
18. Protestants Triumphant (March 5, 1632) 118
19. The Swedish Discipline (1632) 124
20. Memorandum of Hoë von Hoënegg (January 30, 1634) 137
vi Contents
21. The Assassination of General Wallenstein
(February 25, 1634) 144
22. The Battle of Nördlingen and Its Aftermath
(September 6, 1634) 148
23. Advice of Cardinal Richelieu of France
(after September 6, 1634) 151
III. The Long War (1635-1648) 153
24. The Peace of Prague (June 12, 1635) 165
25. Complaint of Elector John George of Saxony
(March 15, 1636) 176
26. Voyage of William Crowne (April-June 1636) 180
27. The Trial of Ludwig Schmalhausen (February 1638) 190
28. Religious Security and War (November 1638-January 1639) 198
29. Diary of Abbot Maurus Friesenegger (1641-1643) 204
30. Preparations for a General Peace Congress (January 6, 1644) 212
31. Military Contributions and French Subsidies (Early 1644) 216
32. Declaration of György Räköczi, Prince of Transylvania
(February 17, 1644) 227
33. Imperial Instructions for the Peace Congress
(October 16, 1645) 233
34. Letter of Cardinal Mazarin to the French Plenipotentiaries
at Münster (January 20, 1646) 241
35. Diary of Clara Staiger (Spring 1648) 249
36. The Peace of Westphalia (October 24, 1648) 252
IV. Two Wartime Lives (1618-1648) 274
37. A Soldier’s Life in the Thirty Years War 276
38. Hans Heberle’s Zeytregister 302
For Further Reading 325
Index 327
*Hamburg
BREMEN
ENGLAND ►UBLIC Venden
MÜNSTER Minden
Amsterdam * . , _
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Münster* Halberstadt '
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I ALSACE X »Augsburg
Breisach* Tuttlingen * Munich
FRANCE Corutdnet
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ELECTO RAL STAT E [ECCL J
I I Habsburg Hereditary Lands
I i Holy Roman Empire
The Holy Roman Empire, 1618-1648
vii
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
That which has given me cause and occasion to write this little book
is as follows. In the year of our Lord 1618, a great comet appeared dur
ing the autumn month of November. To see this was terrible and amaz
ing, and moved me such that I began to write, for I thought that it
would signify and usher in something great, which has indeed oc
curred, as the reader will herein find sufficient record.1
These words, written sometime after 1618 by a shoemaker living outside the
German city of Ulm, began his diary of his experiences during the great
Thirty Years War that followed. These words also began my own interest in
writing a little book about the war, which was indeed both great and terri
ble, as our diarist learned to his sorrow. Rather than address this war in the
usual way, however, I hope to allow those who experienced it to tell their
own stories. Thus the following pages contain thirty-eight different docu
ments, including diaries, diplomatic correspondence, personal letters,
broadsheets, treaties, poems, trial proceedings, news reports, and more. To
gether, they provide a full history of the war and offer a rich and vivid per
spective of the period, and of the lives and experiences of the men and
women who had the misfortune to live through it. For this was one of the
most momentous and destructive wars in European history. Millions died
and millions more were displaced, their lives forever changed. When it was
over, there was little left to do but pick up the pieces. “May God come to
our aid like a father,” a woman from Bavaria pleaded, “and send us some
means so we can begin to build again.”2
The Thirty Years War and the Holy Roman Empire
The principal battleground of the Thirty Years War was the Holy Roman
Empire of the German Nation. The Holy Roman Empire was a multi
ethnic, multilingual, and multiconfessional state centered on what is now
modern Germany, but also including the modern Netherlands, Belgium,
Luxembourg, eastern France, Switzerland, northern Italy, Austria, Slovenia,
Hungary, the Czech Republic, and western Poland. It was at the same time
a loose federal republic and an elective imperial monarchy, though one fam
ily, the Habsburgs, had so long served as emperors that they had almost be
gun to see the position as hereditary. In some ways the empire was strangely
similar to the modern European Union, and the issues involved in the Thirty
1. Document 38.
2. Document 35.
General Introduction
X
Comet over Heidelberg, 1618 (Theatrum Europaeum, I, p. 101, Universitätsbiblio
thek Augsburg Sign. 02/IV. 13.2.26-1)
Years War are ones that still beleaguer us today, such as the proper extent of
the constitutional liberty of states within a larger political federation, the vi
ability and advisability of religious toleration, and how to justify and pay for
military intervention in another state s civil war.
The Thirty Years War was extraordinarily violent, and was the first war in
European history to involve most European powers in one way or another.
Indeed, some scholars have seen the war as merely a part of one or more
much larger and longer international conflicts involving especially the
French Bourbons, the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs, the Dutch, the
Scandinavian powers, Poland-Lithuania, and England.3 This view is bol
stered by the numerous peripheral but connected conflicts that occurred
simultaneously with the Thirty Years War. For example, the Thirty Years
War influenced and was influenced by the already long-standing French-
Habsburg rivalry, the Polish-Swedish wars, and the Danish-Swedish wars,
3. For example, see Geoffrey Parker, ed., The Thirty Years* War, 2nd ed. (London &
New York: Routledge, 1997); S. H. Steinberg, The Thirty Years War and the Conflict
for European Hegemony, 1600-1660 (New York: Norton, 1967).
