Western Civilization_ Volume B_ 1300 to 1815 - Jackson J. Spielvogel [177]
The Thirty Years’ War: Soldiers Plundering a Village. This 1660 painting shows a group of soldiers running amok and plundering a German village. This scene was typical of many that occurred during the Thirty Years’ War, especially in Germany, where the war caused enormous destruction.
Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin//© DHM/The Bridgeman Art Library
The economic and social effects of the Thirty Years’ War on Germany are still debated. Some areas of Germany were completely devastated, but others remained relatively untouched and even experienced economic growth. The most recent work pictures a damaged economy and a population decline of 15 to 20 percent in the Holy Roman Empire. Although historians may debate the degree of devastation, many people in Germany would have understood this description by a traveler journeying along the Main River in 1636:
[We] came to a wretched little village called Neukirchen, which we found quite uninhabited yet with one house on fire. Here, since it was now late, we were obliged to stay all night, for the nearest town was four miles away; but we spent that night walking up and down with guns in our hands, and listening fearfully to the sound of shots in the woods around us.… Early next morning, His Excellency went to inspect the church and found it had been plundered and that the pictures and the altar had been desecrated. In the churchyard we saw a dead body, scraped out of the grave, while outside the churchyard we found another dead body.2
The Thirty Years’ War was undoubtedly the most destructive conflict Europeans had yet experienced.
A Military Revolution?
By the seventeenth century, war played an increasingly important role in European affairs. Military power was considered essential to a ruler’s reputation and power; thus, the pressure to build an effective military machine was intense. Some historians believe that the changes that occurred in the science of warfare between 1560 and 1660 warrant the title of military revolution.
Medieval warfare, with its mounted knights and supplementary archers, had been transformed in the Renaissance by the employment of infantry armed with pikes and halberds and arranged in massed rectangles known as squadrons or battalions. The use of firearms required adjustments to the size and shape of the massed infantry and made the cavalry less effective.
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The Face of War in the Seventeenth Century
We have a firsthand account of the face of war in Germany from a picaresque novel called Simplicius Simplicissimus, written by Jakob von Grimmelshausen. The author’s experiences as a soldier in the Thirty Years’ War give his descriptions of the effect of the war on ordinary people a certain vividness and reality. This selection describes the fate of a peasant farm, an experience all too familiar to thousands of German peasants between 1618 and 1648.
Jakob von Grimmelshausen, Simplicius Simplicissimus
The first thing these horsemen did in the nice back rooms of the house was to put in their horses. Then everyone took up a special job, one having to do with death and destruction. Although some began butchering, heating water, and rendering lard, as if to prepare for a banquet, others raced through the house, ransacking upstairs and down; not even the privy chamber was safe, as if the golden fleece of Jason might be hidden there. Still others bundled up big packs of cloth, household goods, and clothes, as if they wanted to hold a rummage sale somewhere. What they did not intend to take along they broke and spoiled. Some ran their swords into the hay and straw, as if there hadn’t been hogs enough to stick. Some shook the feathers out of beds and put