To them the Protestant revolt meant
independence and prosperity. But in many other parts of
Europe it meant a succession of horrors compared to which the
last war was a mild excursion of kindly Sunday-school boys.
The Thirty Years War which broke out in the year 1618
and which ended with the famous treaty of Westphalia in 1648
was the perfectly natural result of a century of ever increasing
religious hatred. It was, as I have said, a terrible war. Everybody
fought everybody else and the struggle ended only when
all parties had been thoroughly exhausted and could fight no
longer.
In less than a generation it turned many parts of central
Europe into a wilderness, where the hungry peasants fought
for the carcass of a dead horse with the even hungrier wolf.
Five-sixths of all the German towns and villages were destroyed.
The Palatinate, in western Germany, was plundered
twenty-eight times. And a population of eighteen million
people was reduced to four million.
The hostilities began almost as soon as Ferdinand II of
the House of Habsburg had been elected Emperor. He was
the product of a most careful Jesuit training and was a most
obedient and devout son of the Church. The vow which he had
made as a young man, that he would eradicate all sects and
all heresies from his domains, Ferdinand kept to the best of
his ability. Two days before his election, his chief opponent,
Frederick, the Protestant Elector of the Palatinate and a
son-in-law of James I of England, had been made King of
Bohemia, in direct violation of Ferdinand's wishes.
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