To what extent

Reformation. For the rest, the religious aspects should not be overstated because princes would quick trade religious conviction for policy-making advantage Catholic France in particular was eager to support Protestant states against the Hapsburg. By the beginning of the seventeenth century there was parity between the faiths among the small principalities that made up Germany. Of the larger states, leash of the electors of the Holy Roman Emperor were Protestant, another three Catholic, and the seventh and final one was the emperor himself, in his capacity as king of Bohemia.This apparently stable majority for Hapsburg ambition was undermined by the circumstance that the majority of Bohemians were Protestant, and therein lay the spark of the Thirty years War. This came in 1617 when the Emperor Matthias placed his heir apparent Ferdinand on the throne of Bohemia to take care his succession to the imperial title. Ferdinand was a known Catholic zealot and his written report nobles urged him to exercise restraint in the proclamation of religious edicts. When Ferdinand ignored their entreaties, a group of Protestant nobles burst into the royal palace in Prague in May 1618, and threw his advisers out of a window into the moat/maiden.The Defenestration of Prague was the signal for a Protestant uprising in Hungary, Transylvania, and Bohemia, which was a direct threat to the act prosecution of state of war against the Dutch, who would doubt slight find new allies among the truculent Protestant population of central Europe in their struggle against the Spanish Hapsburg. Yet no single prince was willing to set himself up as a rival king of Bohemia in opposition to the legitimately comprise sovereign. In 1619 Ferdinand succeeded to the imperial throne on Mahatmas death, andFrederick of the Palatinate rashly agreed to stay as a rival king of Bohemia. The Palatinate bordered on the Spanish Netherlands and Catholic Bavaria, providing two further flashlights in addit ion to Bohemia itself, and Spanish soldiers soon occupied the Lower Palatinate while the Bavarian occupied the north. The Dutch and English, both supposed champions of the Protestant cause, were reluctant to become involved, sensing a lost cause in the making. German Lutheran stayed neutral for the succession being, leaving their rivals, the Calvinist, to their fate.Hence Fredericks host as crushed at the battle of the snow-covered Mountain outside Prague in 1620. Rebellious Bohemia was thoroughly ravaged by the imperial assistant ground forces, and forcibly restored to the Catholic faith. The Hapsburg seemed to consent sett guide matters in their favor, therefore the Protestant princes belatedly began to cast around for allies. A chiliad Protestant league was formed consisting of some German states, England, and Holland, secretly support by France, and led by the imprudent Christian IV of Denmark, who began the bang in 1626.The Danes were run ragged for three years by the more(prenominal)(prenominal) numerous imperial and Bavarian armies, led by the Bohemian mercenary Willingness, and by 1629 they had had enough of fighting without effective support from their allies, and sued for peace. The alliance collapsed, and it seemed that Protestant hopes were lost, particularly when Ferdinand attempted to return to the state of affairs that had existed at the clock of the serenity of Sagebrush in 1 555, demanding the return to Catholicism of lands that had after converted to the Protestant faith by issuing the Edict of Restitution.For one time Calvinist and Lutheran were united in heir opposition to this Draconian policy. But by seeking to exploit their victory over the Danes to catch an outlet to the Baltic, from which to strike at Dutch maritime commerce, the Hapsburg provoked their nemesis. Gustavo Adolph of Sweden, pained by Hapsburg behavior and rescued from an inconclusive war against the Poles by french mediation, tell war in 1630.By this tim e the cost of the war had weak the imperial treasury, and Ferdinand policies had weakened his alliances within the empire, so the Swedish invasion came at the moment when the empire was least prepared to repel t. The Swedish army was tough and battle-hardened and won two stunning victories at Brownfield in 1631 and Ldozen in 1632, although Gustavo was killed during the latter. But so too was the imperial knight leader Oppenheim while Willingness, who had made himself prince of Knuckleball, was assassinated in 1634.It is not gather in whether this was because he no longer seemed able to win, because Ferdinand was afraid of him, because Riches paying(a) his lieutenants to do it, or a combination of all three. Constant electioneering and attrition had deprived the Swedes of their best native roofs, who had been replaced by inferior topical anesthetic freebooters, and this contributed to their defeat at redlining in August 1634, where the Swedish Gene tusk and the new champion of Protestantism, Bernhard of Saxes-Whimper, were roundly defeated by the veteran Spanish-imperial army with the loss of 14, 000 men, and all their artillery.The last hope for the Protestant German princes was that Catholic France, fearing Hapsburg hegemony, would come to the rescue. Thus the ascendancy gained by the Hapsburg after redlining was destined to be short-lived. Meanwhile, the Dutch were able to roll back the Spanish, who were crippled by an economic collapse and revolt at home. The Spanish Atlantic fleet was ruined by the Dutch Adam Tromp at the battle of the Downs in 1639, and Portugal declared herself independent in 1640. The Spanish tried to renew the offensive, but were resolutely defeated by the French at Rococo.War exhaustion now led to a entrust for peace, but there was no consensus on how this was to be achieved, and the fighting dragged on. The breakthrough came in 1648, when Spain and Holland concluded heir 80-year war, which had become entangle in the wider conflict of the Thirty Years War, and the other combatants followed suit and colonized their differences one after another. These agreements were rolled up into the Treaty of Westphalia, which was to condition the political map of Europe for over a century.Sweden gained a foothold on the southern shores of the Baltic, France had secured her borders, and the Dutch had achieved nationhood. Overall the Protestants had secured their position in Germany, and Bavaria and Brandenburg (Prussia) were to emerge as significant independent states. The Holy Roman Emperors were left with little invite or control over German affairs, as the principle of the Peace of Sagebrush, cuss region, ells religion, was restored each state would follow the faith of its ruler. The Thirty Years War had a lasting impact.Thousands were displaced rather than killed, and often the peasantry was permanently weakened, unremarkably to the advantage of the landed nobility. Yet there is no absolute consistency, for th e war enabled some humble men to rise. The peasant Peter Mainlander commanded an army and became a count his daughter married a reigning prince. During the war, Grottos had published De current Elli AC pacts arguing that individuals deserved protection against the ravages of war, and one of the wars legacies was a desire by rulers, as well as their subjects, to make war less destructive.Although the military revolution thesis is now widely questioned, war did motley during this period-?though arguably even more significantly after it. If the kin between evolving armies and evolving states was less direct than the thesis suggests, it was nonetheless important. Armies grew bigger-?Willingness may have commanded as many as 150, 000 men and Gustavo perhaps 120, 000-?and ere often give out organized, with a premium attached to the marshalling of infantry firepower and the improvement of artillery.They became notably more costly the French army cost about 16 one million million liver s tourism in the asses and over 38 million after 1640. some senior commanders were commercial entrepreneurs, with their subordinates subcontractors in a commercial venture it is unsurprising that the infantry subunit was called a company. Disgust at some of the more extreme effects of this encouraged hesitant steps towards the professionalisms of officer corps,