The Holy Roman Empire, 1600–1660

Rudolf II, emperor since 1576, ruled from Prague Castle, where he gathered painters, astronomers and alchemists. He never married and had no legitimate heir. Melancholic and ever harder to reach, he was also king of Hungary, where his armies had been fighting the Ottomans since 1593.

Philipp Lang, a chamber servant who had come up through the Tyrolean Habsburg household, displaced Rudolf's first chamber servant in 1603 and took his place. Anyone who wanted the emperor's ear, archdukes and foreign princes included, paid him; Lang took over 200,000 florins in such gifts and gathered offices for himself and his sons.

Archduke Matthias, Rudolf's younger brother, was handed the Hungarian business in 1605. In April 1606 the archdukes declared Rudolf unfit to rule and named Matthias head of the house. In June he made peace with Bocskai at Vienna, granting religious freedom to Hungary's Protestants, and in November ended the Turkish war at Zsitvatorok. Rudolf condemned both treaties.

Melchior Khlesl, Bishop of Vienna since 1602, had led the Catholic reform of Lower Austria's towns for Rudolf. From early 1606 he placed himself in Matthias's circle as an opponent of the concessions the Bocskai rising had forced on the dynasty. In Matthias's council he met a stronger rival, Karl of Liechtenstein.

Stephen Bocskai, a Calvinist magnate of eastern Hungary, rose against Rudolf's rule in October 1604, against treason trials used to seize nobles' estates and against forced conversions. His men took Kassa in November; in February 1605 Transylvania chose him as its prince, and his raiders reached Moravia and Lower Austria.

Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer, had been forced out of Denmark in 1597 by its new king, Christian IV. In 1599 Rudolf took him into his service in Prague, and at Benátky outside the city he worked on decades of uniquely precise observations of the planets. In 1600 he took on a young mathematician from Graz.

Johannes Kepler, a Lutheran mathematics teacher, was expelled from Graz in 1600 by the Catholic restoration of Ferdinand of Styria and joined Tycho in Prague. Two days after Tycho died in October 1601, Rudolf made Kepler imperial mathematician. From Tycho's observations of Mars he worked out his first two laws of planetary motion, published in Astronomia nova in 1609.

Karl of Liechtenstein, a Moravian magnate who had turned Catholic in 1599, had been Rudolf's chief steward until 1607. He went over to Matthias, led his council in the move against Rudolf and lent money for his troops. In 1608 Matthias rewarded him with the rank of hereditary prince.

In spring 1608 Matthias marched on Prague with the estates of Hungary, Austria and Moravia behind him. By the Treaty of Lieben in June, Rudolf ceded him Hungary, Austria and Moravia and kept Bohemia, Silesia, Lusatia and the imperial crown. Matthias paid his allies in liberties: the Austrian estates won freedom of worship in March 1609.

Left with Bohemia, Rudolf depended on its Protestant estates. While Matthias's army stood before Prague he had Philipp Lang arrested; his chamber servant had begun to turn to Matthias, and the Bohemians loathed his regime. Lang died in prison a year or two later and his fortune was confiscated.

Karel of Žerotín, a Moravian lord and protector of the Unity of Brethren, helped build the confederation of Austrian, Hungarian and Moravian estates that backed Matthias in 1608. Matthias confirmed Moravia's liberties and made him governor of Moravia. He defended the estates' rights within loyalty to the dynasty, and resigned in 1615 as the Catholic party gained ground.

Václav Budovec, a nobleman of the Unity of Brethren, was the leading voice of Bohemia's Protestant estates at the moment Rudolf most needed them. On 9 July 1609 Rudolf signed the Letter of Majesty, won chiefly by Budovec's efforts: no Bohemian could be forced into a faith. Rudolf had bought his estates' loyalty against his brother.

Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria, enforced the ban of the Empire that Rudolf had laid on Donauwörth, a Lutheran imperial city whose people had broken up a Catholic procession. In December 1607 he occupied it, restored Catholic worship and kept it as a Bavarian pledge. The Protestant princes took fright.

Christian of Anhalt, the Calvinist governor of the Upper Palatinate and chief adviser to the Elector Palatine, turned the alarm into an alliance. On 14 May 1608 at Auhausen he brought a group of Protestant princes and imperial cities into the Protestant Union, a pact for mutual defence.

Frederick IV, the Calvinist Elector Palatine, headed the new Union and left much of its business to Anhalt. When he died in September 1610 the Palatinate and the leadership of the Union passed to his fourteen-year-old son, Frederick V.

Christian II, the Lutheran Elector of Saxony, refused to join a union led by Calvinists and kept Saxony on the emperor's side. Without Saxony the princes of north-eastern Germany stayed neutral too, and the Protestant princes remained divided.

The day after the Letter of Majesty, on 10 July 1609, Maximilian founded the Catholic League at Munich. In August the three archbishop-electors joined, on condition that Johann Schweikhard von Kronberg, Elector of Mainz and arch-chancellor of the Empire, share the presidency; he led the League's Rhenish wing.

John William, Duke of Jülich, Cleves and Berg, died without heirs on 25 March 1609. His duchies on the Lower Rhine lay between the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands, so who held them mattered to both, and the heirs of his elder sisters claimed them at once.

Anna of Prussia, wife of the Elector of Brandenburg, was the daughter of the dead duke's eldest sister. Her inheritance was Brandenburg's title to the duchies, and her husband pressed it at once; she stayed a firm Lutheran when he later turned Calvinist.

John Sigismund, Elector of Brandenburg, sent his envoy to take possession. At Dortmund in June 1609 Brandenburg and the rival claimant agreed to govern the duchies jointly as 'the possessors' and to reject every other claim. John Sigismund turned Calvinist in 1613, and in 1618 inherited the Duchy of Prussia, a Polish fief outside the Empire.

Wolfgang William of Neuburg, son of the duke's second sister, held the rival claim. Brandenburg's partner at first, he turned Catholic in 1613 and married Maximilian of Bavaria's sister, winning Bavarian and Spanish backing. The Treaty of Xanten in November 1614 split the inheritance: Jülich and Berg to Neuburg; Cleves, Mark and Ravensberg to Brandenburg.

Rudolf declared the Dortmund agreement void and sent Archduke Leopold, Bishop of Passau and Strasbourg and brother of Ferdinand of Styria, as imperial commissioner. On 23 July 1609 the commandant of Jülich handed him the fortress; Ernst von Mansfeld served under him. Spain and the League refused him money, and Leopold left a garrison and went to raise troops in his bishoprics.

Maurice of Nassau, stadholder and commander of the Dutch army, would not let a Habsburg hold the Lower Rhine. From 29 July to 2 September 1610 his Dutch troops, with French and Union forces under the overall command of Christian of Anhalt, besieged Jülich until Leopold's garrison surrendered and marched away.

Henry IV of France, though a Catholic, wanted a Protestant rather than a Habsburg ruler in the Rhineland duchies, and prepared to intervene beside the Dutch and the Union. On 14 May 1610 he was assassinated in Paris. His widow, regent for the young Louis XIII, still sent a smaller French force to the siege of Jülich.

Leopold's army, raised in his bishopric of Passau, crossed into Bohemia in January 1611, summoned by Rudolf to win back his power. In February it broke into Prague's Lesser Town, killing and looting; some 1,400 people were killed or wounded. The Bohemian estates raised troops against it.

The Bohemian estates turned to Matthias, whose army reached Prague in March 1611. Rudolf had to give up Bohemia too, and in May Matthias was crowned its king. Rudolf kept only the imperial title until his death in January 1612; that June the electors chose Matthias emperor at Frankfurt.

John George succeeded his brother Christian II as Elector of Saxony in 1611. A Lutheran loyal to the emperor and the Empire's institutions, he kept Saxony out of the Calvinist-led Union, as his brother had done.

Ferdinand of Bavaria, Maximilian's younger brother, succeeded their uncle Ernst in 1612 as Archbishop-Elector of Cologne and Bishop of Münster, Liège and Hildesheim. He followed his brother's policy throughout, so Cologne's electoral vote and a chain of north-western church lands joined Bavaria's network.

Lothar von Metternich, Archbishop-Elector of Trier since 1599, joined the Catholic League in 1610. He voted in the elections of Matthias in 1612 and Ferdinand in 1619, and worked to settle disputes between the Union and the League.

Frederick V was fourteen when his father died in 1610. He began to rule in 1613 and came of age in 1614, with Christian of Anhalt still directing Palatine policy and the councillor Ludwig Camerarius running its business in the Empire. The leadership of the Union passed to him.

Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James VI and I, married Frederick in London on 14 February 1613 and came to Heidelberg, where he built a new wing of the castle for her. The match gave the Palatine court royal prestige and the expectation of English help.

James VI and I, King of England and Scotland, gave his daughter to the Protestant Elector Palatine after first considering a French match. The marriage did not commit him to his son-in-law's ventures: in 1619 he would oppose Frederick's acceptance of the Bohemian crown.

Melchior Khlesl, Matthias's leading minister since 1609 and head of his privy council from 1613, now worked for compromise. To get Matthias elected emperor he needed the Protestant electors; he tried to dissolve both leagues into a party loyal to the emperor, and in 1615 extended the peace with the Ottomans. In 1616 he was made a cardinal.

Anna of Tyrol, Matthias's cousin and a supporter of the Counter-Reformation, married him in Vienna in December 1611; at her wish the court moved from Prague to Vienna. The marriage stayed childless, and Matthias's brothers had no heirs either, so the succession had to come from the Styrian branch.

The family settled on their cousin Ferdinand of Styria, pressed by Matthias's brother Archduke Maximilian while Khlesl delayed. Ferdinand had expelled the Protestant preachers from Inner Austria in 1598. In June 1617 the Bohemian diet accepted him as king after he promised to respect its privileges, and he was crowned in Prague on 29 June.

Philip III of Spain, Matthias's nephew, had a claim of his own to Bohemia and Hungary. In a secret agreement of 1617 he gave it up in Ferdinand's favour, in return for Habsburg rights in Alsace and imperial fiefs in Italy that secured the Spanish Road between Milan and the Netherlands.

The Count of Oñate, Spain's ambassador at Matthias's court, negotiated that agreement, which bears his name. It tied Ferdinand's rise to Spanish interests, and Oñate stayed beside him in Vienna as ambassador through the crises that followed.

Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg, born in Graz to a merchant family and raised a Protestant, had served Ferdinand since 1597 and become his closest friend and confidant. A patron of the Spanish party at court, he rose with Ferdinand toward the crowns.

Count Heinrich Matthias von Thurn had been among the estates' leaders who forced the Letter of Majesty in 1609. When he voted against accepting Ferdinand in 1617, the new king took the burgraviate of Karlštejn from him and gave it to Jaroslav Martinic. After Protestant churches were closed at Braunau and pulled down at Klostergrab, and the estates' protest meeting was banned, Thurn and Budovec led them into Prague Castle on 23 May 1618.

Jaroslav Martinic, the Catholic who had taken Thurn's office at Karlštejn, was one of the regents governing Bohemia in the king's absence. The Protestant lords blamed him and Vilém Slavata for the attacks on their rights, seized them and threw them from a high window of the castle, with their secretary Philipp Fabricius after them. All three survived.

Vilém Slavata, raised in the Unity of Brethren, had turned Catholic in 1597, became a fierce advocate of the old faith and backed Ferdinand's coronation. He struck his head on a ledge as he fell, but lived. He served the Habsburgs for decades afterwards and became High Chancellor of Bohemia in 1628.

The next day the estates elected thirty directors to govern Bohemia, took over the taxes and gave Thurn their army. Václav Vilém of Roupov, a lord of the Unity of Brethren and a defender of the Letter of Majesty, became president of the directorate and pressed for deposing Ferdinand and electing Frederick of the Palatinate.

Karel of Žerotín steered the Moravian diet into refusing the Bohemians' call to join the revolt in June 1618, and in December persuaded most of the Moravian estates to stay neutral and negotiate. He was trying to protect Moravia and keep faith with the dynasty at once.

Ladislav Velen of Žerotín, a Moravian lord married to Thurn's niece, wanted Moravia in the revolt. At the end of April 1619 Thurn's army entered Moravia and set off a coup in Brno that put the radicals in power, and Karel of Žerotín was held under house arrest. Velen led the cavalry that rode on Vienna, and on 7 August was elected governor of Moravia.

Georg Erasmus von Tschernembl, a Calvinist baron and spokesman of the Upper Austrian estates, had backed Matthias against Rudolf in 1608 in return for religious freedom. When Ferdinand succeeded Matthias, the Upper Austrian estates under his lead refused him homage, and on 16 August 1619 they allied with the Bohemian rebels.

As the emperor's minister, Khlesl wanted to answer the Bohemian revolt with negotiation rather than force: the emperor had no money for a war, and Madrid had promised none.

Archduke Maximilian, Matthias's brother, Grand Master of the Teutonic Order and ruler of Tyrol, had long accused Khlesl of stalling Ferdinand's succession. On 20 July 1618 he and Ferdinand, with the Spanish ambassador Oñate, had Khlesl seized and carried off to Tyrol. Archduke Maximilian died that November.

Matthias, old and ill, could not save his minister. His wife Anna of Tyrol died in December 1618, and he died in March 1619, leaving Ferdinand, already accepted as king in Bohemia and Hungary, to inherit his lands.

Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy, a Catholic prince who had just fought Spain over Montferrat, sent the Bohemian rebels an army of about 2,000 men under a commander in his pay, Ernst von Mansfeld.

Ernst von Mansfeld, a Catholic soldier who had served Archduke Leopold in the Jülich war before going over to the Protestant princes, brought Savoy's troops into Bohemia in 1618 and took Pilsen for the estates. His army gave the rebels a second field force, raised and paid by contract.

In June 1619 Thurn's army stood before Vienna. In August the Bohemian estates deposed Ferdinand, but on 28 August the electors at Frankfurt chose him emperor, even the Palatine vote going to him in the end. He then bought allies: the League's army from Bavaria, Saxony's help in the Bohemian crown lands, and Spanish troops.

Count Bucquoy, a general from the Spanish Netherlands whom Matthias had made imperial commander in 1614, had led the war against the rebels since August 1618. On 10 June 1619 he beat Mansfeld at Sablat, forcing the Bohemians to lift their siege of Budweis; in 1620 his imperial army joined Tilly's for the march on Prague.

In August 1619 the Bohemian estates elected Frederick V, the Calvinist Elector Palatine and head of the Union, as their king. Against his father-in-law's wishes he accepted and was crowned in Prague in November, with Elizabeth as his queen. Christian of Anhalt ran his government and commanded his army.

Gabriel Bethlen, Prince of Transylvania since 1613, invaded Habsburg Hungary in August 1619, took Pressburg and the Holy Crown in October, and joined Thurn before Vienna, though neither could take the city. In August 1620 a Hungarian diet elected Bethlen king; he was never crowned.

Christian of Anhalt led the estates' army back to cover Prague. On 8 November 1620 Tilly and Bucquoy caught it on the White Mountain outside the city and broke it in about an hour. Anhalt advised against a stand in Prague, and the next day Frederick and Elizabeth fled to Breslau. Ferdinand put Anhalt under the ban in 1621.

At Munich on 8 October 1619 Maximilian of Bavaria agreed to put the League's army at Ferdinand's service, in return for his costs and Frederick's electoral title; the Spanish ambassador Oñate had pressed Ferdinand to promise it. Bavaria occupied Upper Austria as security for its expenses.

Tilly, a veteran of the Turkish war whom Maximilian had made commander of the League's army in 1610, led it into Upper Austria in summer 1620 to subdue its estates, then into Bohemia. On 8 November, beside Bucquoy's imperial army, he met Anhalt's army on the White Mountain.

John George of Saxony had voted for Ferdinand at Frankfurt. Charged by the emperor with enforcing the Empire's law on the rebel lands, and promised Lusatia as a pledge for his costs, he invaded Lusatia in 1620 and brought the crown lands, Silesia included, back to obedience.

Ambrogio Spinola, commander of Spain's army in the Netherlands, invaded Frederick's Lower Palatinate in 1620 and took much of it. The Protestant Union had promised the League its neutrality at Ulm on 3 July and declined to support Frederick, and it did not stop him.

Ferdinand made Karl of Liechtenstein his governor in Bohemia early in 1621 and president of the extraordinary court that tried the rebels. On 21 June 1621 twenty-seven were executed in Prague's Old Town Square. Rebel estates were confiscated and sold, and Liechtenstein, viceroy from 1622, took Jägerndorf and much rebel property for himself.

Václav Budovec, who had won the Letter of Majesty and stood with Thurn in the castle in 1618, was condemned and beheaded on 21 June 1621. Ferdinand had the Letter itself cut apart and its seal burned.

Johannes Jessenius, physician and anatomist, had made his name with a public dissection in Prague in 1600 and was elected rector of the university in 1617. He served the rebel estates as an envoy to the Hungarian diets in 1618 and 1620, and was executed with the others; his tongue was cut out first.

Cardinal Franz von Dietrichstein, Bishop of Olomouc, had fled to Vienna when Moravia joined the revolt. After the White Mountain he returned as governor of Moravia, an office he held from 1621 to 1628, and led its Catholic restoration. Velen, sentenced to death in his absence, went into exile.

John Amos Comenius, minister of the Unity of Brethren and head of its school at Fulnek, lost his property and writings in 1621 and went into hiding; in 1622 plague killed his wife and children. Karel of Žerotín sheltered him on his estate at Brandýs nad Orlicí, where Comenius wrote The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, first finished in 1623, and dedicated it to Žerotín.

Mansfeld, now Frederick's commander, held the Upper Palatinate against Tilly in 1621 and then moved to the Rhine. On 27 April 1622, with Frederick present, he beat Tilly at Mingolsheim near Wiesloch. His troops plundered friend and foe alike, and that summer Frederick dismissed them.

George Frederick, Margrave of Baden-Durlach, a general of the Union until it broke up in 1621, raised an army for Frederick and handed his margraviate to his son so that an imperial ban could not take it. On 6 May 1622 Tilly and the Spanish general Córdoba destroyed his army at Wimpfen.

Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba had succeeded Spinola in command of the Spanish troops in the Palatinate. He fought beside Tilly at Wimpfen and at the siege of Heidelberg, and on 29 August 1622 at Fleurus blocked Mansfeld and Christian of Brunswick as they marched into Dutch service.

Christian of Brunswick, the young Lutheran administrator of Halberstadt and a nephew of Christian IV of Denmark, raised an army for Frederick and Elizabeth. Tilly beat him at Höchst in June 1622; at Fleurus he lost an arm; and at Stadtlohn on 6 August 1623 Tilly destroyed his new army.

Tilly, made a count after Höchst, took Frederick's capital, Heidelberg, on 19 September 1622 after an eleven-week siege. Three victories in two months had broken the armies raised to defend the Palatinate.

At Regensburg in February 1623 Ferdinand kept his promise and gave Frederick's electoral title to Maximilian of Bavaria. One of the seven votes that chose emperors had passed from a Calvinist prince to a Catholic one.

Ludwig Camerarius, the Palatine councillor who had followed Frederick to Prague, became head of his government in exile at The Hague, where Frederick and Elizabeth lived from 1621. He worked for an alliance of all Europe against the Habsburgs and the League.

Charles I, Elizabeth's brother, became king of England in March 1625. His father had already paid for an army under Mansfeld to recover the Palatinate; it sailed in January 1625 and achieved nothing. On 9 December 1625 the Treaty of The Hague bound England and the Dutch Republic to pay for Denmark's war.

Christian IV of Denmark was also Duke of Holstein, a prince of the Empire. Fearing the Catholic advance in northern Germany, and Gustavus Adolphus as a rival champion of the Protestants, he had the Lower Saxon princes make him commander of their forces and entered the war on 9 May 1625, as Duke of Holstein rather than King of Denmark.

Cardinal Richelieu became Louis XIII's chief minister in August 1624. A Catholic prelate, he set France against Habsburg power and was ready to pay Protestant powers to fight it; his close friend the Capuchin Père Joseph served as his agent.

William Lamormaini, a Jesuit Ferdinand had known since he taught at Graz, became the emperor's confessor in 1624. He urged Ferdinand to use his victories to restore Catholicism without compromise.

Albrecht von Wallenstein, a Bohemian nobleman who had stayed loyal in 1618, had built the Duchy of Friedland, nearly a fifth of Bohemia, out of confiscated land. When Denmark entered the war he offered to raise a whole imperial army on his own credit and keep it on contributions levied from the lands it occupied. Ferdinand commissioned him in 1625.

Eggenberg, now the emperor's leading minister, Duke of Krumau and since 1623 a prince of the Empire, was the court patron of pragmatic newcomers such as Wallenstein. An army of Ferdinand's own would free him from dependence on Maximilian's League.

On 27 August 1626 Tilly routed Christian's army at Lutter, and in 1627 Tilly and Wallenstein overran Holstein and the whole of Jutland; only sea power kept the Danish islands safe. At Lübeck in May 1629 Christian got his lands back without loss and promised to keep out of the Empire's affairs.

On 25 April 1626 Wallenstein beat Mansfeld at the bridge of Dessau and pursued him toward Hungary; Mansfeld, stranded when Bethlen made peace with the emperor, died in Bosnia that November. Early in 1628 Ferdinand gave Wallenstein the duchy of Mecklenburg, but the Baltic port of Stralsund, with Danish and Swedish help, held out against him.

On 6 March 1629 Ferdinand issued the Edict of Restitution: church lands taken over by Protestants since 1552 were to be returned. He decreed it on his own authority, without the electors or a diet, and it threatened Protestant possessions across northern Germany.

Ferdinand's youngest son, Leopold Wilhelm, was made bishop of Passau and Strasbourg at twelve in 1626, succeeding his uncle Archduke Leopold; Halberstadt followed in 1627 and Magdeburg in 1629, though that title brought him no real power. Restitution also served Habsburg advancement.

Adolf Frederick of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and his brother had secretly sided with Christian IV. Early in 1628 Ferdinand deposed them and gave their duchies to Wallenstein. Every prince took note that the emperor's victories could unseat an old ruling house.

Georg Friedrich von Greiffenclau, Bishop of Worms, succeeded Johann Schweikhard as Elector of Mainz in 1626. He pressed the Catholic electors' demand for the return of church lands so hard that he has been called the father of the Edict of Restitution. He died in July 1629.

In 1628 Maximilian handed back Upper Austria, his pledge since 1620, and received the Upper Palatinate instead. He now led the princes who feared Wallenstein's army and its contributions more than the Protestants.

Adam von Herberstorff, a Catholic convert who had served Wolfgang William of Neuburg, governed Upper Austria for Bavaria from 1620 and pressed its re-Catholicisation. In May 1625, after a revolt at Frankenburg, he made the arrested men dice for their lives on the Haushamerfeld; seventeen were hanged without trial.

Stefan Fadinger led the Protestant peasants' rising of May 1626. His army beat Bavarian troops at Peuerbach and besieged Linz, where Herberstorff held out. Fadinger was shot during the siege on 28 June and died on 5 July, and the rising lost its leader.

Maximilian sent Pappenheim, a cavalry officer who had been left for dead at the White Mountain, to crush the peasants. In November 1626, at Gmunden, Vöcklabruck and Wolfsegg, he destroyed their remaining forces. Upper Austria went back to the emperor in 1628.

Ferdinand imposed a new constitution on Bohemia in May 1627 and on Moravia in 1628: the crown became hereditary in the Habsburg line and Catholicism the only permitted faith. Protestant nobles and burghers had to convert or emigrate.

Comenius left Bohemia with the Brethren in 1628 for Leszno in Poland, where he headed the school and took charge of the exiled Bohemian and Moravian congregations.

Kepler, imperial mathematician to Matthias and then Ferdinand, had worked at Linz since 1612. He published his third law in Harmonice Mundi in 1619 and the Rudolphine Tables, built on Tycho's data and dedicated to Ferdinand, in 1627. In July 1628 he moved to Sagan in Silesia at Wallenstein's invitation.

In July 1630 Ferdinand met the electors at Regensburg. He wanted his son elected King of the Romans and the Empire's help against the Dutch and in the Mantuan war with France. The Catholic electors instead demanded that his army be cut and Wallenstein dismissed; the Protestant electors stayed away in protest at the Edict.

On 13 August 1630 Ferdinand gave way and dismissed Wallenstein; his confessor Lamormaini helped tip the decision. Wallenstein, told at Memmingen in September, submitted without resistance and retired to his Duchy of Friedland.

The emperor's elder son Ferdinand, crowned King of Hungary in 1625 and of Bohemia in 1627, was to have been chosen King of the Romans at Regensburg. The electors still refused, and the imperial succession stayed open.

Maximilian of Bavaria, who had saved Ferdinand in 1620, now led the Catholic electors against him. Wallenstein's huge army, its contributions and his seizure of Mecklenburg threatened the princes' independence; at Regensburg they made his dismissal and a smaller army their price.

Tilly, already general of the League, took command of the imperial army as well, now cut down in size despite the Swedish landing. One general now led both Catholic armies.

Père Joseph, the Capuchin friar who was Richelieu's closest agent, came to Regensburg as a French envoy. He negotiated over the war of the Mantuan succession and backed the electors against Wallenstein; the treaty on Mantua signed there was soon broken by France.

Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden had answered the emperor's advance to the Baltic by allying with Stralsund in June 1628 and sending troops to hold it. In July 1630 he landed at Peenemünde on the Pomeranian coast with about 13,000 men.

Axel Oxenstierna, chancellor since 1612, concluded a six-year truce with Poland at Altmark in September 1629, with a French envoy's help. It freed Sweden's army for Germany and gave Sweden two-thirds of the tolls at the Prussian and Polish ports, which helped pay for the war.

Bogislaw XIV, the last Duke of Pomerania, had seen his duchy occupied by Wallenstein's army since 1627. With the Swedes on his coast he signed the Treaty of Stettin in 1630, which put Pomerania under Swedish military control. He had no son, and Brandenburg held the right to succeed him.

George William, Elector of Brandenburg, was Gustavus's brother-in-law but had opposed his sister's marriage to the Swedish king. A Calvinist trying to stay neutral, he had already had his lands looted by imperial troops; now the Swedes stood on his border, and he held back.

Kepler, still owed large sums by the imperial treasury, set out in October 1630 to collect them and came to Regensburg, where the electors had just forced Wallenstein's dismissal. He fell ill there and died on 15 November 1630.

Gustavus Adolphus held only a Pomeranian foothold, and the Protestant electors kept their distance. In January 1631 the Treaty of Bärwalde gave him French subsidies. After Breitenfeld he swept south, forced the crossing of the Lech in April 1632, where Tilly was mortally wounded, and in May entered Munich.

Dietrich von Falkenberg, a colonel in Swedish service, slipped into Magdeburg disguised as a boatman in November 1630 to command its defence and hold the Protestant city for Gustavus. Tilly closed in that spring; when his army stormed the city on 20 May 1631 Falkenberg was killed, fire swept the streets and about 20,000 people died.

Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, a younger son of a Saxon ducal house, commanded the Swedish left wing at Lützen on 16 November 1632. When Gustavus was shot dead riding into the fight, Bernhard took over the command, and the Swedes held the field.

Tilly, now commanding the imperial army as well as the League's, stormed Magdeburg, a Protestant city allied to Sweden, on 20 May 1631. He then invaded Saxony to force its elector's hand, and on 17 September at Breitenfeld outside Leipzig Gustavus destroyed his army. Wounded at the Lech in April 1632, he died that month at Ingolstadt.

Pappenheim, Tilly's cavalry commander, took a leading part in the storming of Magdeburg and shared the blame for the massacre. After Tilly's death he served under the recalled Wallenstein, and at Lützen he rode into the middle of the battle with his horsemen and was mortally wounded.

John George of Saxony called the Protestant princes to Leipzig early in 1631; they condemned the Edict of Restitution and formed a league of their own under arms. When Tilly's army invaded Saxony after Magdeburg, he allied with Sweden on 11 September 1631. At Breitenfeld his Saxons broke, but the Swedes won.

Hans Georg von Arnim, once Wallenstein's field marshal and commander of the imperial troops sent to help Poland against Sweden, had become general of the Leipzig league. After Breitenfeld he led the Saxon army into Bohemia and occupied Prague on 15 November 1631, bringing Thurn and other exiles home; in 1632 Wallenstein drove them out again.

George William of Brandenburg tried to stay neutral, but Gustavus, his brother-in-law, forced him to take sides. The Swedish army, unpaid and ill-fed, now took from Brandenburg what the imperial troops had taken before.

Eggenberg, Wallenstein's patron at court, was largely responsible for bringing him back. With Sweden victorious, Ferdinand recalled Wallenstein for a fixed term in December 1631, and in April 1632 gave him full command on his own terms.

Wallenstein raised a new army, drove the Saxons out of Bohemia and met Gustavus at Lützen on 16 November 1632 in fog and smoke. Gustavus was killed; the Swedes held the field, and Wallenstein withdrew into Bohemia.

Christina, Gustavus's only legitimate child, became queen at five. A regency council led by Axel Oxenstierna governed for her until she was declared of age in 1644.

Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg had married Gustavus in 1620 with her mother Anna's consent but against her brother George William's will. Widowed at Lützen, she was kept out of the regency, and when she clung to her daughter Oxenstierna had her sent away to Gripsholm castle.

Axel Oxenstierna, now regent and Sweden's legate in Germany, kept the war going. On 23 April 1633 at Heilbronn he bound the Protestant estates of four southern and western imperial circles into a league under Swedish direction, with French money behind it; Saxony and Brandenburg stayed outside.

Gustav Horn, Oxenstierna's son-in-law and a Swedish field marshal, shared the war in southern Germany with Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. The two could not work together and were given separate commands.

Thurn had come back to Bohemia with Arnim in 1631, and in 1633 Oxenstierna gave him a small corps of Bohemian exiles. On 11 October 1633 Wallenstein surrounded it at Steinau on the Oder and made it lay down its arms, then let Thurn go in exchange for the Silesian fortresses. Vienna was outraged.

Through 1633 Wallenstein fought cautiously and negotiated in secret with Saxony, Brandenburg, Sweden and France. When the Swedes took Regensburg in November he moved too late to save it, and he left Bavaria to be plundered while Maximilian complained to Vienna. In January 1634 he had his colonels at Pilsen pledge loyalty to him personally.

In December 1633 the court secretly decided to be rid of him. On 24 January 1634 Ferdinand signed a patent removing Wallenstein from command and left his generals to deal with him. Whether Wallenstein meant treason is still disputed.

Ottavio Piccolomini, commander of Wallenstein's bodyguard and one of the generals he had raised, turned against him and helped win the officers over to the emperor. After the murder Ferdinand rewarded him with the Bohemian lordship of Náchod.

Matthias Gallas, another general Wallenstein had promoted, was the senior officer charged with his removal. He left Pilsen on 12 February 1634 to arrange it and held the army for the emperor; he was rewarded with most of Wallenstein's Friedland estates.

Walter Butler, an Irish colonel of dragoons, rode with Wallenstein to Eger. On 25 February 1634 Butler and the Scots officers of the garrison, Leslie and Gordon, killed Wallenstein's companions at supper in the castle, and a party of their men broke into his lodging and killed him.

The emperor's son Ferdinand, King of Hungary, took command of Wallenstein's army on 2 May 1634, with Gallas directing its operations. At Nördlingen he joined the Spanish army of his cousin, and on 6 September the two destroyed the Swedish army of Horn and Bernhard.

The Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, brother of Philip IV of Spain, was marching a Spanish army from Italy to the Netherlands, where he was to be governor. He joined the imperial army before Nördlingen, and the combined Habsburg force won the battle.

Maximilian von Trauttmansdorff, the emperor's negotiator, turned Nördlingen into a settlement with Saxony. In the Peace of Prague of 30 May 1635 the Edict of Restitution was suspended for forty years, with 1627 as the reference date; Saxony kept both Lusatias as hereditary fiefs; and the princes' armies were to merge into one imperial army.

Horn was taken prisoner at Nördlingen, where the Swedish army in southern Germany lost some twelve thousand men or more. He was held in Burghausen castle in Bavaria until 1642.

After Nördlingen John George of Saxony made peace with the emperor at Prague, and most of the Protestant princes followed him. Saxony kept Lusatia for good; in return it turned its army against Sweden.

William V of Hesse-Kassel, a Calvinist and Gustavus's ally since 1631, would not be bound by the Peace of Prague. He took French subsidies to keep an army of 10,000 men; the emperor put him under the ban and gave his lands to the rival Hessian line of Darmstadt to administer.

Philipp Christoph von Sötern, Archbishop-Elector of Trier, had put himself under French protection, and French troops won Trier back for him in 1632. In March 1635 Spanish troops took the city by surprise and carried him off; he was held prisoner in Linz until 1645.

Richelieu had paid Sweden since the Treaty of Bärwalde in 1631. With the German war seemingly about to end, France declared war on Spain in May 1635, citing the seizure of Trier, and entered the fighting openly.

Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, who had escaped from Nördlingen with what remained of his army, entered French service in 1635 with the promise of lands in Alsace. A German prince's army became France's weapon on the Upper Rhine.

Johan Banér, Sweden's commander in Germany, held its position together after Nördlingen and the Peace of Prague. On 4 October 1636 at Wittstock, with Alexander Leslie, he defeated an imperial and Saxon army, and the Swedish war went on. He campaigned until his death in May 1641.

On 22 December 1636, at Regensburg, the electors at last chose the younger Ferdinand as King of the Romans, and in February 1637 his father died. As Ferdinand III he kept Trauttmansdorff as his chief minister and leading diplomat.

Under French contract Bernhard crossed the Rhine early in 1638, beat the imperial and Bavarian army at Rheinfelden in March, taking Johann von Werth prisoner, and in December captured the fortress of Breisach. He meant to keep it as the seat of a principality of his own and refused Richelieu's niece in marriage. He died in July 1639.

Johann Ludwig von Erlach, a Bernese officer whom Bernhard had made governor of Breisach, became executor of his will and one of the army's directors. He handed Bernhard's conquests and troops over to France for pensions and French citizenship, and went on governing Breisach for the French king.

When William V died in exile in East Frisia in September 1637, his widow Amalie Elisabeth became regent for their son William VI. She upheld the regency against Hesse-Darmstadt's claim, kept Hesse-Kassel's army in the field beside France and Sweden, and governed until 1650.

George William of Brandenburg left his Catholic, pro-imperial minister Adam von Schwarzenberg to run the government and in 1637 withdrew to Prussia, where he died at Königsberg in December 1640.

Adam von Schwarzenberg, a Catholic count born in the county of Mark, had grown rich and powerful as governor of Brandenburg. The new elector kept him in office at first but began taking the troops out of his control, and Schwarzenberg died of a stroke in March 1641.

Frederick William succeeded his father in December 1640, at twenty, with Brandenburg occupied by the Swedes, Cleves by the Dutch and Mark by imperial troops. He began to take government and army into his own hands.

Lennart Torstensson, once Gustavus's artillery chief, took command after Banér's death in 1641. On 2 November 1642 he crushed the imperial army at Breitenfeld. After a winter war against Denmark he came back, destroyed another imperial army at Jankau in Bohemia on 6 March 1645, and reached the Danube opposite Vienna.

Leopold Wilhelm, the emperor's brother, had been made imperial commander in 1639 for want of better men. After the disaster at Breitenfeld in 1642, a battle fought against his generals' advice, he resigned; he was called back after Jankau.

Louis Raduit de Souches, a Huguenot from La Rochelle who had served Sweden, had joined the imperial army in 1642 on Leopold Wilhelm's recommendation. Made commander of Brno on 14 March 1645, he held the Moravian city against Torstensson's siege for months, and the Swedish advance stalled.

George I Rákóczi, Prince of Transylvania since 1630, allied with Sweden and France and in 1644 declared war on Ferdinand III, opening a second front in Hungary as Torstensson advanced. By the Peace of Linz in December 1645 he gained seven Hungarian counties, and Hungary's Protestants won guarantees of their freedom of worship.

Cardinal Mazarin, an Italian diplomat whose career Richelieu had fostered, succeeded him as chief minister when Richelieu died in December 1642. He kept France at war with both Habsburg powers while preparing the bargain that would end it.

Anne of Austria, a Spanish Habsburg by birth and Louis XIII's widow, became sole regent for her four-year-old son when the king died in May 1643, and appointed Mazarin chief minister. A Spanish princess presided over France's war against Spain.

Louis XIV became king in May 1643 at four. Through his minority France was governed by his mother and Mazarin, and the change of reign did not interrupt the war.

Louis, Duke of Enghien, later the Great Condé, beat the Spanish army at Rocroi in May 1643. He then fought in Germany beside Turenne, at Freiburg in August 1644 and at Alerheim near Nördlingen in August 1645, where Mercy was killed.

Turenne, Marshal of France since May 1643, took over the French army in Germany after its rout at Tuttlingen and rebuilt it. Mercy beat him at Mergentheim in May 1645, but with Condé's troops he fought Mercy again at Alerheim in August.

Johann von Werth, Bavaria's best-known cavalry general, had been captured at Rheinfelden in 1638 and was exchanged in March 1642 for the Swedish field marshal Gustav Horn. At Tuttlingen on 24 November 1643 he led the first cavalry attack of Mercy's surprise assault on the French camp.

Franz von Mercy, commander of the Bavarian army from 1643, destroyed the French army at Tuttlingen in November 1643, held Freiburg against Condé and Turenne in August 1644 and beat Turenne at Mergentheim in May 1645. At Alerheim on 3 August 1645 he was killed by a musket ball.

In November 1645 Ferdinand III sent his chief minister Trauttmansdorff to the congress in Westphalia to make the concessions the war now required. He led the imperial delegation until 1647, when failing health took him home.

Johann Ludwig of Nassau-Hadamar, a count who had turned Catholic and entered imperial service, had pushed for peace talks since 1638. From 1645 he negotiated at Münster beside Trauttmansdorff and took over the lead when he left; in 1650 he was made a prince for his part in the peace.

Isaak Volmar, once chancellor of the Habsburg government of Further Austria at Ensisheim in Alsace, had negotiated for the emperor at Münster since 1643 and stayed to the end of the detailed bargaining. His formula for dividing the parishes of Osnabrück by their present confession, not by the 1624 rule, was adopted.

Carl Gustaf Wrangel succeeded Torstensson as Sweden's commander in Germany in 1646. Joining Turenne, he invaded Bavaria; on 17 May 1648 at Zusmarshausen they beat the imperial and Bavarian army and plundered Bavaria.

Hans Christoff von Königsmarck, a Brandenburg-born general in Swedish service, took Prague's Lesser Town and castle by surprise in July 1648, while the Old and New Towns held out across the river. On Christina's orders he organised the plunder of Rudolf II's collections, which went to Sweden.

Christina, of age since 1644, wanted peace at almost any cost. When Oxenstierna sent his son to Osnabrück to argue against making peace with the emperor, she sent a delegate of her own, Johan Adler Salvius.

Johan Oxenstierna, Axel's son, represented Sweden at Osnabrück as his father's man, holding out for the larger demands his father favoured, while the queen wanted a quicker settlement.

Johan Adler Salvius, a commoner ennobled in 1629, had been Sweden's envoy to the peace talks since 1641. With the queen behind him he worked for compromise, and in 1648 she made him a member of the royal council over the objections of Oxenstierna.

Abel Servien, who had risen in Richelieu's service, was sent by Mazarin to conduct France's negotiations in Germany with the Count d'Avaux. After years of bargaining and a quarrel that ended in d'Avaux's recall, Servien signed the two French treaties of 24 October 1648.

Turenne, joining Wrangel, drove Maximilian into a truce in 1647; when Maximilian broke it, the two invaded Bavaria again in 1648 and won at Zusmarshausen.

With French and Swedish armies in Bavaria, Maximilian made a separate truce with France and Sweden at Ulm on 14 March 1647, without the emperor. The emperor then outbid them, and on 14 September Maximilian renounced the truce and returned to his side; a new invasion followed in 1648.

Johann von Werth held the Ulm truce a betrayal of the emperor and tried to lead the Bavarian army over to him. Only a few officers and units followed; Werth himself went into imperial service as a cavalry general.

Johann Philipp von Schönborn, prince-bishop of Würzburg since 1642, worked for peace through his envoy at the congress. That role helped win his election as Archbishop-Elector of Mainz in November 1647, which made him arch-chancellor of the Empire.

Franz Wilhelm von Wartenberg, Bishop of Osnabrück and a cousin of Maximilian, represented a block of Catholic bishoprics and abbeys at the congress and fought for their lands. He kept Osnabrück from being secularised, but had to accept that after his death its bishops would alternate between Catholics and Protestants of the house of Brunswick-Lüneburg.

Charles Louis, son of Frederick V, had inherited his father's claims in 1632. The peace gave him back the Lower Palatinate and a new, eighth electoral vote, while Maximilian kept the Upper Palatinate and the old Palatine vote. Charles Louis was still in England when the treaties were signed.

Charles Gustav, Christina's cousin, son of a Count Palatine and of Gustavus's sister, and Sweden's generalissimo in Germany, led the Swedish side at the congress in Nuremberg from April 1649 to July 1650, which settled the payments to the armies and their withdrawal. Christina named him her successor in 1649, and he became king when she abdicated in June 1654.

Ottavio Piccolomini, now an imperial field marshal, was the emperor's chief negotiator at Nuremberg opposite Charles Gustav. Their agreements paid off and withdrew the armies still quartered in the Empire.

Ferdinand III's eldest son, Ferdinand IV, crowned king of Bohemia in 1646 and of Hungary in 1647, was elected King of the Romans on 31 May 1653 to secure the next imperial succession. He died of smallpox on 9 July 1654.

Johann Weikhard von Auersperg had been Ferdinand IV's tutor and chief steward. Made a prince of the Empire in 1653 and given the Silesian duchy of Münsterberg in 1654, he became one of Ferdinand III's leading ministers, Trauttmansdorff having died in 1650, and stayed powerful into Leopold's reign.

Maximilian of Bavaria died in 1651. His widow Maria Anna, Ferdinand II's daughter, whom he had married in 1635, shared the regency for their son with his brother Albrecht, handling justice and finance until the boy came of age in 1654.

Ferdinand Maria became Elector of Bavaria at fourteen in 1651 and ruled for himself from 1654. Bavaria, plundered in the last campaigns of the war, now had to recover.

Ferdinand of Bavaria died in 1650, and his nephew Maximilian Henry, already his coadjutor, succeeded him as Elector of Cologne and Bishop of Liège and Hildesheim. He relied on the brothers Franz Egon and Wilhelm Egon von Fürstenberg, partisans of France in the Empire.

Sötern, freed in 1645, quarrelled with his cathedral chapter and named a coadjutor of his own. In 1650 the chapter's troops, led by Karl Kaspar von der Leyen, confined the old elector and made him accept a lawful election; Karl Kaspar was chosen coadjutor and became Elector of Trier on Sötern's death in 1652.

Augustus the Younger received the principality of Wolfenbüttel in the family settlement of 1635, but the war kept him out of his residence until 1644. After the peace his lands recovered quickly, and he built at Wolfenbüttel what was then the largest library north of the Alps.

Hermann Conring, professor at Helmstedt in the duke's lands, advised on the Wolfenbüttel library. His De origine iuris Germanici of 1643 disproved the legend that Emperor Lothar III had brought in Roman law by decree; from 1650 he held Helmstedt's chair of politics, and he was also physician to Queen Christina.

Andreas Gryphius, a poet who had grown up in Glogau as Habsburg officials re-Catholicised it, became the legal representative of the Glogau estates in 1650. In 1653 he published their collected privileges, printed at Leszno, to defend their rights under Habsburg rule.

Otto von Guericke had escaped Magdeburg's sack in 1631 and come back to help rebuild it; from 1646 he was one of its mayors, representing the city at Münster, Nuremberg and the diet at Regensburg. There in 1654 he demonstrated the vacuum and the pressure of the air before Ferdinand III and the princes.

Schönborn, Elector of Mainz, bought Guericke's apparatus and sent it to the Jesuit college at Würzburg. Caspar Schott, a Jesuit professor there, corresponded with Guericke and published his experiments in Mechanica hydraulico-pneumatica in 1657; that summer Guericke pulled apart evacuated copper hemispheres with teams of horses.

Leopold, Ferdinand III's younger son, became heir when Ferdinand IV died, and was crowned king of Hungary in 1655 and of Bohemia in 1656. His father died in April 1657, and Leopold waited fifteen months while Mazarin looked for a candidate outside the Habsburgs. On 18 July 1658 the electors chose him at Frankfurt, once he had promised not to help Spain against France.

John George I of Saxony died in October 1656. His son John George II inherited the electorate, while his three younger brothers held secondary Saxon duchies at Merseburg, Weissenfels and Zeitz. The new elector came to the long election of 1658 holding Saxony's vote.

Mazarin offered the young Elector of Bavaria the imperial candidacy in 1655, after Ferdinand IV's death. After long hesitation Ferdinand Maria turned it down, and in January 1658 he decided to back Leopold.

Schönborn, Elector of Mainz, wanted to keep the Empire out of the war France and Spain were still fighting. On 14 August 1658, a month after Leopold's election, he formed the League of the Rhine with Cologne, Neuburg, Brunswick-Lüneburg, Hesse-Kassel and Sweden for Bremen-Verden, and France joined. It was to guard the peace and hold the emperor to his promise.

Johann Christian von Boineburg, a Hessian nobleman, had become Schönborn's first minister in 1650 and turned Catholic in 1656. He was drawn into all the main negotiations of these years, Leopold's election among them.

Franz Egon von Fürstenberg, Maximilian Henry's companion since childhood, became Cologne's chief steward and first minister in 1650. With his brother Wilhelm Egon he served French interests in the Empire, and Cologne was among the League's founding members.

Karl Kaspar von der Leyen backed Leopold's election and, for Leopold's sake, declined to join the League of the Rhine in 1658; Trier joined only in 1662, under pressure from Louis XIV.

Charles X Gustav invaded Poland in 1655. When Denmark attacked him in 1657 he marched his army across the frozen Belts to Zealand and forced Frederick III to cede a third of his realm at Roskilde in 1658. That August he attacked again and laid siege to Copenhagen. He died in February 1660.

Frederick III, King of Denmark since 1648, had declared war on Sweden in 1657 and lost Scania and other provinces at Roskilde. When Charles Gustav renewed the war, Copenhagen held out under siege and threw back a storm on 11 February 1659. The Treaty of Copenhagen of 27 May 1660 returned Trøndelag and Bornholm to him.

John II Casimir, King of Poland since 1648, lost most of his kingdom to the Swedish invasion of 1655. Ferdinand III allied with him in 1656, and in September 1657 at Wehlau Poland bought Frederick William's support by recognising his full sovereignty over the Duchy of Prussia.

Frederick William of Brandenburg had first sided with Sweden, which recognised his sovereignty over Prussia in 1656. At Wehlau in 1657 he changed sides for Poland's recognition. The Peace of Oliva on 3 May 1660, signed by Leopold, John Casimir and Frederick William, confirmed it: an elector in the Empire, he was a sovereign duke outside it.

Raimondo Montecuccoli, an imperial general since the Thirty Years' War, led Habsburg troops to Poland's aid in 1657 and forced Rákóczi to make peace with Poland. Made field marshal in 1658 and sent to help Denmark, he joined the Brandenburg army, drove the Swedes from Jutland and Funen and attacked Swedish Pomerania.

Turenne commanded the royal army against Spain, on whose side Condé, now a rebel, was fighting. At the Battle of the Dunes near Dunkirk in June 1658, with English troops sent by Cromwell, Turenne beat the Spanish army, and the long war moved toward peace.

Condé had led the second Fronde against Mazarin's government and gone over to Spain. After the Peace of the Pyrenees of 7 November 1659 Louis XIV pardoned him and restored his titles.

The Peace of the Pyrenees ended the war between France and Spain that had begun in 1635. It arranged Louis XIV's marriage to the Spanish infanta Maria Theresa, who renounced her claim to the Spanish throne and entered France in June 1660.

George II Rákóczi, Prince of Transylvania since 1648, invaded Poland in January 1657 as Sweden's ally, without leave from the Ottoman sultan, Transylvania's overlord. The campaign collapsed, Poland's Tatar allies captured his army, and in November 1657 the Transylvanian diet deposed him at the Ottomans' command.

Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, grand vizier since September 1656, restored Ottoman authority by force and campaigned in Transylvania in 1658. Rákóczi, fighting to keep his throne, was mortally wounded at Gyalu in May 1660, and on 27 August the Ottomans took Várad, leaving Leopold a crisis on the Hungarian frontier.

Comenius, by now bishop of the exiled Brethren, worked at Sárospatak in Hungary from 1650 at the invitation of George I Rákóczi's widow. Back in Leszno he declared for Sweden in the war, and in 1656 Polish partisans burned his house, his manuscripts and the school's press. He found refuge in Amsterdam, where his collected educational writings, the Opera didactica omnia, were published; his picture book Orbis Pictus appeared in 1658.