Transcription
Hello, welcome back to our lecture series for Western Civilization 102. We last discussed the topic of absolutism in Europe in, uh, the 17th century, thereabouts. Our title for our series of lectures is upcoming, "Absolutism and the Enlightenment." But I have to mention, just when we thought, when we thought that maybe religious warfare was over, that everyone had learned to get along, it doesn't happen. There is a period of peace, but we end up with a major religious war that breaks out in Europe in 1618, and that will last for 30 years. Hence the title of this lecture, "The 30 Years' War."
This was the last of the religious wars in Europe that take place, but it's not the end of warfare, obviously not the end of warfare, but the end of warfare at this magnitude based on religion. And we see that with the 30 Years' War, and we'll learn about in Dr. Price's lecture. The 30 Years' War, um, had a series of phases. Yes, it starts off with religious Protestants and Catholics, but it eventually evolves into a dynastic struggle. When I say dynastic struggle, I mean, you've heard about the Habsburgs. I, I refer to Charles V because he's been brought up in a lot of previous lectures. Charles V is the Holy, was the Holy Roman Emperor before he retires. You know, his son, Philip, the King of Spain, we've heard those names mentioned quite a lot. Well, he is of the Habsburg Dynasty, which is like the family. And then we'll have the Habsburgs versus the Bourbons. Bourbons, of course, being the prominent family now on the throne in France. At first, France was not involved in this war. They eventually become involved, as will other countries in Europe.
So, basically, the 30 Years' War starts within the Holy Roman Empire in an area known as Bohemia. It is one of the little states. We've discussed in the past how the Holy Roman Emperor, Empire, is a collection of states. They have a collection of princes that will elect these princes, or electors, and they will elect the Holy Roman Emperor. Well, Bohemia was one of those states, and the Holy Roman Emperor at the time was Catholic in nature, but the Bohemians were Protestant. And there will be issues, and they will have problems together. We see Calvinism playing a huge role in this, not as much as Lutheranism in the past, but Calvinism seems to be the prominent form of Protestantism that plays a role here in these religious wars that are taking place. Um, you know, Ferdinand, who is now the Holy Roman Emperor, his name is Ferdinand. The Calvinists there in Bohemia did not like him. They did not trust him. He, uh, he was very unpopular by these Bohemian Calvinists, and Ferdinand didn't like them either. There was no love lost between Ferdinand, the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor, and these, um, Calvinists, these Protestants in Bohemia. And of course, this will eventually lead into warfare.
There was a story that, um, that Dr. Price will talk about. I really don't want to say it now. It's, it's very cute, but it involves people being thrown out of a window from a very high place and how they survive. I'll let you find out more about that with Dr. Price's lecture. It's always a great story for the beginning of the 30 Years' War lecture because you, you fall out, you're thrown out of a window, very high, you think you die, but according to the story, these men did not. It's interesting how they survived.
So, the first phase of the 30 Years' War that you'll learn about was, you know, more of a religious struggle, um, with Bohemia, but it eventually evolves into more countries in Europe getting involved. We have the Danish phase. The King of Denmark, who is Protestant, his name is Christian. He will get involved on the side of the Protestants. Denmark is at the very top of the European continent. I always look at it as it's sticking straight up from Europe, that would be Denmark, part of Scandinavia as a whole. Scandinavia is Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. So, he will get involved as well. He was Lutheran. He was a Lutheran Protestant. And we eventually have a Swedish phase where the King of Sweden gets involved in the fighting. His name was Gustavus Adolphus, and he is also Protestant as well, another Lutheran. And then, of course, we'll get into the dynastic struggle phase where France, Cardinal Richelieu, you've heard that name before, Cardinal Richelieu will get involved and help propel France into fighting on the Protestant side and in the 30 Years' War.
Um, we're going to see from Dr. Price's lecture that there will be a lot of mercenaries used, and the peasants of the Holy Roman Emperor, Empire, are simply devastated. Their lands are destroyed with all of these armies and these mercenaries marching. I mean, think 30 years of going through this, and it totally devastated this region. France comes out of this pretty good, you know, as well, but there were long-term consequences for the 30 Years' War that Dr. Price will discuss more in depth in his lecture. Um, but just a few of them: France was, was temporarily stronger, but Spain, who had also got involved in this fighting, will be weakened because when you fight war, it costs money. It costs a lot of money, and sometimes these countries could not afford it, and that's not a good thing.
Um, we also have a change that will come about as a result of the 30 Years' War in the way that Europe will fight in the future. They found that the, the fighting here for religious reasons, there's no end. Um, you're not fighting for a piece of land to where you have well-disciplined armies that go in and they capture the land and the war is over and you make a peace treaty. You know, these religious warfares could be, these religious wars could be extremely destructive, as is, you know, Europeans found out. And so we're going to usher in a new style of warfare, um, that we'll, we'll see in future lectures, and it's because of these religious wars that have taken place that we've discussed quite a lot of in our previous lectures. So let's find out a little bit more about the 30 Years' War.
Today, I want to talk about the 30 Years' War, which took place in the first couple of decades of the 17th century. But before I talk about that, I want to take a little bit of time to talk about something that historians call the General Crisis of the 17th Century, because it's this General Crisis that's going to cause a series of civil wars and other kinds of wars throughout Europe for nearly the first half of the 17th century. The troubles can be identified, the reasons for this General Crisis in Europe can be identified in three categories. Now, the first one, we've already talked about almost too much in this course, you might think by now, and that's religion. Uh, the wars between Protestants and Catholics had died down virtually everywhere in Europe by about 1600. The worst of these wars were really in the mid-1500s, and, and wars of religion had sort of calmed down by about 1600, but they would, they would flare up again, uh, in, in, um, in the, in the early part of the, of the 1600s. Now, uh, they would usually be between Protestants and Catholics, but in the case of England, and I believe Dr. Robison is going to talk about this a bit later, between Protestants and Protestants, between Anglicans and Calvinists in England, uh, in the early 17th century, there would be pro-religious warfare that would crop up, especially in Germany and England.
The second problem is really a constitutional problem, and it is the fact that many European states in this period are beginning to make a relatively painful transition to absolutism. Now, the, the chief, uh, uh, the, the chief, the chief stimulus to try to keep absolutism away is the nobility. The nobility will resist absolutism, and so will, in some cases, the middle class, and this will cause frictions and problems. Some of these problems are going to be what we might call constitutional problems.
Now, the third of these, of these problems, is something a little bit new. Europe in the 17th century was undergoing a profound economic crisis, a profound economic crisis, and this crisis is really comprised of two parts. The first is a demographic price crisis, literally a population problem. You may remember that much of Europe's population had been wiped out, at least a third, in the 1300s by the, by the plague, the Black Death, uh, and starting in the mid-15th century, Europe's population began to grow again. And as the population grew, and as more food was produced in Europe, larger surpluses, the population of Europe literally exploded between about 1500 and 1600. Um, they're roughly 50 million people in Europe around 1450, roughly 50 million, and by 1600, there were some 90 million people. So what this means is essentially the population of Europe between 1450 and 1600 almost doubles. Well, uh, there weren't any real advances in agriculture during this period. The, Europe's food supply remained more or less constant. So the demand for necessities increased as the population increased. So did food prices. So the cost of living during the period from about 1500 to 1600 literally skyrocketed. Population trends would force the cost of living for the average European to go up considerably during that century.
But wait, there's more. Population trends explain a lot, but they don't complete the picture. Europe's population growth slowed after about 1550, but prices continued to rise. And the period from 1550 to about the middle of the 1600s is often called by economic historians the Price Revolution. Prices rose because, uh, from 1560 to about 1600, the Spanish exported vast quantities of gold and silver from Mexico and Peru, from the New World, every year. From 1560 on, the Spanish treasure fleet left the New World with an enormous, vast horde of of gold and silver and carried it to Spain. Let me give you some kind of idea about what we're talking about here. In the five years between 1556 and 1560, 1556 and 1560, roughly 10 million ducats worth of silver, silver alone, entered Spain from the New World. Between 1576 and 1580, a four-year period, that figure doubled to over 20 million ducats. Between 1591 and 1595, that figure quadrupled. Well, first question you might want to ask is, what's a ducat? A ducat is a coin, a silver coin. It's kind of difficult to assess its value, but I'll give you some kind of idea. In 1543, the wealthiest man in Europe was worth about 200,000 ducats. The wealthiest man in Europe was worth about 200,000 ducats. Uh, you, in 1550, you could travel from Rome to the Holy Land with a dozen or so servants and guards in great comfort for about 150 ducats. We might say the real value of a ducat is about two thousand dollars. And vast quantities of go, then, and of course, this is just silver. We're talking about gold was coming in at the same time.
So enormous amounts of wealth are pouring into Europe, into Spain from the New World, and from Spain, there's not a whole lot to spend the money on. So that money was spent all over Europe to buy foreign luxury goods for the Spanish aristocrats, the Spanish nobility, and the Spanish Crown. Merchants in countries like the Netherlands and Belgium, like France, and even Germany became incredibly wealthy, or at least acquired a great deal of this gold and silver from Spain. This dramatic increase in the amount of specie, that is gold and silver coins, in Europe caused prices to spiral out of control, caused enormous inflation. Rising prices, aggressive merchants and manufacturers and landlords profited the most from this influx of currency. Merchants sold goods at very high prices. Manufacturers made and sold goods, and landlords took advantage of the very high food prices to take in a fair amount of money. But other people, especially laborers, uh, and both in the countryside and in the towns and cities, suddenly found that even though their wages were rising, the value of those wages was falling. And, and, and suddenly there was an, an enormous amount of poverty in Europe as a result of this price revolution, as a result of this, this inflation.
Now, poor people had to spend more and more and more of their low incomes just in order to survive, in order to buy the necessities of life. In normal years, they could all they could only barely alive, and as prices went up and up and up, their survival became even more precarious. Some, in fact, would literally starve to death. But it wasn't just the poor who were caught in this squeeze, this money squeeze. Merchants and landlords made out quite well, but everything became more and more expensive. Members of the nobility suddenly found that they didn't have enough resources, enough money, and, and, and members of the church found themselves in dire straits, and so they had to borrow money just to keep up with expenses.
In addition to these direct economic effects, the inflation of the later 16th century had significant political effects as well. As the value of money decreased, governments were caught in the squeeze. In order to function, they had to raise higher and higher taxes in order to meet the needs of the government. And in short, rulers having to increase their taxes began to face increasingly more and more resistance from the people who had to pay those taxes. As we shall see, this is a period of very heavy warfare, which of course was even more expensive, increased the expenses of running a government, running a state. The only recourse was for European rulers to squeeze their subjects for every penny they could get out of them, and this caused more pain, more suffering, more resentment, more anger, and made it more difficult for those governments to rule. Governments faced increasing defiance and indeed often armed resistance as a result.
Now, a series of crises caused by all these problems I talked about just now, constitutional issues, religious issues, economic issues, a series of crises rocked Europe from the beginning of the 1600s, or early in the 1600s, all the way until around 1660 or so, uh, chiefly again as a result of these various problems. Now, the most destructive of these took place, uh, in Germany, but at various times during this period, there would be wars and civil wars, rebellions in Germany, France, England, and Spain, and in Holland as well, against the Spanish. The one we're going to look at today takes place in the Holy Roman Empire. It takes place in Germany, and it is called the 30 Years' War because it goes from 1618 to 1648. It literally goes for 30 years, and its causes, you should probably write down, are are primarily religious and constitutional. That is, it has to do with problems in the way governments are designed, not only in the Holy Roman Empire, but as we're going to see in the Habsburg monarchy as well.
And I have to say that the origins of this war are really confusing, very difficult to understand. The struggle began not in Germany, but in a principality in the Habsburg Empire called Bohemia. Now, Bohemia is in the modern-day Czech Republic. The capital city of Bohemia is Prague, which is the capital of the Czech Republic today. In 1600, Bohemia was mostly Catholic, probably about 60% Catholic, but it had a fairly large Calvinist minority. Uh, and, and the split was about the same between the nobility too. The majority of, uh, of Bohemian noblemen were Catholic, but there was a fairly small, a fair-sized Calvinist minority as well. Now, Bohemia was a possession of the Habsburg family, and the Habsburg monarch ruled Bohemia as a sovereign ruler. Remember, we talked about sovereign rulers last time, a sovereign ruler of Bohemia, the king of Bohemia. Now, um, the, the Bohemians also had their Estates, they had their parliamentary system, and, um, in 1609, the Habsburg Emperor named Rudolph II granted the Bohemian Estates what was called the Letter of Majesty. The Letter of Majesty guaranteed freedom of worship and political rights to the Bohemian Calvinists, to the Bohemian Protestants. They were allowed to hold offices, they were allowed to sit in the Estates, they were allowed to worship according to their consciences.
Well, in 1617, uh, uh, Rudolph II died, and a new Habsburg ruler, a new member of the Habsburg family came to the throne, and his his name was Ferdinand II. We talked first about Rudolph II, now Ferdinand II. Uh, Ferdinand had been educated by Jesuits. He was a staunch Catholic, and he wanted to impose religious uniformity on his Habsburg lands. The, uh, this made him, of course, highly unpopular with his Protestant subjects. The Calvinists distrusted and disliked Ferdinand, and to make matters worse, Ferdinand distrusted and disliked them as well. Using his power as the King of Bohemia, Ferdinand II declared that he would not honor certain provisions of the Letter of Majesty. He declared that from now on, all of the senior positions in Bohemia, ruling positions, had to be held by Catholics, and that certain Catholic Church lands that the Protestants had acquired from Rudolph II had to be returned to the Catholic Church. Some of, some of them already had Calvinist churches built on them, and he also declared that henceforth, some Calvinists would not be able to serve in the Estates of Bohemia anymore.
Well, needless to say, the Calvinists of Bohemia were infuriated. And to make matters worse, an awful lot of Catholics were as well. An awful lot of Bohemian Catholics, they had gotten along well with their Calvinist neighbors, and they didn't like the idea of these Calvinists, who were their friends and neighbors, being excluded from public office and excluded from service to the Bohemian state. The Calvinists, both the Calvinists and many Catholics, became very angry at at Ferdinand.
In 1618, Ferdinand sent a group of agents to the Bohemian Estates in Prague, to a meeting of the Bohemian Parliament, if you will, in Prague. And these folks had been sent, these agents had been sent to demand that the Calvinists be removed from the Estates and to demand that the Calvinists give up their church, their their lands that they had acquired back to the Catholic Church, their church lands back to the Catholic Church. Well, some angry Calvinist members of the Estates grabbed the agents, dragged them up to a third-story window, and threw them out the window. This is called the Defenestration of Prague, by the way. Defenestration is a fancy word that means executing somebody by throwing them out of a window. The Defenestration of Prague, um, pretty neat word that. If those who were thrown out the window, the agents of Ferdinand, fell three stories, should have been to their death, and two stories crop up here. When they, when they returned to talk to Ferdinand to tell him what had happened, he said, "Well, why didn't you die? You fell 90 feet onto the cobblestones. Why didn't you die?" And the, the, uh, the Catholic agent said, "Well, we fell in a big cart load of, well, wait a minute, no angels came and picked us up and saved our lives." Now, uh, what appears to actually have been the case, and what the Protestants said, is someone had left a cart, a huge cart full of horse manure under the window, so they essentially their lives were saved because they fell into a cart load of horse stuff. Um, I report, you decide.
Now, anyway, the Estates then declared that Ferdinand was no longer their king. They declared that Ferdinand was no longer their king, and they asked, invited, I guess I should say, a Protestant Calvinist German prince by the name of Frederick, the Elector of the Palatinate, to come to Bohemia and be coronated as their king. Frederick, the Elector of the Palatinate, Frederick accepted. He headed for Bohemia. He was duly installed as the new king. Ferdinand, of course, was absolutely outraged. He had lost his territories to this usurper, Frederick. So, so the crisis, that's the crisis in a nutshell, and it begins in Bohemia. It begins as a religious struggle, and when Frederick moves to take the crown from Ferdinand, it becomes a constitutional struggle as well. So the first phase of the 30 Years' War begins as a constitutional and religious struggle in the lands of the Habsburgs. The first phase is called the Bohemian phase. Bohemia revolted against Ferdinand, and soon found willing allies among the Protestants in the East, Silesia, Moravia, even some Austrians joined in to fight with Ferdinand, the Habsburg monarch, for the Bohemian cause. Ferdinand, for his part, fearing the growth of rebellion, was compelled to call on his nephew, King Philip IV of Spain, for assistance. So now Spain becomes involved in this struggle. In response to Ferdinand's reliance on Spanish support, the leader of the Hungarian Protestants, a fellow by the name of Bethlen Gabor, made an alliance with the Ottoman Turks to support, get this, the Protestant cause in the Habsburg Empire. At one point, it appeared that the Turkish Sultan, the king of the of the Ottoman Turks, might make, uh, 600,000 troops available to the Protestants, so that fell through. But what we're beginning to see is a little struggle, a little argument in the Habsburg Empire is now growing almost into a world war.
In 1619, Ferdinand, the Habsburg Emperor, was elected by the German princes to be the Holy Roman Emperor. So now, not only is he the Habsburg monarch, but he's also the Holy Roman Emperor, the ruler of the German states. Uh, at this point, Ferdinand had vastly more power, and he decided that he wasn't going to get pushed around by a bunch of Calvinists. He decided not only would he go to war with the Bohemians, but he would go to war with Frederick's state in Germany as well. Well, he needed support from his German subjects, and the German Catholics rallied around Frederick as soon as the German Catholics decide to ally with Frederick in his war against, I'm sorry, Ferdinand, they rally around Ferdinand. As soon as they rally around Ferdinand, Frederick is fearful, and, and the, and the Protestant princes in Germany become fearful as well, and so they joined Frederick. And now you have a war that stretches from Austria through Germany, Catholics on the one side led by Ferdinand II, and Protestants on the other led by Frederick of the Palatinate. What a mess.
Um, by 1625, the Catholics had won. Ferdinand had had decisive victories in Bohemia. He had forced the Bohemians to surrender. He had chased Frederick off of his lands in Germany, and it looked as if, for the most part, the war was over. The Catholics had won. And then in that year, 1625, King Christian of Denmark joins the war on the Protestant side. Christian of Denmark was a Lutheran. He was deeply worried about the Protestant cause in Germany. I mean, Denmark, after all, is right next door, and he was also deeply worried about the power of Ferdinand. He worried that if Ferdinand were successful in Germany, if he defeated the Protestants in Germany, then he may expand the war, and the first likely target would be Denmark. So Christian, Christian of Denmark enters the war on the Protestant side. Um, on May 9, 1625, May 9, 1625, Christian enters the war with about 25,000 Danish troops. Initially, Christian's army was successful. It helped the Protestant princes, it gave him an advantage, but by 1628, the Catholics had defeated Christian, had redefeated the German Protestant military, and it looked as if, uh, the, the, uh, the German Catholics were going to win again. In fact, in 1629, Christian of Denmark pulls out of the war and goes home to Denmark.
This might have been the first opportunity of a Holy Roman Emperor to impose Catholicism on his Protestant princes since Charles V, but it wasn't going to work out that way. By the end of 1629, Ferdinand's armies had conquered virtually all of Germany, and in that year, or at the beginning of 1630, a new country entered the war on the side of the Protestants, and that country was Sweden, and the King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, invaded Germany on the Lutheran, on the, on the Protestant side. Um, Gustavus Adolphus was a Lutheran as well, fearful of a Protestant defeat in Germany, and he enters the war on the Protestant side. Now, there's a big difference between Gustavus Adolphus, the Swedish King, and Christian of Denmark. There are a couple of differences, actually. The first one is that unlike Christian, Gustavus Adolphus is a military genius. He is the most capable commander of the 17th century, and so having him enter the war on the Protestant side gives them an enormous advantage. But there's a second part to this, too. Gustavus Adolphus's army is the best trained, most up-to-date model army in Europe in the 16th, the early 1600s. So Gustavus Adolphus, a genius himself when it comes to military matters, enters the war and brings the best army in Europe with him.
Now, when he comes, when he invades Germany, he invades with about 50,000 men, but as we're going to see, that number would grow over time. And the chief reason it would grow is because when Gustavus Adolphus enters the war, he enters with one of the most unlikely allies I can possibly imagine. Gustavus Adolphus is supported by Cardinal Richelieu of France. Let's think about this. Gustavus Adolphus is a Lutheran. He enters the war on the Protestant side with the aid and support of a Roman Catholic cardinal, Cardinal Richelieu of France. Now, I can't think of anything that's much more unlikely than that. Well, remember though, the Cardinal is French, and one of the things I talked about it last time that he wants to do is make France a great figure on the political stage of Europe, and one way he can do that is by hurting the Habsburg monarch, who also is Ferdinand, the Holy Roman Emperor. So Richelieu comes in on the Protestant side for political reasons. He wants to prolong the war, and he wants to punish Ferdinand II. Wow. Using French money, Gustavus Adolphus expands his army by an additional 150,000 mercenaries. Protestants from Germany and Scotland and England join the Protestant cause for pay. Gustavus defeated the Catholics in two major battles. The first one is called Breitenfeld, which took place in September of 1631. The second one is called the Battle of Lützen, which took place in November of 1632. At this point, the tables are turned. The Protestants are winning, and the Catholics are in retreat. Gustavus Adolphus has turned the tables, has put the Protestants in control, but that won't last very long. At the Battle of Lützen, Gustavus Adolphus is killed, and there are no commanders, no able commanders on the Protestant side that can take his place.
Well, we're almost through here. The war itself becomes a series of indecisive battles, and it simply goes on and on and on from 1635 to 1648 with ever increasing destruction, ever increasing chaos and slaughter. Between 1635 and 1638, a number of other countries sort of enter the war on one side or the other, and as a result, the carnage in Germany is simply prolonged, simply made worse and worse. Ironically, the last battle of the 30 Years' War is fought in Prague, in fact, in the very city where the defenestration took place, in the very city, we might say, where the war began, right where the trouble started back in 1617. The 30 Years' War finally ended in May of 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia. The Peace of Westphalia, which in many ways simply put everything back to the way it was before the war. The only real change that took place in terms of the government of the Holy Roman Empire was now you could be a prince, could be a Catholic or a Lutheran or a Calvinist, but basically that's the only difference after the Peace of, we might say, Westphalia.
Well, the 30 Years' War turned out to be enormously destructive for Germany. Some scholars guess that more than 30% of the population of Germany was killed in this war, which means the war itself is as devastating as the Black Plague, at least for the Holy Roman Empire, at least for Germany. Uh, the population was, was not only killed in battle, but was also killed by out-of-control bands of mercenaries who wandered around after they had been cashiered, after they had been paid, on their way home. They would live off the land, raping, pillaging, burning as they wandered through Germany on their way to their home country. Disease that the soldiers carried caused a great many fatalities. Some scholars argue that Germany will not recover economically from this war for 300 years, essentially until the middle of the 19th century.
Well, how about long-term political consequences of the war? A little more difficult to figure out, but here are a few that are worth thinking about. First, the Holy Roman Empire lost even more centralization. The Holy Roman Emperor himself was, his position as ruler of Germany was weakened considerably by all of this warfare. Even though he won the war, essentially, if anybody can be said to have won it, the various princes of the Empire, whether, whether Catholic or Protestant, gained even greater independence from the Holy Roman Emperor. The Peace of Westphalia limited the power of the Holy Roman Empire and further decentralized the Roman, the German state. That's the first part. The second part, both France and Spain would fight a costly war as part of the 30 Years' War, a Franco-Spanish war, and even though France wins this war, uh, and is temporarily a little stronger, France will be poor. Spain will be weakened to the point where it's simply no longer a great power in Europe. It had been the great power in Europe in the early 1500s, and as a result of the, the 30 Years' War and the Franco-Spanish war, Spain will simply cease to be a great power in European, um, in the European theater. A Spain weakened by wars in Germany and France no longer had sufficient military power to control the Low Countries, Belgium and Holland, and as a result, in 1648, Holland will gain her independence from Spain and form the Dutch Republic, an independent Dutch Republic made out of lands taken away from the Spanish. Similarly, in 1640, Portugal will be able to break away from Spain and become an independent monarchy as well.
As a result of Sweden's involvement in the 30 Years' War, Sweden emerges as the great military and police and a great power political power in Europe for the next century or so. Or so, Sweden will become one of the leaders in terms of European power for nearly a century. Now, the 30 Years' War marks the last major religious war on the European continent. The last major religious war on the European continent. It marks the end of large-scale religious bloodshed that had accompanied the Reformation, that had been going on for nearly 150 years, that had begun over a century before. There were other religious conflicts in the years to come, but no really great wars involving several nations. The destruction caused by mercenary soldiers in this war was awful, truly dreadful, and the war did a great deal to end the age of mercenaries that had begun in the late 15th century. The war ushered in a new age in which monarchs developed their own well-trained, well-disciplined national armies, where they conscripted, or at least took volunteers from their own nation, and, and, and merged them into large national armies, and so that becomes a new feature of European military activity in the, in the period after the 30 Years' War, the growth of national armies under the king.
Yeah, as I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture, the 30 Years' War was not the only struggle in Europe that was caused by the various contributing factors to the period that some historians call the Iron Century. Professor, Professor Robeson will talk next time, I believe, about other struggles that would break out in Spain and France, in England. That's funny, the story about the beginning of the 30 Years' War depends on if you were a Protestant or a Catholic. The, the people either were saved by angels, or they were saved when they hit the pile of manure that they fell into. I guess I would take either one as long as it saved me. That's just a cute story. So that was interesting to learn about this last major, here, religious war that takes place during this time. When we come back, I hate to tell you this, but we will talk a little bit more about warfare. One of the topics that will be discussed in our next lecture deals with the English Civil War. England, of course, fighting amongst themselves, very interesting, actually. And we'll also discuss some of the events that are occurring in France as well. Those are just a few of the topics that you'll find out and learn about during our next lecture. Until next time.