Europe: A History (115 page)
One day in 1631, the Bavarian town of Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber was invested by the imperial army. According to tradition, General Tilly ordered that the town be put to the sack unless one of the citizens could drink up an enormous flagon of wine. Whereon the
Bürgermeister
, Heinrich Toppler, drained the flagon, saved the town, and fell down dead. His feat is commemorated in a play,
Der Meistertrunk
, which is performed to this day every Whit Monday in the Kaisersaal of the Rathaus.
The experience of one village must stand as an example of thousands of others. In January 1634 twenty Swedish soldiers rode into Linden in Franconia, demanding food and wine. They broke into one of the thirteen cottages, belonging to Georg Rosch, raped his wife, and took what they wanted. Shortly afterwards, they were ambushed by the villagers, stripped of their clothes, loot and horses. The next day, they returned with a constable, who arrested four men for assaulting the Swedes. He then made a report to General Horn, naming one of the soldiers, a Finn, as Frau Rosch’s rapist. What happened next is not clear; but shortly after the village was registered as uninhabited. Its inhabitants did not return to their prewar number until 1690.
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[HEXEN]
The French phase, 1635–48, began when France became the protector of the League of Heilbronn, whose remaining Calvinist members had been excluded from the Peace of Prague. Richelieu’s strategy now came into the open. France declared war on Spain, took the Swedes into its pay, and invaded Alsace. The war developed on three fronts, in the Netherlands, on the Rhine, and in Saxony. In 1636 the Spaniards advanced towards Paris, but pulled back when threatened from the flank. In 1637 the Emperor Ferdinand died, raising hopes for an eventual peace. From 1638, when Richelieu’s German allies presented him with the great fortress of Breisach on the Rhine, French fortunes were mounting. The arrival of the youthful Due d’Enghien, Prince de Condé (1621–86), gave them the finest general in Europe. His stunning victory at Rocroi in the Ardennes (1643) ended the Spanish military supremacy which had lasted since Pavia in 1525. From 1644 the diplomats were hard at work, shuttling between the Protestant delegates at Osnabrück and the Catholic delegates at Münster. Whilst they argued, the French and the Swedes ravaged Bavaria.
The Treaty of Westphalia, which was arranged simultaneously in its two parts, set the ground plan of the international order in central Europe for the next century and more. It registered both the ascendancy of France and the subordination of the Habsburgs to the German princes. On the religious issue, it ended the strife in Germany by granting the same rights to the Calvinists as to Catholics and Lutherans. It fixed 1624 as the date for ecclesiastical restitution; and it made provision for denominational changes except in the Upper Palatinate and in the hereditary lands of the House of Austria, which were reserved for the Catholic faith. On the constitutional issue, it greatly strengthened the Princes by granting them the right to sign foreign treaties and by making all imperial legislation conditional on the Diet’s approval. It proposed that both Bavaria and the Palatinate be made electorates. On the numerous territorial issues, it attempted to give
something to all the leading claimants. Switzerland and the United Provinces received their independence. The Dutch succeeded in their demand that the Scheldt be closed to traffic. France received a lion’s share—sovereignty over Metz, Toul, and Verdun; Pinerolo; the Sundgau in southern Alsace; Breisach; garrison rights in Philippsburg; the
Landvogtei
or ‘Advocacy’ often further Alsatian cities. Sweden received Bremen and Verden, and western Pomerania including Stettin. Bavaria took the Upper Palatinate; Saxony took Lusatia; Brandenburg took the greater part of eastern Pomerania up to the Polish frontier, the former bishoprics of Halberstadt, Minden, and Kammin, and the ‘candidacy’ of Magdeburg. Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Brunswick-Lüneburg, and Hesse-Kassel were each thrown a morsel. The final signatures were penned on 24 October 1648.
HEXEN
I
N
1635 Dr Benedikt Carpzov (1595–1666), professor at Leipzig and son and brother of Saxony’s most celebrated jurists, published his
Practica rerum criminalium
on the conduct of witch trials. Whilst admitting that torture exacted many false confessions, he advocated its use. ‘He would live to a ripe old age, and look back on a meritorious life in which he had read the Bible fifty-three times, taken the sacrament every week … and procured the death of 20,000 persons.’
1
He was a Protestant, and Europe’s leading witch-hunter. Nowadays, historians challenge the numbers.
A few years earlier Johann Julius, burgomaster of Bamberg in Franconia, lay in the town dungeon, condemned to death for attending a witches’ sabbath. He had been denounced by the Chancellor of the principality, who had already been burned for showing ‘suspicious leniency’ in witch trials. But he managed to smuggle out a detailed account of the proceedings to his daughter. ‘My dearest child … it is all falsehood and invention, so help me God … They never cease to torture until one says something … If God sends no means of bringing the truth to light, our whole kindred will be burnt.’
2
The Catholic Prince-Bishop of Bamberg, Johan Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim, possessed a purpose-built witch-house, complete with torture-chamber adorned with biblical texts. In his ten-year reign (1623–33) he is said to have burned 600 witches.
The European witch craze had reached one of its periodic peaks. In England, the Pendle Witches of Lancashire were brought to justice in 1612. In Poland, the record of a trial at Kalisz detailed the procedures in the self-same year:
Naked, shaved above and below, anointed with holy oil, suspended from the ceiling lest by touching the ground she summon the Devil to her aid, and bound hand and foot, ‘she was willing to say nothing except that she sometimes bathed sick people with herbs. Racked, she said she was innocent, God knows. Burned with candles, she said nothing, only that she was innocent. Lowered, she said that she was innocent to Almighty God in the Trinity. Repositioned, and again burned with candles, she said Ach! Ach! Ach! For God’s sake, she did go with Dorota and the miller’s wife … Thereafter the confessions agreed.’
3
In the countryside, villagers often took matters into their own hands. If a suspected witch drowned when submerged in a pond on the ‘ducking-stool’, she was obviously innocent. If she floated, she was guilty.
Many learned treatises were written on the black arts of witchcraft. They included Jean Bodin’s
De la démonomanie des sorciers
(1580), the
Daemonolatreia
(1595) of Nicholas Rémy in Lorraine, the massive encyclopaedia of Martin del Rio SJ published at Louvain in 1600, and King James’s
Demonologie
(1597) in Scotland. They discussed the mechanics of night-flying on broomsticks, the nature and effect of spells and curses, the menu of witches’ cauldrons, and, above all, the sexual orgies organized at witches’ sabbaths. The Devil was said to appear either as a bearded black man, or as a ‘stinking goat’, who liked to be kissed under the tail, or as a toad. He could be an incubus for the benefit of she-witches, or a succubus for the benefit of he-witches. He sometimes summoned his faithful fifth column to crowded general assemblies in notorious locations such as the Blakulla Meadow in Sweden, the summit of the Blocksberg in the Harz, or to the Aquelarre at La Hendaye in Navarre.
The witch craze poses many problems. Historians have to explain why the age of the Renaissance and the Reformation proved so much more vicious in this regard than the so-called Dark Ages, why superstition came to a head when humanism and the scientific revolution were supposedly working in the opposite direction. They usually attribute it to the pathological effects of religious conflict. They must also explain why certain countries and regions, notably Germany and the Alps, were specially susceptible, and why the most ardent witch-hunters, such as King James VI and I, were among the most learned and, at the conscious level, the most Christian men of their day. And there is an important comparative aspect: the collective hysteria and false denunciations of witch-hunting have much in common with the phenomena of Jew-baiting and of the Communist purges.
[DEVIATIO] [HARVEST] [POGROM]
From the papal bull of 1484 to its decline in the eighteenth century, the craze persisted intermittently for 300 years, consuming vast numbers of innocents. Signs of critical protest first emerged among the Jesuits of Bavaria, where persecutions had been especially fanatical, notably with Friedrich Spee’s
Cautio criminalis
(1631). Europe’s last witch-burnings took place in Scotland in 1722, in Switzerland and Spain in 1782, and in Prussian-occupied Poznań in 1793. By that time, they were all illegal. The last of the Lancashire Witches, Mary Nutter, died naturally in 1828.
The end came slowly. In Prague, where the war had begun, they were still fighting. Monks, students, and townsmen were manning the Charles Bridge against an expected Swedish assault. But then, with nine days’ delay, news of the Peace arrived. ‘The clanging of church bells drowned the last thunders of the cannon’.
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But the troops did not go home. A second congress had to be held at Nuremburg in 1650 to settle the indemnities claimed by the armies. The Spaniards kept their garrison at Frankenthal in the Palatinate until 1653, when the Emperor offered them Besançon in exchange. The last Swedish soldiers did not depart until 1654. Delegates at Westphalia had already started calling it ‘the Thirty Years War’. In fact, since the first act of violence at Donauworth, it had taken up forty-seven years.
The Pope, Innocent X, was outraged. A lifelong foe of Cardinal Mazarin, who had attempted to veto his election, he was offended by the concessions made to France and to the Protestants; and he ordered the nuncio at Münster to denounce the settlement. In his brief
Zelus domus Dei
(1650), he described the Treaty as ‘null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, and devoid of meaning for all time’. Behind his anger lay the realization that hopes for a united Christendom had been dashed for ever. After Westphalia, people who could no longer bear to talk of ‘Christendom’ began to talk instead of ‘Europe’.
Germany lay desolate. The population had fallen from 21 million to perhaps 13 million. Between a third and a half of the people were dead. Whole cities, like Magdeburg, stood in ruins. Whole districts lay stripped of their inhabitants, their livestock, their supplies. Trade had virtually ceased. A whole generation of pillage, famine, disease, and social disruption had wreaked such havoc that in the end the princes were forced to reinstate serfdom, to curtail municipal liberties, and to nullify the progress of a century. The manly exploits of Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Croat, Flemish, and French soldiers had changed the racial composition of the people. German culture was so traumatized that art and literature passed entirely under the spell of foreign, especially French, fashions.
Germany’s strategic position was greatly weakened. The French now held the middle Rhine. The mouths of Germany’s three great rivers—Rhine, Elbe, and Oder—were held respectively by the Dutch, the Danes, and the Swedes. The common interest of the Empire was subject to the separate interests of the larger German states: Austria, Bavaria, Saxony, and Brandenburg-Prussia. Destitution was accompanied by humiliation. Some historians have seen it as the soil of despair which alone can have fed the seeds of virulent German pride that sprouted from the recovery of a later age. Austria, which had begun the period as the wonder of the age, was reduced to being just one German state among many.
In the years after 1648, however, Germany was not alone in its misery. Spain was struggling with the revolts of Portugal and Catalonia, whilst still at war with France. England was in the after-shock of Civil War. France was rocked by the Fronde. Poland-Lithuania was torn apart by the Cossack revolt, the Swedish ‘Deluge’, and the Russian wars. This concatenation of catastrophes has led to the
supposition of a general ‘seventeenth-century crisis’. Those who believe in the existence of an all-European feudal system tend to argue in favour of an all-European socio-political revolution caused by the growing pains of all-European capitalism. Some argue in contrast in favour of ‘a crisis of the modern state’, where the peripheries reacted violently against the rising demands of the centre. Others suspect that it may all have been a coincidence.
Rome, 19 February 1667
. Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), the papal architect, submitted his designs for the third and last section of the great colonnade that was nearing completion round the square of St Peter’s. He proposed that this
terzo braccio
or third arm of the colonnade should take the form of a detached
propylaeum
or ‘gateway’ with nine bays surmounted by a clock-tower. It was to be positioned at the entrance to the square directly opposite the centrepoint of St Peter’s façade (see Map 17, p. 570).
In the
giustificazione
or ‘argument of proposal’ which accompanied the original plans a dozen years before, Bernini had explained the design and symbolism of St Peter’s Square. The Square was to provide an approachway to the church, a meeting-place for crowds receiving the papal benedictions, and a boundary to the holy space. The colonnade was to be permeable, with more gaps than columns, thereby facilitating the circulation of pedestrians and avoiding the sense of a physical barrier. It was to be covered by a continuous pediment, giving protection to processions in inclement weather; and it was to be graced above the pediment by a ring of statues, illustrating the communion of saints. Its two semicircular arms, which were projected beyond the straight sides of the immediate cathedral forecourt, were specifically likened by Bernini to ‘the enfolding arms of Mother Church’, offering comfort to all humanity. The proposed propylaeum was to have taken the place of hands clasped in prayer, joining the extremities of the Church’s outstretched arms.
