MacCulloch, Reformation, 485-501.

Identify: Wittelsbachs, Ferdinand II, Friedrich V, George Abbot, Christian of Anhalt, Rosicrucian tracts, Letter of Majesty, defenestration of Prague, Edict of Restitution, Gustavus Adlophus (Gustav Adolf), Magdeburg, Cardinal Richelieu.

The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) was a major event in European history. For perhaps a century historians have argued about its impact (how destructive was it?) and its nature (was it a religious war?). Syntheses and specialized studies on the Reformation rarely address the war usually because, for textbooks at least, the Reformation is over by 1600.

MacCulloch's chapter is relatively brief. Do you think it flows naturally from what he has already written? He obviously interprets the Thirty Years War as a religious conflict. In the first paragraph, he identifies it as the "Catholic struggle to hold the line against Protestantism," which "brought thirty years of misery to millions of Europeans" (485). While he does not entirely dismiss the theory that the war was a dynastic struggle between Habsburgs and Wittelsbachs--and as far as I know, this theory is not a prevalent one in the current literature on the conflict--he makes it abundantly clear that "religion, religious zeal and religious hatred were at the heart of the outbreak of war in 1618, and both sides believed that they could effectively eliminate those who took a different view of the Christian message" (487). Towards the end of the chapter he reiterates: "This account of the Thirty Years War has highlighted its character as conflict of two religious confessions. That is how it began, and much of its atrocious course had a bitterly confessional character" (498).

Yet MacCulloch admits the possibility of "alternative, less mythically dramatic forces in the conflict" (499). Note the relevance of "practicality and considerations of statecraft" (499). Perhaps MacCulloch inserts where he does a chapter on the Thirty Years War to signal the end of the Reformation. If it was the result of religious hatred, the pursuit of confessional animosity may not have been its natural result if Europe began to embrace the principle that "religion and politics need not be identical" (500).