History of Austria - Austria in The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648)

Austria in The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648)

When, in 1619, he was elected Emperor to succeed his cousin Mathias, the ultra-pious and intransigent Ferdinand II, as he became known, embarked on an energetic attempt to re-Catholicize not only the Hereditary Provinces, but Bohemia and Habsburg Hungary as well as most of Protestant Europe within the Holy Roman Empire. Outside his lands, his reputation for strong headed uncompromising intolerance had triggered the Thirty Years' War in May 1618 in the polarizing first phase, known as the Revolt in Bohemia. After several initial reverses, he became accommodating but as the Catholics turned things around and began to enjoy a long string of successes at arms he set forth the Edict of Restitution in 1629 vastly complicating the politics of settlement negotiations and prolonging the rest of the war; encouraged by the mid-war successes, he became even more forceful leading to infamies by his armies such as the Sack of Magdeburg.

His forced conversions or evictions carried out in the midst of the Thirty Years' War, which with the later general success of the Protestants therefore had greatly negative consequences for Habsburg control of the Holy Roman Empire itself, while these campaigns within the Habsburg hereditary lands were largely successful in religiously purifying his demesnes, leaving the Austrian Emperors thereafter with much greater control within their hereditary power base— although Hungary was never successfully re-Catholicized—but one much reduced in population and economic might while less vigorous and weakened as a nation-state.

In terms of human costs, the Thirty Years' wars many economic, social, and population dislocations caused by the hardline methods adopted by Ferdinand's strict counter-reformation measures and almost continual employment of mercenary field armies contributed significantly to the loss of life and tragic depopulation of all the German states, during a war which some estimates put the civilian loss of life as high as fifty-percent overall. Studies mostly cite the causes of death due to starvation or as caused (ultimately by the lack-of-food induced) weakening of resistance to endemic diseases which repeatedly reached epidemic proportions amongst the general Central European population—the German states were the battle ground and staging areas for the largest mercenary armies theretofore, and the armies foraged amongst the many provinces stealing the food of those people forced onto the roads as refugees, or still on the lands, regardless of their faith and allegiances. Both townsmen and farmers were repeatedly ravaged and victimized by the armies on both sides leaving little for the populations already stressed by the refugees from the war or fleeing the Catholic counter-reformation repressions under Ferdinand's governance.