By LIGIA OSORIO SILVA*

Unpublished text by the recently deceased sociologist

On May 23, 1618, Protestant nobles stormed Prague Castle. They demanded religious freedom from the representatives of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor – Matthias had restricted the rights of Protestants. After a heated argument, the nobles from Bohemia, the present-day Czech Republic, threw the emperor’s supporters out of the window. Luckily, they survived the fall into the castle moat.

The Habsburg Emperor Matthias saw this act of insurgency, which went down in history as the Defenestration of Prague, as a declaration of war and decided to put down the Protestant rebellion in its infancy. This was the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, which would involve almost all of Central Europe. For Germany, the conflict became a trauma.

“This war undoubtedly left much deeper scars on Germany than any subsequent war, except perhaps the two great world wars of the 20th century,” says political scientist Herfried Münkler of Humboldt University.

An explosive combination of factors caused the conflict in Bohemia to turn into a widespread and uncontrolled fire. While a prolonged cold snap destroyed crops, a doomsday mood, fueled by superstition, spread through the population. Sectarian issues made the situation even worse: about a hundred years after the beginning of the Protestant Reformation and the division of the Church, Catholics and Protestants cultivated a fierce rivalry.

And to make matters worse, there were worldly interests at play. “Religion was manipulated for political ends,” says political scientist Elisabeth von Hammerstein of the Körber Foundation. “Political factors played at least as important a role,” she adds.

The emperor and some regional sovereigns fought over who would dictate the destiny of the empire. In the midst of this, external forces got involved. “The French, the Habsburgs, the Swedes, the English and even the Ottomans considered the region very important for their own security and fought for its control or to prevent the influence of other powers,” explains Von Hammerstein. In this context, religion was the fuel used to feed the fire.

Deaths, looting and destruction

Historians and political scientists see parallels with current conflicts, such as the civil war in Syria. Initially, it was a local uprising of Sunni forces against the rule of the Shiite-Alawite Bashar al-Assad. But the conflict quickly turned into a proxy war, with Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia and the United States all pursuing their own interests and complicating the situation.

Likewise, the Thirty Years' War reached a new level of horror as more countries became involved. Armies of mercenaries, rampant and hungry for booty, swept across the battlefields like hordes of apocalyptic locusts. They set fire to cities and towns, massacred the inhabitants, and raped women.

Children were not spared either. Countless people died of starvation or succumbed to diseases such as the plague, spread by legions of roving mercenaries and tens of thousands of fleeing victims.

One historical testimony is the diary of the German mercenary Peter Hagendorf. In one passage, he lists “a beautiful maiden” as part of his booty, along with money and clothes. A few pages later he states that almost all the churches, towns and villages in the Bishopric of Liège were looted or robbed.

Setback and peace

Estimates of the number of dead from the Thirty Years' War range from three million to nine million, for a population also estimated at 15 million to 20 million. Proportionally, this is more than the number of dead in the Second World War. Few regions were not destroyed, and the system of power was left in ruins. While other nations profited, Germany suffered from ruin and depression.

“In the socio-economic aspect, the war catapulted Germany back decades,” says political scientist Herfried Münkler. A war in which a quarter or even a third of the population dies “is a rupture in people’s perception of themselves,” he says.

The experience of becoming a plaything in the hands of foreign powers and a stage for conflicts left a deep impression on Germany, argues Herfried Münkler. He goes further and says that this trauma helped the German Empire and later Nazism justify their attacks in the First and Second World Wars.

By the middle of the third decade of fighting, the warring parties were beginning to show signs of tiring or becoming content with their areas of influence. For five years they tried to reach a peace agreement in negotiations held in Münster, a Catholic city, and Osnabrück, a Protestant city.

On October 24, 1648, the so-called longed for peace was finally reached in Münster. The series of agreements would go down in history as the Peace of Westphalia and also as a triumph of diplomacy for containing numerous concessions, for example, on freedom of religion.

Protestants and Catholics agreed that “religious controversies cannot be resolved through theological bias and that, instead, pragmatic solutions must be sought rather than arguments about who is right,” explains Von Hammerstein.

Thus, among other advances, peace solidified the equality of Christian creeds. “This created the basis for peaceful coexistence between confessions, which seemed impossible after decades of violence.”

Example for other conflicts?

A system of guarantees was responsible for maintaining peace. For example: if one of the sides disrespected the agreements, the other signatories had the right to intervene to reestablish the status quo.

Furthermore, the sovereignty of the emperor was limited, and the princes were given more powers. As a result, the empire was definitively transformed into a loose alliance of states. While in countries like France central power was strengthened, in Germany the evolution took place in exactly the opposite way. The increase in power of regional sovereigns is reflected to this day in German federalism, in which governors closely monitor the powers granted to the states.

The Peace of Westphalia is often held up as an example of how other conflicts can be resolved. In 2016, then-German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier reported that an Arab intellectual had told him that his region needed its own version of the Peace of Westphalia.

Von Hammerstein also sees the agreement as a source of inspiration and recalls that it proved that even a conflict with strong religious and emotional elements can be resolved peacefully.

*Ligia Osorio Silva was a professor at the Institute of Economics at Unicamp. Author of, among other books, Vacant lands and latifundia (Unicamp Publisher).

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