The Bohemian rising and the victory of the Counter-Reformation

War became inevitable when Emperor Matthias died in 1619. Not that he had been master of the situation, but his death brought Ferdinand II, the most uncompromising Counter-Reformer, to the head of the house of Habsburg. Ferdinand was hard-pressed at first, as Bohemian and Moravian troops invaded Austria. A deputation of the estates of Lower Austria tried to make him renounce Bohemia in a peace treaty and demanded religious concessions for themselves, unsuccessfully. The Bohemians were forced to retreat, and imperial troops advanced into their country. The Bohemians deposed Ferdinand from the throne of Bohemia and elected Count Palatine Frederick V in his stead; two days later, however, Ferdinand II was elected Holy Roman emperor at Frankfurt (August 28, 1619).

War was the only means of resolving the issue. The conflict for the Bohemian crown developed into a European war—the so-called Thirty Years’ War—when Spain, the Bavarian duke Maximilian I, and the Protestant elector of Saxony entered the struggle on the side of the emperor. The Upper Austrian estates rashly joined Frederick V, with the result that their country was occupied by the army of the Catholic League and afterward pledged to Bavaria. At the Battle of the White Mountain, Ferdinand II became master of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, while Lusatia was pledged to Saxony. King Frederick fled to the Netherlands. The leaders of the Bohemian rising were executed, and other nobles who had compromised themselves lost their property. Many Protestants left the country. In the new constitution of 1627, Bohemia and its associated lands became a hereditary kingdom. The diets were not dissolved entirely, as the government wanted to make use of their administration, but their influence was restricted to financial matters.

After the death of Matthias, Ferdinand had also inherited the Danubian territories. Tirol, however, retained a special status under a new Habsburg secundogeniture (inheritance by a second branch of the house). Upper Austria, pledged to Bavaria, was disturbed by a great peasant rising. The Protestant peasants were defeated after heavy fighting, and in 1628 the country passed into the hands of the emperor again.

The Counter-Reformation was vigorously enforced in the Austrian domains. This led to the mass emigration of Protestants, including many members of the nobility. Most went to the Protestant states and to the imperial cities of southern Germany. After the Bohemian victory the war went favourably for the emperor, and the Peace of Lübeck (1629) seemed to secure the hegemony in Germany for the Habsburgs. But in 1629 Ferdinand’s attempt in the Edict of Restitution (Restitutionsedikt) to establish religious unity by force throughout the empire provoked the violent opposition of the Protestants.

Struggle with Sweden and France

July 1630 saw intervention in Germany’s religious strife from a different quarter—Sweden. In that month the Protestant Swedish king, Gustav II Adolf, landed on the Baltic coast of Pomerania. His purpose was to defend the Protestants against further oppression, to restore the dukes of Mecklenburg, his relatives, who had been driven from their lands by Ferdinand’s forces, and perhaps to strengthen Sweden’s strategic position in the Baltic. In the ensuing conflict, the German city of Magdeburg was destroyed by fire after it had been taken by the emperor’s troops under General Johann Tserclaes, Graf (count) von Tilly (1631). The North German Protestants, who had so far remained undecided, consequently went over to the Swedes. After victories in the Battle of Breitenfeld and on the Lech River, the Swedish troops entered Bavaria.

During the subsequent period of the Thirty Years’ War, Ferdinand adopted a rigorous and often unrelenting attitude, though he yielded a little when the Peace of Prague was being negotiated (1635). His successor, Ferdinand III (1637–57), was as loyal to Catholicism as his father had been but showed himself more of a realist. He was not able, however, to prevent the war from again dragging into Habsburg territory, so in 1645 even Vienna was threatened. The extremist party that had rejected all concessions lost its influence at the Vienna court, and two able diplomats, Maximilian, Graf von Trauttmansdorff, and Isaac Volmar, were entrusted with the representation of a weakened Austria at the German cities of Münster and Osnabrück, where extended negotiations were conducted until acceptable terms could be settled for Austria. In the Peace of Westphalia (1648), Austria lost its possessions in Alsace, and Lusatia had to be ceded for good to Saxony.

The peace in many respects marked the beginning of a new epoch. The Holy Roman Empire from then on was reduced to a loose union of otherwise independent states, and Habsburg politics shifted its emphasis, falling back entirely on the political, military, and financial resources of the hereditary Habsburg lands, now including also Bohemia. The new central organs and the administrative bodies of the territories took on much greater importance than the remaining institutions of the Holy Roman Empire. The emperor came to rely on a standing army rather than on troops provided by the German princes.

The heavy drain the religious wars had made on the population of the Austrian territories was compensated for by immigrants from the Catholic parts of the empire and by Croatian refugees from the southeast. The economic position of the peasants on the whole deteriorated. Many members of the nobility, as well as the church, acquired new property. In mining, boom and depression followed quickly upon each other. The loss of many experienced miners during the Counter-Reformation resulted in difficulties, but the government took several steps toward improving and extending the salt mines. In 1625 it founded the Innerberg Union, under which Steiermark’s iron industry was reorganized. The emperor also tried to interfere with the trade organizations of the towns, though without much success. Trade and finance in the Austrian territories were dominated by foreign capital.

The cultural life of the period was also dominated by the religious struggle. In the field of education the schools of the denominational parties rivaled each other. In 1585 a Jesuit university was founded at Graz, while at Salzburg a Benedictine university was established (1623). Austrian humanists produced some outstanding works of poetry and historical writings, and the sovereigns were great patrons of the arts, but on the whole this was an epoch dominated by Italian and Western influences.