Chapter X - The state of Germany (to 1618)

Summary

Germany in the early seventeenth century was a land of contrasts. It was a great and on the whole a prosperous country, even if it no longer led Europe in either mining or industrial technique or in financial expertise. In political structure, it was ‘the Roman empire of the German nation’—briefly, the German Reich—at whose apex was enthroned the Kaiser Rudolf II (1576-1612), the senior representative of the Austrian branch of the Habsburg arch-house. In 1606 his envoys had concluded at Sitvatorok in Hungary a peace with the Turkish sultan doubly unprecedented, alike in its terms and its duration. Further territories had to be ceded to the Turk, but the Christian prince was for the first time admitted by the Muslim as a monarch of equal status, and over half a century elapsed before formal war was resumed between them. Although the chronic threat of Turkish invasion did not immediately disappear, the internecine struggles which were soon to devastate much of central Europe were in fact conducted without interference from the infidel. Yet despite the aura of partly successful achievement that might in retrospect seem to surround the Sitvatorok agreement, it had been made only because Turkish government was as incapable as the Austrian. The plight of the Habsburgs in Germany was never so desperate as in the early seventeenth century. The kaiser was an elderly and half-demented recluse, the Reich constitution was being eroded almost to the point of disappearance, political and religious antagonisms within Germany had been mounting towards the point of crisis for a generation and more, while the lack of a firm central government was a grave disadvantage to the economic development of the country and made it possible for foreign armies to prey upon the inhabitants in frontier regions.