Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War

Transcription

1 Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War

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3 Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War Geoff Mortimer Lecturer in German St Edmund Hall, Oxford

4 Geoff Mortimer 2002 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN DOI / ISBN (ebook) This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mortimer, Geoff, 1944 Eyewitness accounts of the Thirty Years War / Geoff Mortimer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Thirty Years War, Personal narratives. I. Title. D270.A2 M dc

5 Contents List of Illustrations Sources, References and Translations vii viii 1 What Happened in the Thirty Years War? 1 The course of the war 5 The issues 9 2 Sources, Authors and Texts 15 Contemporaneous accounts 17 Partly contemporaneous accounts 22 Non-contemporaneous accounts 26 3 Military Perspectives 29 Military life 29 Campaigning and fighting 38 4 Civilian Perceptions 45 5 Siege and Storm 59 6 Faith and Experience 71 Religion and superstition 71 Plague, famine and depopulation 76 Signs of the times 80 7 Counting the Cost 85 8 Three Nuns Accounts 96 9 Priests and Politics Thomas Mallinger s Freiburg Chronicle Gallus Zembroth s Allensbach Chronicle The Memoirs of Colonel Augustin von Fritsch The Memoirs of Colonel Robert Monro A Myth of the All-destructive Fury? 164 The war as reported 164 The war as perceived 174 v

6 vi Contents 15 Why did they Write? Historical Sources or Ego-documents? 189 Appendix: Authors, Occupations and Locations 199 Map: Homes of Civilian Eyewitnesses 201 Bibliography 202 Further reading 202 Source eyewitness accounts 202 Other works referred to 208 Index of Eyewitness Authors 211 General Index 213

7 List of Illustrations Map Homes of civilian eyewitnesses 201 Plates 1 The battle of Nördlingen, A page from Raymond s manuscript 3 The title page of Monro s book 4 The siege of Magdeburg, Vincent s horrific illustrations 6 Fritsch s memorial plaque 7 The walls of Nördlingen 8 Bürster s monastery at Salem vii

8 Sources, References and Translations Sources All the eyewitness accounts referred to in this book have been published, albeit in many cases in the nineteenth century or even earlier, and all quotations are drawn from these publications. Some of the original manuscripts have been consulted, but a number are no longer extant, having either disappeared long ago or been lost in the aftermath of the Second World War. References and quotations The author date system is used within the text to identify works cited, and to give the page references for quotations. The relevant full publication details are listed alphabetically by first author in the Bibliography. Because of their very large number, quotations from eyewitness accounts are identified only by a code and page number thus: (Di.193). These codes are given with the relevant entry for the published text in the Bibliography, and with the map and list of authors on pages Where there is more than one quotation in a sentence, the references are placed at its end. Subject to the needs of clarity, in other cases where two or more quotations from the same source occur consecutively in a paragraph the references are grouped together, and if these all have the same page number it is given only once. References follow the quotations and are given in the order in which they appear in the preceding text. Translations, spelling, names and dates All translations from German are my own, and I have sought to render the meaning accurately in good modern English rather than attempting to capture the style or literacy level of the individual authors. Latin interpolations have been left untranslated, with the meaning given only when this is neither obvious nor unimportant. In the main text recognised English versions of names of people and places have been used where they exist. In quotations names have been retained in the German form but spelling has been modernised if it is quite clear who or where is meant, whereas if there is any possible doubt the author s original spelling has been retained. Quotations from authors who wrote in English follow the spelling and capitalisation of the published editions. Dates within quotations are as given by the authors, but otherwise are new style. viii

9 Sources, References and Translations ix Units of measurement and money At the time of the Thirty Years War Germany was not a single country, but comprised a large number of political entities of various types and greatly differing sizes, united only by their nominal allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire. Many of these were able to issue their own money, while units of measurement were frequently determined by local custom and practice rather than by wider regulation. The eyewitnesses often mention sums of money and prices or quantities of food and drink, which presents a problem as the original terms will probably be unfamiliar to the reader while equivalents may be tendentious or suggest spurious accuracy. Where quantities are involved it is desirable to give at least some idea of whether a little or a lot was implied. Thus the many and varied volume measures used for dry foodstuffs, particularly grain, have been divided into smaller and larger ones and translated by the old British terms bushel and quarter respectively (the latter, a little under 300 litres, being about eight times the former). Measures of wine and beer have likewise been translated as quart, a term actually in use in seventeenth-century Germany, keg a small barrel of unspecified size, and tun a very large barrel holding almost 1000 litres. For weights, pound and hundredweight are reasonable equivalents if not viewed too precisely, while if wagon-load seems vague it is in fact how the relevant term was defined at the time. For precious metal halfounce provides a workable conversion, while ell is the same word as an old British cloth measure of rather over a metre. Stunde (hour) as a measure of distance has been converted roughly into miles. Land areas are particularly difficult, with a Morgen, for example, being the amount of land a man and a team of horses or oxen could plough in a morning. Opinions about this varied, and in the early nineteenth century Baden fixed it as 3600 square metres but Hesse preferred Things were no clearer in the seventeenth century, so it has been loosely translated as an acre, while other measures have been correspondingly converted. Translation is effectively impossible for money. Not only did coins with the same names have different values in different places, but those values also varied with time. Inflation was one of the burdens of war for much of the period, and it was rampant during the 1620s, when private mints, coinclipping and debasement of the precious metals used added to the problems. Hence the original terms for money have been retained in the text and all that can be done here is to rank them roughly by size. The Reichstaler was an Imperial coin and in theory the same across the Holy Roman Empire, and it was often used as a basis for exchange of local currencies. Any coin referred to simply as a taler was probably of local issue, and if so almost certainly worth less, and perhaps much less, than a Reichstaler. Taler, gulden or florin were common names for the larger units of currency, while kreuzer, batzen or groschen were typical smaller units.

10 x Sources, References and Translations Some rulers also issued a coin known as a kopfstück, literally meaning one with his head on it, while coins such as ducats came in from outside Germany, probably with the armies. Acknowledgement The substance of Chapter 14 has previously been published in the journal German History, and I am grateful for permission to reprint it here. G.M.