People in the explanation business are constantly deciding what merits explaining. Which events make it onto the front page of the New York Times? Which subjects should authors write books about? Which historical moments should I spend time on in the courses I teach?
You might think, the answer is simple: just explain the most important stuff. But importance is in the eye of the beholder. What makes an event important, and which groups’ definitions of importance should matter the most? If you start to drill down on these questions, you may soon start to wonder whether the things that initially seemed the most important are as significant as they first appeared.
On top of this, those of us in the explanation business have a dirty secret: we’re often not choosing topics based on their importance alone. We’re also considering how easy it is to explain those events. We sometimes prioritize things that are easier to explain — or that fit readily into existing narratives.
This is all just a way to say that I’ve never felt like I do justice to the Thirty Years’ War in my history classes.
The Thirty Years’ War is really, really important — it had a profound effect on European history and our system of international relations — but it’s so complex that it’s almost impossible to explain. Just read the first paragraph in Britannica’s account of the conflict, and you’ll see what I’m talking about:
Although the struggles that created it erupted some years earlier, the war is conventionally held to have begun in 1618, when the future Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand II, in his role as king of Bohemia, attempted to impose Roman Catholic absolutism on his domains, and the Protestant nobles of both Bohemia and Austria rose up in rebellion. Ferdinand won after a five-year struggle. In 1625 King Christian IV of Denmark saw an opportunity to gain valuable territory in Germany to balance his earlier loss of Baltic provinces to Sweden. Christian’s defeat and the Peace of Lübeck in 1629 finished Denmark as a European power, but Sweden’s Gustav II Adolf, having ended a four-year war with Poland, invaded Germany and won many German princes to his anti-Roman Catholic, anti-imperial cause.
At what point in the above paragraph did you start to feel your eyes roll back in your head and consciousness slip away? And Britannica’s paragraph only skims the surface of the beginning of the war — after this, the author tells us, “the conflict widened” and became even more complex.
So what do I do in my history classes when the Thirty Years’ War comes around?
The real answer is that I probably don’t give it the attention it deserves. It’s the sort of thing you can spend two weeks or twenty minutes on, but anything in between feels pointless. So I choose twenty minutes. I quickly explain the war’s causes (tensions in Europe around the Reformation and Habsburg power, exacerbated by environmental pressures from the Little Ice Age), and its effects (the staggering human cost — some regions lost more than half of their population through death and migration — and the ways in which the Treaty of Westphalia set up the international system in which we still live). Mostly, though, I try to reinforce that it was an incredibly bad time to be alive.
And nobody helps me to do that better than Jacques Callot.
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Jacques Callot wasn’t a general, soldier, or politician during the Thirty Years’ War. He was a printmaker — one of the best, in fact, during a golden age for his profession. He hailed from Lorraine (now, but not then, a part of France), and didn’t live much past 40. But in his short life, he was incredibly prolific, creating over 1,400 etchings — a painstaking process in which he used acid to mark a metal plate that would then be used to stamp out prints.
Callot’s prints were a marvel of minute precision. Most of them were the size of a standard sheet of paper or smaller, but he managed to pack an impressive amount of detail into his scenes. Here, for example, is “The Falconer,” a relatively early work. It’s less than 6 inches by 5 inches:
Most of Callot’s subject matter is pretty typical for 17th-century prints. There are depictions of everyday life, like this May Day festival around a magnificent tree:
And religious scenes, like this one from Christ’s passion:
But Callot produced his most striking work just a couple of years before his death. It was called The Miseries of War, and it expresses the essence of the Thirty Years’ War better than any lecture could.
Before Callot, there were generally two types of artworks about war. The first, like this 1632 painting of Gustavus Adolphus (one of the main actors of the Thirty Years’ War), depicts heroic leaders and their impressive armies:
The other, like this engraving of the siege of Magdeburg in 1631, emphasizes the geography and strategy of a battle:
Callot’s series of prints is different, because he’s trying to do more than simply depict a battle or glorify a leader. He’s trying to express something about the nature of war itself.
So he begins with the mundane. There’s the mustering of troops (probably mercenaries, who were often used in the Thirty Years’ War):
The soldiers fight in a battle. Callot isn’t specific about which one — historians speculate that he might be depicting King Louis XIII’s annexation of Lorraine — but it hardly matters. The generic nature of the conflict is kind of the point. There were so many battles during this time, and they all kind of blurred together.
But Callot understood that the effects of war weren’t confined to the battlefield. Many of the armies that marauded across Europe during the Thirty Years’ War pillaged civilian areas, assaulting and killing the people who lived there. Primary sources from the conflict speak of rape, looting, and even cannibalism. Callot doesn’t flinch from this. He shows us soldiers looting a house and preparing to rape its female inhabitants:
He writes below the image:
Here are the fine exploits of these inhuman hearts
They ravage all over, nothing escapes their hands
One invents forms of torture to get some gold,
The other, having committed 1,000 crimes, encourages his accomplices
And all in accord, they maliciously commit
Theft, kidnapping, murder, and rape.
The soldiers go on to loot a monastery:
And rob people on the road:
As in so many cases, justice comes too late to help the people murdered, robbed, and abused by the marauding army. But when it does, it represents its own kind of hell. Callot wants to show us that when law and order are restored, things aren’t much better.
One of the criminals is suspended from the “strappado,” a device designed to drop him until he’s almost hit the ground:
Other offenders are hanged from a tree:
Burned at the stake:
Or broken on the wheel:
Callot seems to want us to understand that the violence of war begets more violence. The authorities’ brutality is over the top, creative, and extravagant. You’ll notice that all of these tortures take place in front of large crowds; the suffering of these once-powerful soldiers serves as entertainment for a public that hasn’t tired of cruelty yet.
Callot’s last few images in the series leave us with a bitter contradiction. Some of the soldiers are humanized; we see them dying alongside beggars in the street:
But in the next image, peasants fight back against the soldiers, butchering some and hanging one from a tree:
And then, in a contrast to all of the bloodshed and cruelty, a final obscenity: the king who set all this in motion planted on an ornate throne, holding an orderly audience. He’s distributing awards to the military commanders who oversaw this orgy of cruelty.
The overall effect of Callot’s series is striking. He shows us the underbelly of war — not the maneuvers, battles, or sieges but the grubby, chaotic part where there’s very little glory and a lot of suffering. It’s a new image of war.
Some argue that Callot’s series is one of the first truly antiwar works of art, spotlighting the hypocrisy and pointlessness of it all. Others say that things are not so simple — that he was simply trying to depict the world as it was. Maybe he didn’t think he could stop war; he was just trying to accurately represent what his world was like.
Whatever Callot’s purpose, he wasn’t the only artist who tried to depict the awfulness of the Thirty Years’ War and, perhaps, make a case against war with his art. In the early years of the conflict, Sebastiaen Vrancx, in addition to painting big landscape paintings of battles, created this image of soldiers looting a farm and killing those who stood in their way:
Other artists used an indirect approach. Near the end of the war, Peter Paul Rubens painted his allegorical The Consequences of War, which uses classical imagery to show the devastation of war:
In a letter, Rubens explained the significance of the scene:
The principal figure is Mars, who… rushes forth with shield and blood-stained sword, threatening the people with great disaster… Near by are monsters personifying Pestilence and Famine, those inseparable partners of War… There is also a mother with her child in her arms, indicating that fecundity, procreation, and charity are thwarted by War, which corrupts and destroys everything… That grief-stricken woman clothed in black… is the unfortunate Europe who, for so many years now, has suffered plunder, outrage, and misery, which are so injurious to everyone…
Diego Velasquez also used mythology to make a point about the war. His Mars Resting shows us the god of war in near-naked repose, looking simultaneously vulnerable and threatening. He stares at us with a direct, louche gaze. Mars is at rest for the moment, but could soon pick up his weapons and begin the slaughter again:
In the end, these works of art tell us most of what we need to know about the Thirty Years’ War. It was chaotic, it was cruel, and it was senseless.
The artists who created these early anti-war works of art understood that, for most people, it mattered little which king had allied with which other king, or which religious denomination had declared itself the one true faith. It didn’t even matter who won the war when the treaties had been signed. What mattered instead was how the war brought suffering to everyone unfortunate enough to get in its way.
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This was your best story. I have never really considered the Thirty Years War but now I truly understand it. Thanks
Will humans ever learn. Maybe with such excellent history teachers there is a chance.