Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/291

 THE ERA OF THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR 279 victory of Breitenfeld suddenly transferred the domination of Germany to the Protestant King of Sweden. We need not follow the campaigns which brought about the complete reversal of the previous situation. The triumphs of Gustavus compelled the emperor to recall Wallen- Later Stages stein, who was now determined to play for his own of the War. hand. The two great generals met at the battle of Liitzen, where Gustavus himself fell in the hour of victory. There was no one to succeed him capable of carrying out his policy of uniting German Protestantism. A year later Wallenstein was murdered, and the war became a chaos of conflicts with the Swedes fighting for their own hand, the French seeking to snatch Rhine provinces for themselves out of the general confusion, and princes on both sides chiefly engaged in the general game of grabbing territories. The Thirty Years' War was brought to an end in 1648 by the series of treaties known as the Peace of Westphalia. It had devastated Germany and half depopulated it. It The Peace f made anything like a unification of the empire Westphalia, impossible for two centuries. It left Austria nothing 1648, more than the strongest among the German states, with a merely titular supremacy. It added to the territories of some princes, and took away from those of others, while it gave Sweden a definite foothold south of the Baltic, and it left France the greatest military state in Europe. As to the religious question, it practically restored the Peace of Augsburg, with some modifica- tions in favour of the Protestant interpretations of that com- promise, and with an extension to the Calvinists of the rights which had been previously conceded only to the Lutherans. Germany had become practically a collection of states large and small, owning a merely nominal allegiance to the Austrian emperor; and it is Austria, not the empire, Austria with its kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary, which now has to be recognised as a European power. While Germany was tearing herself to pieces, England and Scotland were somewhat similarly occupied with a struggle which was partly religious and partly constitutional. The Crown attempted to render itself absolute, and to impose religious