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Updated: June 6, 2025
I have seen the marble heads of heathen gods broken with the hammer to make mortar of, and great cups of onyx and alabaster used as water troughs for a thrall's mongrels.. .. Knowing the land, I sent pedlars north and west to collect such stuff, and what I bought for pence I sold for much gold in the Germanies and throughout the French cities.
To these demands, the people of Paris gave support barricades were erected in the streets, and Mazarin, whose loyal army was still fighting in the Germanies, was obliged temporarily to recognize the new order. Within six months, however, sufficient troops had been collected to enable him to overawe Paris and to annul his concessions.
Those who rejected the Roman Catholic Church in central and western Europe were collectively called Protestants, but they were divided into three major groups. Lutheranism was now the religion of the northern Germanies and the Scandinavian states of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.
As chief of the Holy Roman Empire, he must keep revolutionary agitation out of the Germanies and protect the border provinces against French aggression. All these factors served to make the Emperor Leopold the foremost champion of the "old regime" in Europe and incidentally of the royal cause in France. Now it so happened that the emperor found a curious ally in Prussia.
Fighting was carried on in the Netherlands, in the southern Germanies, in Italy, and in Spain. The tide of war turned steadily for several years against the Bourbons. The great battle of Blenheim drove the French from the Holy Roman Empire, and the capture of Gibraltar gave England a foothold in Spain and a naval base for the Mediterranean.
The war, which proved momentous both to the Habsburgs and to their enemies, resulted from a variety of reasons religious, economic, and political. The peace of Augsburg had been expected to settle the religious question in the Germanies. But in practice it had failed to fix two important matters.
German merchants from Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm, Regensburg, and Constance purchased Eastern commodities in the markets of Venice, and sent them back to the Germanies, to England, and to the Scandinavian countries.
Yet all this while that other island of the group to the Northwest of Europe, that island which had never been conquered by armed civilization as were the Outer Germanies, but had spontaneously accepted the Faith, presented a contrasting exception.
They had met again in the damp forests of the Ardennes and the vague lands beyond the Rhine, when the Roman auxiliaries of the decline pushed out into the Germanies to set back the frontiers of barbarism.
For nearly a hundred years France practiced a religious toleration which was almost unique among European nations, and it was Calvinists who benefited. The Netherlands were too near the Germanies not to be affected by the Lutheran revolt against the Catholic Church.
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