Berlin was devasted by the destructive impact of the Thirty Years War. But Elector Frederick William, who had been brought up as a Calvinist and educated in the Netherlands, transformed challenges into opportunities. Using the threat of continued warfare as a pretext, he took advantage of the weakness of both the landed nobility and urban burghers to impose new taxes in order to maintain a standing army. Known as ‘the Great Elector’, he also engaged in active immigration policies to repopulate devastated lands and stimulate manufacturing and trade. The immigration of French Huguenots, as well as a small Jewish community, significantly affected Berlin’s profile and subsequent development. Frederick III, who took over as Elector in 1688, crowned himself King in Prussia in 1701, and transformed Berlin into the seat of a royal residence.

"This chapter will examine the practice of strategy – the relationship between available resources, competing aims and geopolitical realities – by focusing on the Habsburg dynasty in the period from 1500 to 1650. The Habsburg monarchies brought together a diverse series of different concerns focused on dynasty, geopolitics and religion, within a framework of planning, prioritisation and opportunism. I will also seek to examine changes in practice over time. How do strategic conceptions and the pursuit of strategic aims shift in the century between the reign of Charles V and the Spanish and Austrian Habsburg rulers at the time of the Thirty Years War? How did changing political and military circumstances over this century alter the aims and dynamics of strategy? Or were there fundamental continuities in, for example, the constraints on mobilising financial and human resources, sustaining warfare or achieving desired outcomes through war or diplomacy?

The chapter will be based on two case studies. The first of these examines the strategic implications of the transformation to the dynasty enabled by the extraordinary inheritance of Charles V, and the vast European monarchía that this brought into existence. It will look at Charles’s strategic aims and goals; the resources, both material and ideological, that could be mobilised in pursuit of these goals; the enemies that he faced; and the way in which they forced him to prioritise and compromise. Ultimately the largest compromise was the decision to divide his inheritance between two branches of the family. The account will pass over the later sixteenth century and resume with the strategies, priorities and resource mobilisation of the Austrian and Spanish branches of the family during the Thirty Years War. The account will look at the way in which they sought to re-create a strategy based on close family co-operation, and mobilising resources that were significantly different from those of Charles V. The comparison raises a number of themes, both structural and contingent, that I hope will contribute to the larger discussion of the volume.

Chapter 8 details the on-going importance of the politics of alliance before and after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. In the Empire, the organization of alliances shifted in the second half of the seventeenth century, as the principles of corporate alliance migrated into princely military leagues like the 1658 Rhenish Alliance and large-scale associations among Imperial Circles. Despite their different structures, both the military alliances and Circle Associations adopted the rhetoric of earlier leagues and mirrored their goals. Related processes played out in the United Provinces, where the decades after Westphalia witnessed a running debate over what form the Dutch state should take. At the heart of this conflict sat competing ideas about the Union of Utrecht. The Union served as a focal point for all kinds of proposals about the Dutch Republic’s operation. One of the few things that each side agreed on was the Union’s centrality. Accordingly, the development of the Dutch state during this period was inseparable from struggles over the Union’s meaning. By examining Westphalia’s legacy in both the Empire and United Provinces, this chapter traces the lasting influence of the politics of alliance on northern Europe’s political systems into the late seventeenth century and beyond.

Chapter 7 examines the causes of the Thirty Years‘ War through the lens of the Protestant Union and Catholic Liga. While each alliance’s smaller Estates successfully imposed their vision on the larger Estates in the early 1610s, internal conflict in the Union and Liga resurfaced almost a decade later at the start of the Thirty Years‘ War. The Union’s inability to resolve the internal differences that first crystallized in 1610 proved decisive in its defeat and dissolution in 1621. Conversely, the Liga’s ability to balance the visions of its leading territory, Bavaria, with the alliance’s smaller ecclesiastical states explains its military success. The Liga’s capacity for serving the interests of all members underscores how it supported Bavaria’s expansion as a territorial state, maintained the integrity of its smaller member states, and influenced the development of the Empire’s political system during the war. This chapter therefore reevaluates the causes and course of the Thirty Years‘ War through the politics of alliance. It shows that the religious and constitutional impulses driving the war were in many cases inseparable for the parties involved.

Chapter 6 examines the lead up to the Thirty Years‘ War through the lens of two opposing alliances: The Protestant Union and the Catholic Liga. Founded in 1608 and 1609, respectively, both leagues positioned themselves as protectors of the imperial constitution, even as their members could not agree with each other over how best to defend the Empire’s vitality. Conflicting visions dominated the Union and Liga, as small and large Estates clashed over each league’s scope of action. Smaller Estates saw each alliance as a way to conserve existing rights and conditions, while some princely members sought to use the alliances to pursue their own innovative plans for the Empire. These divergences echoed the debate over the League of Landsberg’s failed expansion from forty years earlier. Ultimately, each alliance’s smaller Estates successfully imposed their vision on the larger Estates during a controversy over the Union’s invasion of Alsace in 1610. The patterns established in 1610 ultimately determined how each alliance reacted to the later crisis in Bohemia that began in 1618.