Richelieu faced enormous domestic pressures for his policies in opposing, or seemingly opposing, catholic interests in the empire. Richelieu had to respond to those kinds of arguments that he was facing at home about the morality, for want of a better word, of his foreign policies. The papacies wre olled during e the entire 30 as well as agains something very interesting. It faces a criticism, at times, for not intervening forcefully enough in defence of religion in the Empire. There's a lovely m satire that appears in the wake of sweden's intervention of the church, e r covered in flies, a beseeching, beseeching rome for aid, and
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the war in Europe which begain in 1618 and continued on such a scale and with such devastation that its like was not seen for another three hundred years. It pitched Catholics against Protestants, Lutherans against Calvinists and Catholics against Catholics across the Holy Roman Empire, drawing in their neighbours and it lasted for thirty gruelling years, from the Defenestration of Prague to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. Many more civilians died than soldiers, and famine was so great that even cannibalism was excused. This topic was chosen from several hundred suggested by listeners this autumn.
The image above is a detail from a painting of The Battle of White Mountain on 7-8 November 1620, by Pieter Snayers (1592-1667)
With
Peter Wilson
Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford
Ulinka Rublack
Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John’s College
And
Toby Osborne
Associate Professor in History at Durham University
Producer: Simon Tillotson