The Thirty Years' War began as a quarrel about faith and ended by making faith a weapon and a pretext. Under the banner of truth — Catholic or Protestant — kings and princes carved up lands, crowns, and revenues. God was written into the war dispatches, but what drove the sides was not the salvation of souls but power. When the highest is made an instrument of the lowest, the idol has already been raised: what was enshrined was not God but one's own interest, cloaked in His name.
The collapse surpassed anything Europe had known before. The war rolled across the German lands from 1618 to 1648, and whole regions died out. Magdeburg became the emblem of the horror: in 1631 the city was stormed and sacked by imperial troops, and of roughly twenty-five thousand inhabitants as many as twenty thousand perished — the city all but ceased to exist. Historians estimate the total loss of population in the German lands at about forty percent; in some regions one person in two died — by the sword, but still more from the famine and plague that trailed behind the armies of mercenaries.
The captivity was not the captivity of a single nation but the long stupor of an entire country. Germany came out of the war bled white, ruined, and splintered into hundreds of petty domains; it would not gather its strength again for a century. The land the soldiers had crossed remembered them for decades — burned villages, abandoned fields, a generation that grew up among ruins and had never known peace.
The return came as a sobering. The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 proclaimed no new truth — it acknowledged an exhaustion with truths for which men kill. A system of sovereign states was born, in which each governs its own affairs, along with the principle of religious toleration: let subjects of differing confessions live side by side without exterminating one another. Out of a scorched war of religion Europe carried away a bitter wisdom — that conscience cannot be imposed at the point of a bayonet — and this wisdom became a harbinger of secular politics and the Enlightenment. The remelting was genuine: not a return to the old order, but a different order, grown from the recognition that the price of a "war for the faith" is beyond bearing.