30YearsWar #42: The Silver Domino

When Diplomacy Fails Podcast

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1629 was THE year of the Thirty Years War, when all the tributaries seemed to join the main river, and flow as one. The Swedish and Poles made their peace, under French sponsorship. The French expelled the Huguenots from La Rochelle. The Spanish continued their siege of Casale, in North Italy. The Danes made their peace with Wallenstein and the Emperor, and the Emperor let the ink dry on his Edict of Restitution, before releasing it to the world. But that wasn't all.

Across the Dutch border, something incredible was happening...

It's up for debate when the tide truly turned in the Thirty Years War, and the Habsburgs lost the initiative. However, I would make a strong case for the winds of change blowing in the Spanish Dutch War first, when a daring naval assault by Admiral Piet Hein seized 11 million florins worth of silver just off the Cuban coast. Though he couldn't have known it, Admiral Hein had just knocked over the first in what would be a series of dominoes, that would lead all the way to the peace of Westphalia twenty years later.

Not only did the Dutch seize the money, thus ruining Spain's precarious financial situation - they also spent that money on several armies, and invested the town of S'hertogenbosch, the capital of Catholic propaganda in the Spanish Netherlands. As if to tie it all together, who should stand side by side Frederick Henry, but Frederick V, Elector Palatine. Although his Austrian enemy was supreme, Frederick had ensured that the Habsburgs could not rest.

The Spanish were crumbling, and it remained for the Lion of the North to roar the whole place down in Germany....

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