Radical Protestant Propaganda of the Thirty Years' War

inability of the Church at that time to engage with the printing press or organize itself:
despite the waves of Protestant propaganda flooding the Empire, many Catholics still
viewed the printing press with scepticism. This was to their own detriment because the
failure of the Catholics to respond only helped the Protestant campaign: the practically
inaudible voice of the Catholics in public media allowed Protestant ideas to spread across
virtually the whole Empire, unimpeded and unchallenged. The Catholic Church was only able
to flex its own propagandistic muscle much later in the century, after it had initiated the
internal reforms at the Council of Trent. Only then, and largely thanks to the dynamic and
intransigent energies of the Jesuits, did the Catholic Church begin to contest Protestant
ideas effectively in counter-propaganda. 23
Magdeburg and the Schmalkaldic Wars
The Schmalkaldic Wars erupted in the middle of the sixteenth century, and were a battle of
wills between the Emperor and the Protestant princes of the Schmalkaldic League, initially
formed in 1531. The main controversy concerned the right of the Protestants to exercise
their faith and the threat that Emperor Charles V posed to the liberties of Protestants living
in the Empire. Although the first war was relatively short-lived, lasting from 1546 to 1547,
and ended with a Protestant defeat, it was accompanied by a Protestant propaganda
campaign that has many links to the later propaganda of the Thirty Years’ War. One of the
centres of the propagandistic campaign was Magdeburg, a free imperial city, which refused
to surrender even after the war was over, 24 and openly defied Charles V until 1552.
23 Heintzl, pp. 214-5.
24 Nathan Rein, The Chancery of God: Protestant Print, Polemic and Propaganda against the Empire,
Magdeburg 1546-1551 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 44. Henceforth Rein.
16