Radical Protestant Propaganda of the Thirty Years' War

Introduction
This dissertation examines radical Protestant propaganda of the Thirty Years’ War. It focuses
on publications which supported foreign allies of the Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire,
as well as writing that denounced leading German Catholics. It aims to find out if, and how,
radical writers were able to persuade a German Protestant audience to support foreign
rulers who intervened in the conflict, and it asks whether the same group of writers was
able to argue convincingly that German Catholic leaders should be rejected.
My examination seeks to draw out the details of an ambitious and sophisticated campaign
that tried to pressure a moderate German audience into accepting foreign allies and
denouncing native German Catholic authorities as hostile enemies. The focus of my work
stems from my interest in the role that propaganda played in the Thirty Years’ War, and to
the extent it contributed to intensifying hostilities between the Protestant and Catholic
camps in the Empire. I am particularly interested in the way in which the Protestant camp
reacted to foreign powers which claimed to be intervening on its behalf.
While the propaganda on the most famous of these foreign ‘assistants’, Gustavus Adolphus
of Sweden, has been the subject of several studies, propaganda on another foreign ally,
Bethlen Gabor, Prince of Transylvania, has not. I examine both figures individually and
comparatively. By analyzing a range of representative sources, I aim to establish the detail
of the campaign to gain support for these foreign rulers and their forces. In addition, I shall
examine whether similar propagandistic techniques were employed in the depiction of each
ruler. By means of an assessment of the arguments and images used by the propagandists, I
will consider the extent to which the propaganda would have been effective in moulding
readers’ attitudes towards these figures.
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