lUlL^] on the Efnis of the Thirty Years' \\',ir. :^,79 



In central Germany, the statistics of taxation, which here we 

 fortunately have at hand, speak very distinctly of a general decline of 

 taxing-power, bearing out the general conclusions as to depopulation, 

 which I have already discussed ; but I am now specially concerned 

 with the towns, among which our attention is arrested by the very 

 exceptional case of Leipzig. As, so to speak, the centre of the centre, 

 and the natural meeting place of the streams of commerce converging 

 from east and west, north and south, Leipzig had suffered all but 

 incessantly from the lirst approach and advent of the Swedish 

 invaders onwards, and had witnessed a succession of sieges, occupations 

 and great pitched battles on its vast plain, to which it would ])e 

 difficult to find a parallel. However, after the bloody second battle 

 of Breitenfield (1642), it remained occupied by a Swedish garrison 

 for a total of eight years (extending even over the actual conclusion 

 of peace) ; and this circumstance gave the sorely tried town a position 

 of certain stability, the Swedish commander Torstensson, who was a 

 shrewd personage and fully alive to his own interest, proclaiming the 

 Leipzig Fairs to be under his protection, as an institution, without 

 which neither Leipzig nor the world at large could exist. Thus the 

 good town after all weathered the storm, and even while that storm 

 endured had maintained its honourable reputation as a shelter for 

 sick and poor, and a refuge for fugitives and exiles. Such a repu- 

 tation may well be looked back upon with pride, and proves the 

 beneficent part which even in the worst of times commerce may 

 play on behalf of civilization. What a contrast the experience of 

 Leipzig in the first War offers to that of the other great midland 

 city, the bulwark of Protestantism, which had proved unequal to 

 save itself, and which Gustavus had been unable to save because of 

 the laws of strategy ! It had cruml)led into a heap of ashes, from 

 which at first there seemed little hope of recovery. ^Magdeburg had 

 before the War numbered something like 40,000 inhabitants — not 

 very far off the population of Niirnberg, larger than that of Strass- 

 burg, more than twice that of Leipzig or Berlin. After the catas- 

 trophe to which the city's unsupported steadfastness had doomed her, 

 the population, huddled together in a handful (100-150) of small 

 houses or huts, had sunk into a miserable remnant, which not until a 

 whole generation after the peace (1680) had again risen to 7000 or 

 8000 souls. The trade of the Elbe had irrecoverably gone to the 

 great town at its mouth. Erfurt, formerly not only a famous L'^'ni- 

 versity but the flourishing commercial capital of busy Thuringia, was 

 entirely shorn of her prosperity ; nor was the condition of the Bruns- 

 wick and Westpbalian towns much better, owing to a chronic pressure 

 of calamity, which no administrative care could withstand, and to 

 the drying-up of the industries, which in these regions had been most 

 carefully and continuously fostered — thus, in particular, the mining 

 industry in Brunswick, and in Westphalia the cloth industry, which 

 had now passed altogether into the hands of English and Dutch. 



