History of Baden-Württemberg

Johann Valentin Andreä was a Protestant pastor in Calw during the Thirty Years War. He wrote down his recollections in the book, "A Swabian Pastor in the Thirty Years War." We know, through him, what happened as the war approached the city and finally reached it.

"Our misery began with the defeat at Nördlingen," Andreä wrote. They had learned that the imperial troops were already in Stuttgart and Tübingen. Would they also come to the Nagold valley? A defense would be impossible. The city walls were to protect against thieving mobs. They were hardly a barrier to an army equipped with cannons (soldier with plume hat).

On 8 September 1634, suddenly the report was broadcast that the enemy was approaching. Panic broke out in the city, citizens pressed out through the gates, with no idea where they would go. They had let themselves be frightened by a false alarm. But the worst could really happen any day.
A small part of the population seemed to have no worries at all. Andreä reported full of indignation, that all, foremost the young "dressed up and pressed" city governor, were amusing themselves with music, dancing and gambling, and that one could witness people who were shamelessly getting drunk in the middle of the market square.

On 10 September Andreä learned that in Stuttgart Protestant clergy were being badly mistreated. Later that proved to be untrue, but the pastor, who was a particularly zealous defender of the faith, feared now that the Catholic troops could also intend that for him. He decided to flee. He fled into the mountains along with a number of Calw citizens. He and his companions felt fear deep in their bones, and they avoided the good roads so that they would not run into the hands of enemy knights. They climbed up- and downhill over steep, difficult forest paths. Several times they were terrified when they encountered people in the wilderness. But each time they were people who also found themselves in flight. "Like ants we misled one another around between hills and cliffs," Andreä writes. In the evening, they sought shelter in a lonely farmstead. The farmer refused to send the exhausted refugees away. But around midnight he awoke in fear. They must move on; they could not remain any longer.

Even in the darkness they reached high ground that allowed a wide view of the pitch dark forest. In the east the sky turned red. Calw was burning! On the next day they reached Gernsbach. But the little timber transportation city on the Murg had an angry reception for them: "We heard the cry in the public streets: We must kill the Calw dogs!"
Andreä finally found refuge in a field shed in the deeply cut Lauterbach valley. A good natured forest peasant provided him with food.
At the end of September, the refugee pastor received news from Calw. He should come home, the worst had been endured, he was needed. Full of worry, he made his way home.
From a teacher named Lenz, who had held out in the city, Andreä learned what had happened:

The troops who fell on the city were Bavarians. They immediately began plundering and torturing the citizens, whom they tried to force to reveal where they had hidden money and valuables. Some, who could betray nothing more because they had nothing more, were tortured until they died. Many of those who remained behind were now trying to get out of the city; the younger and nimbler fled into the forest.

In the night, the soldiers continued their tormenting. They did not shrink from martyring old men and women. They destroyed furniture, tableware and anything else they could not take with them. The cries of women and maidens was heard throughout the night.

The next day, 83 dead were counted in the city. That was no longer a war, it was just murder, pillage, robbery, theft. Many houses went up in flames; no fewer than 450 burned down.

The enemy commander proclaimed scornfully that Calw must immediately bring forth 6000 guilders if it did not wish to be destroyed by fire. They called a payment that was extracted with that kind of coercion a war contribution. The pillaged citizens were not capable of scratching together the demanded sum. Then the enemy allowed that he would be satisfied with a partial payment.

Of course Andreä also found his parsonage practically cleaned out. He had possessed a few valuable pictures, among which originals by Dürer, Cranach and Holbein. They had all disappeared. The long-term consequences of the plundering and destruction were devastating for the city. Andreä described them:

Poverty arrived overnight in the once prosperous Calw. The wealthiest citizens met this fate the hardest; their houses were more than any others plundered to the bare walls. Andreä also observed, however, that people who were still poor yesterday were suddenly going around in expensive clothing. He wrote angrily: "Whatever was left over from the rapacity of the soldiers, that fell to these hawks, who just beforehand were still eating alms-bread."

Since money and foodstuffs had practically disappeared from the entire city, hunger set in quickly. And the people, weakened by hunger, lost their resistance. Diseases broke out. "So one saw the people dying like flies, and daily six, seven and more persons were taken to their graves."

Andreä wrote to a friend: "Ours were 3831 (inhabitants) and now we are only 1528. ...You know, that all our welfare revolved around the woolens industry and the dye works." There were still more than 300 masters in Calw and its surroundings. But when would they be able to work again? The entire industry threatened to succumb. Twelve hundred textile makers and just as many or more spinning factories depended on Calw. "If Calw starves, most of them must also starve with us," Andreä wrote to his friend.

The hunger lasted for many months. Within a half a year, about 800 people died in the city. As if he wanted to give himself courage, the pastor wrote: "We live and hold worship services."

The fate of the soldiers: whoever did not fall in battle, did not die from a disease, or was not killed by peasants, ended up as a tramp, a beggar or a cripple.

[Just an additional editor's note to this fascinating account by M. Andreä. He was no simple small-town pastor, but a writer of some note who became preacher to the court of Württemberg at some point. Another book, The Thirty Years War by Geoffrey Parker also quotes from Andreä's accounts and shows that the tribulations of Calw did not end in 1634: "In 1639 he wrote despondently that of his 1,046 communicants of 1630 only 338 remained. 'Just in the last five years (that is, since Nördlingen), 518 of them have been killed by various misfortunes.' Among these, he noted five intimate and thirty-three other friends, twenty relatives, and forty-one clerical colleagues. 'I have to weep for them,' he continued, 'because I am so impotent and alone. Out of my whole life I am left with scarcely fifteen persons alive with whom I can claim some trace of friendship.'"]