Anti-Climacus

The past is a foreign country, 17th century edition:

One of the really remarkable things I've come across in my research on the Thirty Years War is that there were four major Catholic power sources, all of whom at least partially disliked and distrusted each other and, for that matter, couldn't even agree on theological questions: (Jesuit) Spain and the Holy Roman Empire were closest, but the Pope would occasionally play them off each other, and (Capuchin) France seemed content in the early part of the war to be unaligned but sympathetic to the Protestant cause. This makes the comparative willingness of Lutherans and Calvinists to put aside their differences in the name of opposing the Hapsburgs more impressive, but existential crises do have a way of focusing the mind.