The paintings were preserved because it could not be agreed what should be done with them, since the Calvinist Church order of the Reformed Creed introduced by Count Arnold II at Bentheim in 1588 forbade pictures and adornment in church rooms. During more restoration work in the late 1990s, these pictures were rediscovered, and the church council decided to cover the pictures over with rice paper, as they seemed too valuable simply to paint over. Sharply decimated by war and epidemics, the town had to deal with several occupations and troop movements in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the Eighty Years' War waged by the Dutch against the Spaniards, Nordhorn was a way station for Spanish troops because the neighbouring County of Lingen was Spanish territory. It is said that once, the Duke of Parma camped around Nordhorn with 6,000 soldiers. During the Thirty Years' War, Swedes, Hessians, Lüneburg troops and Imperial forces passed through Nordhorn on the old Flemish army and trade road. They all wanted to feed on the scanty crop yields. The harried town, however, was left hardly any time to recover from the war's ravages. Only a few years later, the warlike Bishop Christoph Bernhard Count of Galen from Münster waged a war against the Dutch on the plains outside Nordhorn, which was brought to an end in 1666 by the Peace of Nordhorn. In Napoleonic times there was once again much afoot in Nordhorn. In these years, the trading place on the Vechte grew and the two harbours defined the town's image. Napoleon's continental blockade against British trade made Nordhorn into a smuggling centre by 1806. The broad moors and heaths abetted this lucrative trade. As a result of Europe's new political landscape in the wake of the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815, the hitherto flourishing transit trade in Nordhorn was once again disrupted. The border became a customs barrier, stripping Nordhorn of its trading, which had been oriented towards the west. In the years that followed, the town became poorer. Because the Vechte could not be upgraded and modernized, and because it silted up, shipping was disrupted. The townsfolk turned to farming small plots and traders and shippers left town. Only home weaving still afforded some earnings. Whole families emigrated to the New World. It is said that 1839 was the year when Nordhorn's textile industry was founded. The first mechanized