The first half of the seventeenth century witnessed the last and greatest of the religious wars, a war that for thirty years (1618-48) devastated Germany and involved, before it was over, nearly every state in Europe. For more than half a century before the war began, the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) had served to maintain an uneasy peace between the Protestant and Catholic forces in Germany. But conditions had changed since 1555, and with the opening years of the seventeenth it became increasingly apparent that the settlement could not last much longer. The revived energy of Catholicism under the impetus of the Counter-Reformation, the rising power of militant Calvinism, the territorial greed and jealous independence of the German princes, the dynastic ambitions of the house of Hapsburg in both its branches, and the national interests of France, Sweden, and other European powers all tended to increase the tension and to produce a situation that menaced the peace of Europe. In these years, Germany was a vast powder magazine, which any chance spark might ignite. For these were more than religious problems involved. Political and economic motives played their part in the war from the first, and, as the war continued, religious issues sank into comparative insignificance before the greed and mutual hatred of territorial states and ruling dynasties.
When the war was over, Germany lay prostrate; the Holy Roman Empire had been reduced to an empty shell; and out of the final settlement emerged the modern state system of Europe. The years following the Religious Peace of Augsburg marked the high tide of Protestantism in Germany. For a time the momentum gained by the Lutheran Reformation in its early days carried it on to further conquest, especially in northern Germany. But as the century drew on, the tide turned. The Catholic Church in the period of the Counter-Reformation gained a new aggressive energy and began to recover some of the lost ground. In every German state where the prince was still Catholic, the Jesuits set up their efficient schools and exerted a steady, tactful influence on both the people and their princes.
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One Catholic prince after another seconded their efforts by energetically enforcing the principle of the religious peace, which gave the prince the right to dictate the religion of his subjects. Thus, large sections of southern Germany, including Bavaria, the Austrian Hapsburg lands, and the ecclesiastic states of Rhineland, were purged of the numerous Protestant population and became almost unanimously Catholic. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, German Catholicism had developed a decidedly militant spirit, and had found two powerful and devoted champions in the young Maximillian, Duke of Bavaria, and his contemporary, Ferdinand of Styria, cousin and heir of Hapsburg emperor. In contrast to this Catholic revival, Lutheranism seemed to be sinking into a state of passive apathy. All that was positive and aggressive in the Protestant faith was now concentrated in the growing Calvinism which had established itself in several of the upper Rhineland states and in Bohemia, and had won over the Elector Palatine and the Elector of Brandenburg. The stern faith of Calvin provided the moral force needed to meet the revived energy of Catholicism, but the growth of Calvinism in Germany weakened rather than strengthen the Protestant cause, for Lutheran and Calvinist were divided by an antagonism almost as deep as that which separated Catholic and Protestant.
The final settlement of the religious strife in Germany, at least for the sixteenth century, was arranged at the Diet of Augsburg of 1555. It is called the Religious peace of Augsburg. It kept Germany free from further religious war for more than sixty years; but there were terms in the compromise that maintain a constant tension between Protestant and Catholic parties and promised serious trouble at some future date. That promise was fulfilled in the following century in the frightful devastation of the Thirty Years War. Four major principles laid down by this treaty are worth remembering: The princes of the various German states and the governments of the free cities were to be free to choose between the Lutheran and Catholic faiths. The princes were to have the right to enforce the religion of their choice upon their subjects, but the free cities on the Lutheran side could not expel a Catholic minority. The principle, which made the religion of the state that of its ruler, is generally, known by the phrase cujus regio ejus religio.
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This principle was to apply only to Lutheran and Catholic governments. It did not extend to Calvinists, though their number was increasing. An ecclesiastical reservation made an exception of ecclesiastical princes (archbishops, bishops, and abbots), who ruled territorial states. In case any of these should become Lutheran, he was to surrender his state, which would remain under the control of the church; but Lutheran subjects of such princes were not to be forced to give up their religion. Protestant states were to retain whatever church property they had confiscated prior to 1552. The peace of Augsburg marks a definitive stage in the disintegration of the empire, not only because it determined that Germany should remain divided between two religions, but because it recognized the sovereign authority of the princes in the important matter of religious control.
It was a victory of princes in their struggle for independence as much as for the cause of Protestantism. Ironically, the Thirty Years War had started as a religious conflict, yet at the end of the war, the effect of the war religiously was not a major significance compared to the Reformation. Although Calvinism finally became a legal creed, the Peace of Augsburg had basically been agreed to stand permanently, in which the effects were already seen after the Reformation. In the German states, each prince could determine the religion practiced in their territory. The papacy also lost its power in the right to participate in German affairs. At the end, the Northern German states remained Protestant, and the south remained Catholic. The Thirty Years War solved little religiously yet had effected severely politically, socially, and economically. The end of the Thirty Years War was marked by the Peace of Westphalia.
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The treaty brought upon many effects of the war in every aspect. Germany was of the greatest affected because the war was mostly fought on its land. The war had been the most disastrous event in German history. From the changes of religion, to the change of government and warfare, the thirty Years War formed a break with the past and the modern world.
Bibliography:
D. Ogg Europe in 17th Century.
New York Publishing, 1987. S.H. Stainberg The Thirty Year War and the conflict for the European Hegemony. Oxford, 1996. H. Hollborn A History of Modern Germany. 1959..
