PART THREE

Aftermath

21

The Westphalian Settlement

THE INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION

Westphalia and World History

Interpretations of the peace settlement have broadly assumed one of two positions. Political scientists are generally positive, seeing the treaties as the birth of the modern international order based on sovereign states. Historians have, until recently, been largely negative, claiming ‘the war solved no problem. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.’¹

The general conclusion of German historians was that ‘the Empire in its former sense had ceased to exist’.² ‘Germany’ was supposedly no longer a nation but a loose collection of independent principalities. Austria pursued a separate existence, becoming a great power through expansion in the Balkans at the Ottomans’ expense after 1683, as well as acquisition of Spain’s former possessions in the Netherlands and Italy in 1700. It allegedly neglected ‘German’ affairs until challenged by Frederick the Great of Prussia in 1740. As with much of the received interpretation of German history, this is a distortion articulated by those favouring national unification under Prussian leadership during the 1860s. Traces of this remain today, and the most recent edition of the standard history of the Westphalian settlement describes 1648 as ‘one of the years of greatest catastrophe’ in German history.³

These problems of interpretation derive from misconceptions surrounding the character of both the war and the peace. The Thirty Years War was not a general European, let alone global conflict. The dates 1618–48 make little sense as a frame for the history of countries outside Central Europe, and nor can the Empire’s war be fitted into a general, global crisis.⁴ Other countries certainly experienced major upheavals. The Mughal emperor Shah Jahan retired grief-stricken at his wife’s death, precipitating civil war between his sons across India in 1657–8. The last Han Chinese emperor hanged himself as the Manchurians overran China in 1644. Despite the presence of some European traders, these events remained unconnected with those in the Spanish and Austrian empires. Likewise, turmoil elsewhere was not indefinite or without results. The Mughal empire did not collapse, while the new Manchurian Qing dynasty asserted China’s authority over Mongolia, Tibet and Turkestan. Upheaval in Japan after 1600 was followed by relative stability under the Tokugawa shogunate and a prolonged period of international isolation from 1639 to 1858.

Spain’s conflicts with the Dutch, French, Portuguese and English did see fighting in Brazil, parts of Africa, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. The period also witnessed the development of European trading companies and the growing involvement of previously minor players in overseas ventures. Foremost were the English, who established themselves in Virginia and other parts of North America’s Atlantic coast by the 1620s, and then penetrated the Caribbean and established a presence in Madras in 1639. Unlike the treaties ending the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) or the Seven Years War (1756–63), those of Westphalia did not settle these colonial conflicts, though Spain’s Treaty of Münster did end the fighting in the Dutch East Indies. Neither the Thirty Years War proper nor the associated Spanish-Dutch and Franco-Spanish wars, can match claims made for the Seven Years War for the dubious honour of being labelled the true first world war.⁵ On closer inspection, even this later alleged world war mirrors the seventeenth-century experience as a conflict exported by Europeans, rather than one involving non-European states as full belligerents.

The negative assessment of Westphalia has some sense when measuring the terms against the framers’ aspirations for European peace. Clearly, it did not end all European wars, or prevent new conflicts occurring soon after. The Franco-Spanish war lasted until 1659, and while the Catalans lost their independence struggle in 1652, the Portuguese eventually won theirs in 1668. The continuation of these conflicts represents real failures, since all three struggles were on the congress’s agenda. However, no attempt was made to end the British Civil Wars or the Veneto-Turkish conflict that started in 1645. Baltic tensions had been checked at the Peace of Brömsebro in 1645, but erupted again with wars between Sweden, Poland and Russia after 1655, as well as three further Swedish-Danish struggles that lasted into the eighteenth century. Those who stretch the Thirty Years War to encompass all European conflicts argue that the Franco-Spanish Peace of the Pyrenees (1659) and the general Baltic settlement at Oliva (1660) mark Westphalia’s real conclusion.⁶ This raises the same problem encountered in explaining the origins of the Thirty Years War, since the causes, course and conclusion to these struggles were all distinct and the fact that some countries participated in more than one does not make them into a single general war.

Westphalia’s significance lies not in the number of conflicts it tried to resolve, but in the methods and ideals it applied. The first article of both the IPO and IPM stated they were instruments of a ‘Christian, general and permanent peace’ intended to establish lasting friendship across the continent. This was more than merely a statement of good intentions. The congress offered a new charter for European relations. The sections on the imperial constitution did refer to the Empire’s earlier settlements of 1552 and 1555, but otherwise the documents made no mention of other European treaties, instead offering a new framework for peace. The treaties ending other wars were regarded as extensions to Westphalia, pacifying additional parts of the continent. The Westphalian treaties continued to be invoked in major European settlements up to the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 that ended the Napoleonic Wars. These later settlements rested on the same understanding of international law as a voluntary contract superior to all existing secular and religious law.⁷

Like many important innovations, the intentions behind this development were more modest than its effects, since the relevant articles about international law were there simply to thwart the expected papal protest. The pope was not the only one to object. Spain and Lorraine protested at their exclusion from the IPM, Saxony objected to the inclusion of the Calvinists in the IPO, Bishop Wartenberg rejected the religious concessions in general, while Mainz, Magdeburg and others raised specific points.⁸ Eighteen territories failed to sign, because they were not represented at the congress. However all, including Wartenberg, accepted the general validity of the treaties. Only the pope rejected the entire settlement in his decree Zelo domus Dei, which he issued in August 1650 but backdated to 26 November 1648 to reaffirm his envoy Chigi’s earlier verbal protests.⁹

The positive interpretation of Westphalia regards it as the birth of the modern international order based on sovereign states interacting (formally) as equals within a common secularized legal framework, regardless of size, power or internal configuration. The classic ‘Westphalian state’ rests on indivisible sovereignty that both excludes external agencies and does not share the exercise of internal governance with other domestic bodies. In addition, it possesses well-demarcated, nonporous borders, and a common identity and culture among its inhabitants. The latter element assumed greater significance in the nineteenth century when the ideal of each nation with its own state was propagated; a factor contributing to conflicts to expel minorities or extend frontiers to include those sharing language and culture currently under ‘foreign rule’.

Handbooks of international relations and diplomatic history still routinely take 1648 to frame their discussions, but historians and most political scientists are no longer so confident in asserting the date as a turning point.¹⁰ One reason is that the development of this new order was clearly a lengthy process, beginning well before 1648 and continuing long after. Another is that the nation state no longer appears the final destination of political development. One recent study of the European Union presents it not as a single, centralized Westphalian super-state, but as a ‘neo-medieval empire’, with the process of integration remodelling the continent along lines not dissimilar to the Holy Roman Empire.¹¹

These are important points that nonetheless do not detract from Westphalia’ significance as a general marker for international development. Europe remained a hierarchical, fragmented international system after 1648, but was clearly moving towards a secular order based on more equal, sovereign states. By pacifying Central Europe, the peace treaties of 1648 provided sufficient stability to build a new international order on these principles.¹² This model assumed global significance through its articulation in theories of international relations and by its use by western colonial powers in their dealings with other parts of the world.

The Empire and Europe

The negative historical assessment of Westphalia is correct in the general sense that the settlement confirmed a decline in the Empire’s size and international standing. This was neither as sudden nor as decisive as German historians once thought. The issue of Dutch and Swiss ‘independence’ illustrates this. Spain renounced rule over the Dutch in the first article of its Treaty of Münster, but the word ‘sovereignty’ appears only in the English translation of the original text.¹³ Spain also accepted Dutch neutrality towards the Empire. The emperor recognized that the Dutch would not contribute to imperial defence in 1653, but neither he nor the Reichstag accepted that the Republic was no longer part of the Empire until 1728. The Swiss were included in both the IPO and IPM thanks to the lobbying of the Basel mayor, Johann Wettstein. Wettstein attended the congress because Basel had joined the Swiss Confederation in 1501, two years after Emperor Maximilian I had been forced to free the Swiss from their obligations to contribute to imperial defence and conflict resolution. Basel wanted a similar exemption so that it would no longer have to pay for imperial institutions; upkeep of the Reichskammergericht alone cost the city 14,239 talers in 1647. Emperor Ferdinand III granted Basel’s request, but neither the Westphalian treaties nor the 1499 peace formally ended Switzerland’s incorporation within the Empire.

The remaining ties appear unimportant. Neither the Dutch nor the Swiss participated as imperial Estates in imperial politics and they felt no obligation to assist the emperor, though the Dutch were generally allies of Austria after 1673. Nonetheless, the absence of clear statements indicates the lingering sense of the Empire as embodying the ideal of a single European political community. Zurich finally removed the imperial coat of arms from its town hall in 1698, while Schaffhausen considered itself part of the Empire until 1714. Savoy failed to recover Pinerolo from France or to gain electoral status, yet it also remained part of the Empire, regarding its loose association with the organization north of the Alps as useful additional security in an uncertain international situation.¹⁴

Both the IPO and IPM combined revisions to the imperial constitution with the international settlement and placed Sweden and France as guarantors of the new order within the Empire. The older assessment that this left the Empire at the two crowns’ mercy no longer holds. Both powers were entitled to intervene only if the imperial Estates were unable to resolve a dispute amicably within three years. Intervention still depended on an invitation from the injured party. These formal rights added little to either power’s ability to influence imperial affairs, which still depended on its own military potential and its diplomatic standing within the Empire.

Trier’s example illustrates the rapid decline of French influence after 1648. Sötern’s restoration as elector had been the chief justification for French intervention after 1635. He was reinstated but had little authority over his subjects. Dependent on French support, he agreed to support Mazarin’s candidate as coadjutor in April 1649. Most of the cathedral canons rebelled, and raised a few hundred troops with Austrian and Spanish backing. Mazarin was distracted by the Fronde and conscious his interference in Trier was damaging France’s reputation in Germany. Abandoned by France and now bedridden, Sötern was powerless to prevent the installation of a pro-imperial coadjutor, who succeeded him after his death in February 1652.¹⁵

France made use of its guarantor powers during a dispute between Mainz and the Palatinate in the early 1660s, but Louis XIV’s subsequent aggression ensured no one afterwards was prepared to risk appealing for French help.¹⁶ Philippsburg was recaptured in 1676, and though lost again to France in 1688, it was recovered permanently nine years later. Austria also regained Breisach, pushing the French presence back across the Rhine. France then used its military strength to impose its own interpretation of Westphalia in a process known as the Reunions (1679–84) that saw the annexation of Strasbourg and the other territories saved for the Empire by Volmer and Trauttmannsdorff’s ambiguous terms. France also conquered the Franche-Comté in the 1670s and eventually acquired Lorraine in 1766.

France always denied these gains were part of the Empire since this would imply its king was subordinate to the emperor. It preferred to sacrifice the formal influence of constitutional rights to retain the freedom to ally with groups of princes when necessary. Gradually, France upgraded its partners, moving from an alliance of smaller principalities in 1658–68 to rely on Bavaria by the late seventeenth century, then Prussia and finally Austria after 1756. These changes reflected a shift in policy towards the emperor as France switched from using the constitution to contain a perceived Habsburg threat to upholding the existing order to preserve its major European ally.¹⁷

Sweden followed a similar course, but more immediately and for different reasons. Unlike France, Sweden accepted its gains as full imperial Estates, giving it representation in the Reichstag as well as the Lower and Upper Saxon assemblies. The Swedish monarch thus acted like the Danish king who was represented in imperial institutions as the duke of Holstein. Swedish authority remained curtailed by imperial law. It was granted exemption from the imperial courts equivalent to that enjoyed by the electors, but was obliged to establish its own tribunal in Wismar to uphold imperial law. In practice, this entailed leaving the existing legal systems in place and respecting the privileges of the Estates in its new territories. Taxes increased, but they were spent locally on maintaining garrisons of German professionals. No effort was made to introduce the national conscription practised in Sweden and Finland. Religious affairs also remained in local hands, with church management and theological matters handled by a German consistory.¹⁸

Ferdinand III was unable to prevent the incorporation of the remaining mediate church property (see below), but did thwart Swedish efforts to extend possession of the archbishopric of Bremen to include the city as well. Immediately after the conquest of the archbishopric in 1645, the emperor confirmed the city’s status in return for a much needed 100,000 florins. Sweden objected belatedly in 1654, but significantly did not push matters to an open breach.¹⁹ Whereas its representatives had posed as self-confident executors of Gustavus Adolphus’s glorious legacy during the Westphalian congress, they now sought closer collaboration with the emperor to preserve Sweden’s existing possessions. Their vulnerability was exposed when Brandenburg and Denmark attacked Sweden once it embroiled itself in the Northern War with Poland (1655–60). Sweden’s relative decline became clearer after 1675 when it was cajoled by France into trying to invade Brandenburg during Louis XIV’s Dutch War (1672–9). As a result, a combination of Brandenburg, Denmark, Münster and the Guelphs swiftly conquered all of Sweden’s German possessions and it was only thanks to French intervention at the peace of 1679 that they were returned.

The Empire’s protective framework already demonstrated its utility with the neutralization of north-western Germany that safeguarded Bremen and Verden during 1655–60. Sweden responded by sending a contingent to assist the emperor repel an Ottoman attack in 1664. More troops and money followed during the Great Turkish War of 1683–99 that saw the Habsburg conquest of Ottoman Hungary and Transylvania. King Charles XII’s intervention in the Empire in 1705–7 was likened by the press to a return of Gustavus, not least because the Swedes overran Saxony in their efforts to conquer Poland. However, Charles’s subsequent defeat in Russia (in 1709) again exposed his German possessions and led to the permanent loss of Bremen and Verden to Hanover by 1714. Sweden retained Wismar and western Pomerania, but saw the preservation of the imperial constitution as a primary safeguard and for this reason joined France to back Austria against Prussia during the Seven Years War. By now, Sweden was one of the chief supporters of the established order. In contrast to Bavaria and other south German states that joined Napoleon, Sweden’s King Gustavus IV bitterly opposed the Empire’s dissolution in 1806 and told his German subjects he hoped it would be restored.²⁰

A CHRISTIAN PEACE

The Religious Settlement

It is a common misconception to see Westphalia as bringing peace by taking religion out of politics.²¹ Though it promoted secularization in the longer term, it was not a fully secular peace. The Empire remained Holy in the sense of Christian. Toleration was extended only to include Calvinists. Other dissenters, along with Orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims, were denied similar constitutional rights.

Westphalia formally endorsed the Peace of Augsburg, but addressed its shortcomings by modifying it within a permanent settlement. Article V, paragraph 50 of the IPO forbade any attempt to question the religious peace or derive contradictory interpretations of it. Any future difficulties were to be resolved through the process of ‘amicable composition’ already favoured by moderates prior to 1618. This is the reason behind the change to the constitution to allow discussion as two confessional bodies, rather than the customary three hierarchical colleges. Known as itio in partes, this practice was reserved for religious issues and not, as the earlier radical Protestant programme intended, for all matters.

The significance of this change was reduced by the adoption of 1 January 1624 as the new normative date, since this fixed the official faith of each territory as it had been on that day. The new arrangements significantly curtailed princely prerogatives. Rulers retained the ‘right of Reformation’ granted in 1555, but only as supervision of their territorial churches. They were no longer able to impose their own theological beliefs on their subjects. Any subsequent conversion was to remain a private matter. Rulers gained personal freedom of conscience but lost a key aspect of their political authority. This removed much of the controversy surrounding the ecclesiastical reservation that was formally confirmed but now became largely irrelevant because further secularization had been ruled out.

Only the Habsburgs retained the full right of Reformation in its previous form, because the IPO merely obliged them to respect the Protestant faith of the Lower Austrian nobility, the city of Breslau, and the Silesian princes and their tenants. Elsewhere, they remained free to suppress Protestant minorities, even if these had existed in 1624. In addition, Article IV, paragraph 53 expressly confirmed the confiscation of rebel property in Bohemia and Austria, and exempted Habsburg possessions from the checks imposed on the rulers of other territories. Ferdinand III and his successors were free to continue extending their authority over their subjects by promoting Catholicism and fostering a loyal aristocracy. Whereas half of Europe had been under Protestant rule in 1590, that proportion fell to a fifth a century later with the most significant Catholic gains made in the Habsburg monarchy.²²

The constitutional changes safeguarded political equality elsewhere between the three recognized confessions and extended a wide range of personal freedoms to their adherents. Religious discrimination was banned from commercial companies, guilds, societies, hospitals, burial grounds, schools and universities and in inheritance law. Nonetheless, this stopped short of full toleration in the modern sense. Instead, three levels of religious freedom received constitutional guarantees. The new normative year associated each territory with one of the three confessions. Adherents received full rights of public worship, complete with processions, bells, church spires, feast days and the other trappings required by their particular doctrine. Those minorities with official recognition in the territory on 1 January 1624 received lesser rights of private worship, denying them, among other things, the right to summon their followers by ringing bells, or processing in public. Minorities without recognized rights in 1624 were granted reduced rights of domestic worship, allowing them to practise their faith within their own homes and to visit churches in neighbouring territories.

Toleration was thus not based on individual equal rights but on membership of a community with corporate rights. All people received legal protection, but this was less extensive for those belonging to the third category of unofficial minorities. The authorities were encouraged to display ‘patient toleration’ towards such groups, but their powers under the 1555 Peace to expel them were confirmed, subject to three years’ notice to sell their property and leave.²³ Despite the uneven distribution of rights, they were more extensive and better secured than those in other countries, because they were embedded in a judicial system that did not depend on the arbitrary power of a centralized state. Even the famously tolerant Dutch Republic offered no legal protection for those dissenting from Calvinism.

The arrangements worked because they were a genuine compromise that brought gains for Catholics and Protestants alike. The Protestants had defeated the hated Edict of Restitution by securing 1624 as a more favourable normative year, and enhancing their political position through greater confessional parity in imperial institutions. The Calvinists finally secured full protection under imperial law, and the Catholics upheld their inflexible interpretation of the Religious Peace by obliging Protestants to renounce further claims to church land. The ecclesiastical reservation was confirmed, but now cut both ways with Catholics accepting that former church land would remain secularized even if its ruler converted from Protestantism. Though the losses entailed by 1624 were painful, that date was considerably better than those originally proposed by the Protestants, who were obliged to restore the property taken after Swedish intervention. This reconciled Catholics to the rules permitting freedom of conscience, especially as their right to expel dissenters had been confirmed.

Rather than secularizing politics, the Thirty Years War discredited the use of force to obtain confessional or political objectives within the Empire. Confessional militancy did persist after 1648, personified by Christoph Bernhard von Galen who was known as the ‘cannon bishop’ of Münster for his attempts to impose his authority over his largely Protestant capital city.²⁴ Galen had some success, but was increasingly out of step with the more moderate Catholics represented by Schönborn of Mainz, the dominant figure in the imperial church until his death in 1673. Schönborn promoted long-standing efforts to reconcile German Christians within a national church that would finally banish the threat of secularization of the ecclesiastical territories. This programme was picked up by others, notably after the mid-eighteenth century when the Catholic church lands often embraced more progressive social reforms than their ‘enlightened’ Protestant neighbours. It failed, because secular Catholic rulers, including those of Austria and Bavaria, increasingly regarded the imperial church as a convenient arena for their territorial ambitions and withdrew support for its autonomous existence during the Empire’s last reorganization in 1802–3.²⁵

Other practical impulses encouraged moderation. The need to repopulate territories after 1648 encouraged rulers to relax insistence on confessional conformity. Already by 1662, the counts of Neuwied extended toleration to Christian sectarians by issuing their own legislation that went beyond the basic rights guaranteed by imperial law. Other minor territories extended toleration to Jews on the same basis. Moreover, many rights were open to people regardless of religion. For example, Jews could prosecute Christians in the imperial courts on the basis of property law. This complex web of legal rights combined, in some cases at least, with a more genuine spirit of toleration to offer a range of freedoms largely absent elsewhere in Europe: the Jewish inmates of the Hamburg workhouse were allowed to observe the Sabbath, for instance.²⁶

The Empire’s religious settlement thus offered an alternative route to the more common path towards a modern secular society provided by a centralized state. Both routes had drawbacks. Centralized states imposed official uniformity through an established church and then widened opportunities for others through limited toleration. In most cases, gradual pluralism led eventually to the disestablishment of the official church, as in the modern French Republic where the state is fully secular. The disadvantage of this approach has been the long purgatory of persecution endured by dissenting minorities whose limited freedoms came as gifts from above from a state that could revoke them, as the French monarchy chose to do with the abolition of the Huguenots’ religious freedoms in 1685. The Empire took a different direction, accepting three privileged churches with equal status. This reduced official persecution and intolerance, while creating greater opportunities for mutual understanding, especially as national identity was not primarily linked to a particular creed. Its drawback lay in rooting religious freedom in a web of corporate rights, and thus in a conservative social order that saw the rule of law, not democracy, as the guarantee for stability.

The Nuremberg Execution Congress

The preceding becomes clearer when we examine how the peace treaties were implemented. Their success lay not in settling every dispute, but providing guidelines to defuse conflict peacefully. The IPO had deliberately postponed a range of contentious issues to bring the war to a conclusion. These problems were not ignored, however. One important example was the normative year, where the IPO established a basic rule but left it to the emperor and imperial Estates to work out the detailed implementation together. Likewise, the treaty specified the amount of compensation to be paid to Sweden and Hessen-Kassel, but did not provide a detailed schedule for troop withdrawal. Tight deadlines were imposed: implementation of the normative year was to be completed within two months, while the Reichstag was to convene within six to debate the postponed constitutional issues, by when demobilization was also supposed to have been completed.

All three deadlines were missed. The peace was ratified on 18 February 1649, but it was not until 1654 that the last foreign garrison was removed. The Reichstag met three years late in June 1653 and concluded with an imperial Recess in May 1654 that still left many important matters open.²⁷ An imperial decree entrusted implementation of the normative year to the Kreis convenors on 7 November 1648, but some cases were still pending when the Empire was dissolved in 1806. It is easy to see why many have considered the peace a failure and the Empire an empty shell after 1648. However, the unrealistic timetable reflected the widespread impatience to restore peaceful relations and prevent a resumption of hostilities. These basic objectives were achieved, even if the details took longer to finalize.

The Reichstag was delayed by Sweden’s reluctance to relinquish eastern Pomerania to Brandenburg. Appreciating the advantages of Brandenburg goodwill, Ferdinand III withheld formal enfeoffment from Queen Christina, preventing her from exercising the constitutional rights associated with her German possessions. She gave way in May 1653, surrendering eastern Pomerania in return for half its toll revenue, clearing the way for her investiture. Her representative at last travelled to Regensburg where the emperor and other delegates had been waiting with growing impatience.

The more pressing matters of troop withdrawal and the normative year had meanwhile been handled by a special Execution Congress (Exekutionstag) in Nuremberg to ‘execute’, or implement, the peace. Delays in demobilization and restoring property were eroding confidence in the settlement. Implementation of the normative year immediately hit the difficulties encountered by those charged with enforcing restitution in 1629. It proved difficult to disentangle the competing claims accumulated over decades of changing ownership.²⁸ Ferdinand was keen to reassert his authority by assigning the matter to the Reichshofrat, which named a Protestant and a Catholic prince as commissioners in cases where the Kreis convenors encountered local resistance. Several princes appealed directly to the court to uphold their interpretation of the normative year. Though some applicants were Protestant, many distrusted the Reichshofrat as it had only two Protestants among its fourteen judges. Moreover, referral through the court was very slow, because the commissioners had to review the evidence before making a recommendation to the judges.

The Swedes were very concerned at the delay. They regarded the restoration of Protestant property as an essential part of Gustavus’s legacy, and believed that it should be completed before they withdrew their troops. However, Christina and her advisers wanted a quick withdrawal because they feared they were losing their hold over an army that threatened to act independently. There were lingering suspicions that senior officers would simply seize territory in lieu of their arrears. Such unilateral action would damage Sweden’s standing, yet the army could not simply be dismissed either. Under growing pressure to act, its commander, Carl Gustav, invited his French, Hessian and Bavarian counterparts to meet him in Nuremberg to arrange a phased withdrawal (see below, p.769). As it became clear that France and Spain would not make peace, most representatives still in Westphalia moved to Nuremberg by early May 1649. While the generals discussed demobilization, the imperial Estates seized the initiative over the normative year by establishing their own bi-confessional deputation to review the outstanding cases.

Ferdinand’s reaction to this challenge to his judicial authority indicates his willingness to work within the new constitutional framework. He accepted the deputation as an auxiliary to the Reichshofrat that retrospectively sanctioned its decisions. In the meantime, he was spared the difficult task of judging the appeals. The deputation was wound up in May 1651 having resolved only 31 of the 117 cases it received, handing the remainder back to the Reichshofrat. This resumed the appointment of commissioners who appeared increasingly suspect to some Protestants. Importantly, there was no return to the ‘religious cases’ that had undermined imperial justice in the later sixteenth century. Brandenburg did manipulate the issue at the Reichstag in 1653 in an attempt to revive the radical Protestant political programme. Ferdinand neatly deflected this challenge by issuing his own revised ordinance for the Reichshofrat before the radicals imposed one themselves.²⁹ The number of Protestant judges was raised to six out of eighteen, sufficient to ensure parity on bi-confessional panels dealing with individual cases, but the court stayed under the emperor’s immediate jurisdiction.

Relative Success

The remaining cases over the normative year were referred to another imperial deputation that met in Frankfurt in 1655 that was soon charged with additional matters and was unable to clear the backlog. Cases were soon referred back to the Reichshofrat, or the revived Reichskammergericht after 1663. The persistence of these disputes did not detract from the overall success. Of the 313 petitions received by June 1651, around half were settled by 1654, with most of the remainder resolved within the next decade. Only 5 per cent of cases involved substantial property rights. Most concerned the exercise of fiscal privileges like tithes, or items such as religious paintings, documents, or compensation for alleged injuries.³⁰

Some of the most serious cases were resolved before the Nuremberg congress opened. The duke of Württemberg recovered his monasteries, while Protestant rights were restored in bi-confessional Augsburg. The normative year was then implemented successfully in most other Swabian cases. Elsewhere, the rule was ignored or bent to suit local rulers. There was little Ferdinand could do to prevent the Swedes redistributing the remaining church land in their German possessions as additional compensation for their senior officers. Other rulers suppressed dissident minorities and recovered churches for their own faith, contrary to official protection. Osnabrück was an important example as it was regulated by a special article intended to reconcile the Catholic bishop Wartenberg and the Guelphs to the IPO. Wartenberg remained bishop on the condition Osnabrück passed to a Guelph duke on his death. It would then alternate between an elected Catholic bishop and a Protestant Guelph duke. The normative year was to apply there, as well as to the part of Hildesheim retained by the Guelphs where they had to accept fifty Catholic parishes alongside eighty Lutheran ones. Wartenberg falsified documents to ‘prove’ the Tridentine decrees had been implemented in Osnabrück in 1571, rather than 1625 – a deception not discovered until 1988.³¹ Nonetheless, Protestants remained in the majority, while the high incidence of cross-confessional marriages suggests a measure of social harmony.

The overall impact varied. In some areas, the coexistence of two faiths in the same community hardened divisions by creating an ‘invisible frontier’. The most notorious example was the city of Augsburg where guilds, taverns and even pigsties were now segregated along confessional lines. However, many territories successfully integrated dissenting minorities and even individual communities accommodated two faiths. After initial conflict in the village of Goldenstadt between Bremen and Minden, Catholics and Lutherans agreed to share the local church after 1650. Lutherans attended high mass while the Catholic organist played Lutheran hymns. Lutherans remained silent during Catholic singing, and the local Catholic authorities instructed the priest to avoid controversy.³² It is important not to see this as progressive secularization or modern tolerance. Rather, it represented a return to the earlier pragmatism that had been eroded by confessional militancy during the war. For example, mixed marriages were already common in areas of territorial and confessional fragmentation before 1618, and they resumed as fear and hostility abated after 1648.³³

The Düsseldorf Cow War

The key point was not the imperfect implementation of the normative year, but that violence had been discredited as a tool of repression. This became obvious when Brandenburg tried to use force to resolve the long-standing Jülich-Cleves dispute in 1651. The inheritance remained divided according to the treaty Elector Friedrich Wilhelm imposed on Duke Wolfgang Wilhelm in 1647 (see Chapter 20, p. 717). Brandenburg held Cleves, Mark and Ravensberg, leaving Jülich and Berg to Pfalz-Neuburg. The arrangement confirmed the earlier settlements of 1609 and 1614 regarding church property in all five territories. These arrangements pre-dated the normative year. Wolfgang Wilhelm argued that the normative year took precedence as imperial legislation and ordered its implementation in his two duchies in March 1651. He hoped to stabilize his authority by this move, because more parishes had been in Catholic hands in 1624 than a decade before. Friedrich Wilhelm objected to this unilateral action while the relevant Reichshofrat commission was still reviewing the evidence. He presented himself as protector of the 62,000 Protestants living in the duchies and despatched 3,800 troops into Berg in June.

The Brandenburgers killed two civilians as they advanced, before shelling one of Wolfgang Wilhelm’s palaces and seizing a herd of cows belonging to his wife. The Pfalz-Neuburg envoy in Vienna coined the term ‘Cow War’ to belittle Brandenburg objectives and place its elector on a par with a cattle rustler. The invasion was no minor affair, however. The foreign powers had not yet completed their withdrawal and it was feared they would side with their co-religionists. Brandenburg increased its forces in the region to 7,500 by July, allegedly mobilizing 16,000 men altogether across its possessions. Outnumbered with only 3,000 men, Wolfgang Wilhelm called on Duke Charles of Lorraine who had been subsisting as a Spanish auxiliary since 1644. Charles now posed as a good Catholic, launching a counter-invasion of the duchy of Mark that was really intended to find food for his small army.

The struggle represented a very serious challenge to the Westphalian settlement, because it exemplified the tensions that caused the war in 1618. This makes the reaction to the crisis all the more significant. During the 1640s, the Dutch garrisons in Orsoy and Rheinberg regularly kidnapped priests in Jülich and Berg to pressure Wolfgang Wilhelm to tolerate Protestant worship in his duchies. Now, however, the Dutch roundly condemned Brandenburg’s invasion and backed the Estates of all five territories that refused money to either side. Sweden advised Friedrich Wilhelm to back down, while Hatzfeldt arrived from Vienna and browbeat Wolfgang Wilhelm into agreeing a truce. Imperial mediation then persuaded Brandenburg to accept a new Reichshofrat commission in October and both sides withdrew their troops by the end of the year.

The distribution of church property was left on the basis of current possession in 1651 while the commission sought a definitive settlement. The fact that it did not impose the normative year should not be considered a failure. The whole purpose of that arrangement was to end violent disputes. The crisis proved the redundancy of force. Pfalz-Neuburg had failed to get its way completely, while Brandenburg’s invasion left it diplomatically isolated. Even ardent Protestants realized the elector’s real motive was to repeat his attempt of 1646 to conquer the entire inheritance. His submission to Ferdinand greatly enhanced the emperor’s standing on the eve of the new Reichstag. Even the subsequent collapse of the new commission mattered little. Brandenburg and Pfalz-Neuburg were compelled to resolve their differences through amicable agreements in 1666 and 1672 that confirmed the distribution of territory and church property on the basis of the 1647 and 1651 arrangements.³⁴

The Palatine Controversy

The general success of the religious settlement can be gauged from the disputes in the Lower Palatinate that provided the most contentious and prolonged controversy over the normative year. The Thirty Years War left the Calvinist elector Karl Ludwig with so few subjects that he was forced to build churches for the Lutheran community and even to grant limited toleration to Catholics. The electorate passed in 1685 to his Catholic Pfalz-Neuburg relation Philipp Wilhelm, son of Wolfgang Wilhelm. The new elector began a concerted campaign to promote Catholicism in defiance of the normative year. The issue assumed prominence because it concerned an electorate and occurred against a backdrop of general Protestant decline. Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in the year of Philipp Wilhelm’s accession, while Protestantism in the Empire lost its patrons as 31 German princes converted to Catholicism between 1648 and 1769. The most significant conversion was that of Elector Augustus of Saxony who embraced Catholicism in 1697 to ensure his election to the Polish throne. This coincided with the reimposition of Catholicism on parts of the Lower Palatinate with French connivance, leading to a partial re-confessionalization of imperial politics that lasted into the 1730s.³⁵

The period saw a third of the 750 official complaints received by imperial institutions between 1648 and 1803 about infringements of religious rights.³⁶ Religion clearly still mattered, otherwise appeals along confessional lines would have lacked resonance. The root cause of the controversy was, however, political and lay in the development of Brandenburg ambitions after 1648 to join the front rank of European powers. The then elector Frederick III (King Frederick I of Prussia from 1700) saw a chance to wrest political leadership of the German Protestants from Saxony by exploiting Augustus’s conversion and the threat posed by the re-Catholicization of the Palatinate. The episode draws our attention to the constitutional changes introduced at Westphalia to defuse confessional tension.

The new arrangement of itio in partes permitted the Protestant imperial Estates to convene as the corpus evangelicorum to discuss issues relating to their religious rights. This fell far short of the earlier radical Protestant proposal to split the Reichstag permanently along confessional lines. The more reduced format enabled Saxony to assume leadership of the group that was inaugurated on 21 July 1653. The Saxon decision was broadly welcomed by Lutherans and ensured the organization remained a forum to debate common concerns, rather than an alternative to the Reichstag. Saxony appreciated the danger of deadlock inherent in the itio in partes rights. While Protestants debated among themselves, Saxony refrained from invoking the new rights in the Reichstag itself where the Estates continued to meet in their three hierarchical colleges and take decisions by majority vote. The corpus became more problematic once Saxon leadership faltered in the wake of its elector’s conversion to Catholicism in 1697. In its bid to replace Saxon leadership, Brandenburg-Prussia proved a far tougher bully than the Palatinate a century earlier, but it likewise found confession a poor vehicle for a viable alliance. Saxony repelled all efforts to displace it and generally acted as a break on confessionalized politics. The right of itio in partes was only used five times after 1648, beginning in 1727, and each occasion was the result of Prussian manipulation intended to derail Austrian Habsburg management of the Empire. The last, in 1780, disrupted the Reichstag for five years, but did not prevent that institution from reviving and functioning well until 1806.³⁷

The elector Palatine meanwhile defused the confessional problem by granting equal rights to all three Christian churches in his lands in 1705, although bickering over minor infringements continued for another decade or so.³⁸ The controversy underscores how the Thirty Years War changed imperial political culture. The disputes after 1648 no longer concerned fundamental truth, but the relative weight of Protestant and Catholic territories in imperial institutions. This political aspect had been present before 1618, but was overlaid by a theological militancy lacking after 1648. Theologians no longer influenced policy. The Prussian kings Frederick I and his son, Frederick William I, embraced the Lutheran fundamentalist revival known as Pietism from the 1690s, but largely as a means of promoting useful values like obedience, thrift and duty. Frederick the Great, king of Prussia in 1740 –86, was personally indifferent to religion and used it opportunistically in his rivalry with Austria, but it remained subordinate to his wider use of the existing constitution. Unlike the elector Palatine Frederick V, the Prussian Frederick sought constitutional stasis, not change, regarding the post-Westphalian framework as the best means to constrain Austrian influence.³⁹

DEMOBILIZATION

Alongside its role in implementing the religious settlement, the Nuremberg Execution Congress successfully oversaw demobilization. The withdrawal of foreign garrisons made peace tangible, restoring confidence and enabling other aspects of reconstruction to commence. It was a formidable task. There were around 160,000 soldiers and probably a similar number of dependants to be evacuated or discharged (see Table 6). They were scattered across the Empire, often far from their own homes or the countries of their paymasters. The Swedes held 84 towns and castles, and had 31 garrisons in the provinces they had just received in the peace. The French occupied 56 places, while the Hessians had 27, in addition to 10 garrisons on their own territory. The Imperialists, Bavarians and Westphalians were already concentrated on their own soil, but still held 33 posts elsewhere in total. More problematic was the presence of the Spanish in Frankenthal and the Lorrainers in seven castles between the Saar and the Rhine, because neither of these belligerents was included in the peace.

Table 6: Military strength in the Empire, October 1648

Note: The above excludes Spanish forces in the Burgundian Kreis, those in imperial Italy, as well as Austrian Habsburg troops outside the Empire in Hungary. It also excludes the 6–7,000 Lorrainers (mainly in Luxembourg), as well as the neutral Brandenburg, Guelph and Saxon forces that probably totalled around 15,000. The figures for the Westphalian army relate to February 1649 by which time some men had already been discharged. The total for October 1648 was probably around 15,000.

Sources: T. Lorentzen, Die schwedische Armee im Dreiβigjährigen Kriege und ihre Abdankung (Leipzig, 1894), pp.184–92; P. Hoyos, ‘Die kaiserliche Armee 1648–1650’, in Der Dreiβigjährige Krieg (issued by the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Vienna, 1976), pp.169–232; H. Salm, Armeefinanzierung im Dreiβigjährigen Krieg (Münster, 1990), pp.154–61; B.R. Kroener, ‘ “Der Krieg hat ein Loch…” Überlegungen zum Schicksal demobilisierter Söldner nach dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg’, in H. Duchhardt (ed.), Der Westfälische Friede (Munich, 1998), pp.599–630; C. Kapser, Die bayerische Kriegsorganisation 1635–1648/49 (Münster, 1997), p.220.

As long as the soldiers remained, people feared the war might restart. All yearned for a ‘peace dividend’ after decades of onerous military burdens, yet the IPO stated that soldiers were to be maintained at local expense until the withdrawal was completed. The Swedes initially claimed their army was 125,000 strong to press as much money from Germany as possible, but they were soon obliged to provide detailed lists that revealed their actual strength was only half that. Queen Christina suspected her cousin Carl Gustav of deliberately delaying demobilization to prolong his influence. In fact, he asserted his authority over other generals like Wrangel and worked hard to accelerate matters. He got rid of the cumbersome baggage and amalgamated regiments, reducing the total number of companies from 952 to 403 at the beginning of 1649. The discharge of the 2,200 superfluous officers greatly reduced monthly maintenance costs, which were halved after January 1649 to 500,000 talers by October. Maintenance of the Swedes nonetheless cost the Empire 15 million tlr in addition to their 5 million ‘satisfaction’ money.⁴⁰

Many soldiers were also disgruntled at the delay and suspected they would be cheated of their arrears and the promised rewards. Several Swedish units in southern Germany mutinied, prompting Carl Gustav to abandon the garrisons there and concentrate the troops in northern Germany where he could supervise the soldiers more closely. Sweden thereby lost its hold over the south German territories and feared these areas would not deliver their share of the satisfaction money. Carl Gustav pressed the north German Protestants even harder, deliberately obstructing implementation of the normative year to encourage payment. The process of reducing the armies also slowed as some rulers used the remaining units to reimpose their authority on recalcitrant areas. Ferdinand of Cologne sent 3,500 Westphalian troops to bring his subjects in Liège to heel in the summer of 1649.⁴¹

These problems concentrated minds in Nuremberg. A phased withdrawal was agreed on 21 September 1649, setting out which towns each army had to evacuate as the satisfaction money came in. A supplementary agreement on 4 March 1650 added 200,000 tlr to the Swedish satisfaction in return for accelerating their withdrawal. The congress concluded arrangements with Sweden that June, followed by France in July. The French had largely pulled back into their own territory already by the end of 1648, leaving only a few posts in south-western Germany that were abandoned in the summer of 1650.

Payments were organized through the Empire’s system of assigning tax quotas to each territory. The emperor received 100 Roman months to reduce his forces, which had already been withdrawn into the Habsburg hereditary lands by early 1649 so as not to incur blame for delaying the peace. Total strength fell to 26,230 men by September 1650, but these were retained thereafter, giving Ferdinand a considerably larger peacetime standing army than his predecessors before 1618. Generals Hatzfeldt and Sparr meanwhile oversaw the disbandment of the Westphalians, completed by September 1650.⁴² Another thirteen Roman months (250,000 tlr) were paid to Spain in return for its evacuation of Frankenthal in 1652 in a deal brokered by the emperor.

Sweden received 133.5 Roman months (5.2 million tlr) from seven of the ten Kreise. Burgundy was exempt, because it was excluded from the peace. The Austrian lands were assigned exclusively to the imperial army, while the Bavarian Kreis helped pay off Maximilian’s army. Though Salzburg objected, the other members of the Bavarian Kreis paid a heavy levy of 125 Roman months to raise 753,303 fl. that cleared the army’s arrears.⁴³ The electorates of Mainz and Cologne and the various Westphalian lands occupied by the Hessians were also exempted, because their payments went to disband Amalie Elisabeth’s troops instead. The Hessians received the full 800,000 tlr they had been promised and evacuated their last post (Lippstadt) in 1652. The Swedes received a remarkable nine-tenths of their money by the June 1650 deadline, despite much of the money having to come from Catholic territories, and not just the Protestants as originally envisaged in the 1635 negotiations. A mere 3 per cent remained outstanding when they evacuated Vechta in 1654 which they had held as security for the final arrears.

The 18,000 native Swedes and Finns were shipped home. Only 6,000 Germans were retained by the Swedes to garrison their new possessions, while the rest were disbanded. Bavarian demobilization was the most complete, as the entire army was discharged apart from the elector’s bodyguard. Saxony and Brandenburg retained only around 1,500 men each; the other princes simply kept bodyguards and a few garrison companies. Other than the emperor, no prince really had an army. Bavaria did not recruit new troops until 1657, and most territories continued to rely on reorganized militias rather than professional troops into the 1660s. German armies therefore cannot be said to have ‘been left standing’ after 1648.⁴⁴ It was not until the onset of French aggression after 1666 that most major princes armed themselves with new, permanent forces.

At least 130,000 men were discharged into civilian life at a time when the Dutch also reduced their establishment by around 20,000 men. The Swedes used some of the satisfaction money to transport the native soldiers home, distributing the rest to the men who were demobilized. The other armies paid their men off in a similar fashion, sometimes also giving them surplus weapons and munitions in lieu of pay arrears. Infantry privates in Swedish service received 6 tlr each, 10 tlr less than their comrades in the cavalry. These were decent amounts, but hardly sufficient to retire on. Both the IPO and IPM forbade the transfer of soldiers into armies of countries still at war, except for that of Venice which received special dispensation because it was fighting the infidel Ottomans. A large proportion of the Bavarian, Dutch and probably other soldiers entered Venetian service. Contrary to the prohibition, France recruited around 8,000 Dutch and Germans at the end of 1648, but reduced the numbers of foreigners in its service after 1655. The remaining Bernhardine officers lost their special status with the incorporation of the Army of Germany into the other French forces. French commanders distrusted Germans for their Protestantism and their reputation for mutiny. Some men enlisted for the brief Cow War of 1651, but both Pfalz-Neuburg and Brandenburg drastically reduced their armies once this finished. Some of those discharged then joined the Lorraine army. A recent modern estimate placed the total entering service outside the Empire at no more than 30,000.⁴⁵

Once those numbers still in imperial and Swedish service are deducted, this suggests about 80,000 former soldiers remained to be absorbed into civil society around 1650. There was widespread fear they would not be able to adjust. The immediate post-war years were disturbed by marauding bands that included many former soldiers, but also other displaced persons. Many soldiers found new employment as watchmen hired by villages and small towns for their own security. Much of the fear proved unfounded and the reduction in the numbers of watchmen in the early 1650s suggests a fairly swift return to relative tranquillity.⁴⁶ Soldiers, especially those with skills or families, were generally welcomed by most territorial governments keen to repopulate the countryside and bring abandoned land under cultivation.

THE IMPERIAL RECOVERY

Habsburg Power

The relatively swift demobilization was just one factor promoting an impressive recovery of the emperor’s influence. As with other aspects of the settlement, this did not represent a return to the past. The war had changed perceptions of the imperial office in ways that only gradually became clear. Ferdinand II’s programme to increase his authority had been defeated outside the Habsburg lands. Many leading thinkers believed that real power in the Empire was shifting to the electors and more important princes, eroding both the emperor’s authority and the autonomy of the weaker imperial Estates. Later historians accepted their verdict too readily, presenting the Empire after 1648 as a loose federation of independent states. This federalist tendency persisted as a current in imperial politics, but never fully asserted itself until Emperor Francis II dissolved the Empire in August 1806 under pressure from Napoleonic France.⁴⁷

Far from turning his back on the Empire to concentrate on Austrian interests, Ferdinand III made a concerted effort to rebuild Habsburg influence. He and his two immediate successors pursued a much more intensive imperial policy than Rudolf II had before the war. Rudolf attempted to rule by cultivating an aura of lofty majesty that merely isolated him from the Empire. Ferdinand II sought to impose his will unilaterally, consulting only the electors and denying the lesser imperial Estates a chance to share responsibility. His son accepted the new political conditions, turning them to his advantage to govern by consent, not coercion. He realized that active involvement in imperial institutions allowed him to shape their development. The postponement of the outstanding constitutional questions as negotia remissa by the IPO left large aspects of executive authority undefined. The emperor retained the initiative in many areas. To be effective, he had to win the confidence of the imperial Estates by carefully cultivating influential figures, presenting Habsburg interests as common concerns, and avoiding rash or controversial actions.

This direction was signalled at the 1653–4 Reichstag, the last meeting before that of 1663 that remained in permanent session as the ‘eternal diet’. Despite concluding a Recess of 200 articles in 1654, the Reichstag left open key areas of security policy and judicial reform. These omissions did not hinder the functioning of the existing arrangements. Far more significant was the confirmation of the framework for taking decisions in the Empire. The 1654 Recess reprinted the entire IPO and IPM, along with the two concluding Nuremberg recesses of 1650. Its Article 6 declared these as permanent fundamental laws, stabilizing the Empire as a mixed monarchy where power was exercised in unequal shares by the emperor and imperial Estates. The lack of precision in certain areas left room for further modification in response to circumstances, as well as preserving the remaining imperial prerogatives by leaving them undefined and hence unlimited.

Ferdinand was thus able to accept curbs on other aspects of his authority. Most notably, he agreed that all future elevations in status among the imperial Estates depended on the electors’ and princes’ agreement. In return, the Reichstag accepted his creation of nine new princes to reward loyal supporters from the war, including Nassau-Hadamar and Piccolomini. Only ten further elevations were approved over the next century. Meanwhile, the remaining counts were integrated into the Reichstag by granting them collective votes in the college of princes. These changes confirmed the Empire as a hierarchy of imperial Estates under the emperor’s authority but not his direct control. He would have to rule by persuasion, not formal power.

The emperor had already impressed the Estates by attending the Reichstag with a 3,000-strong entourage and spending 46,000 fl. on opera and other festivities to demonstrate his continued wealth despite the war. He also took more practical steps to alleviate the pressing problem of Duke Charles of Lorraine, who had invaded the bishopric of Liège. He persuaded the Reichstag to raise 300,000 tlr to pay the Lorrainers to evacuate their seven castles in the Rhineland. He then cooperated with Spain, for whom the duke had become an embarrassment, to arrest him in February 1654. France and Spain agreed that Liège, as part of the Westphalian Kreis, was henceforth to be treated as neutral in their war. The remaining Lorraine troops were incorporated into the Spanish army.⁴⁸ The arrangement completed the demobilization process and preserved peace along the Empire’s western frontier.

Spanish cooperation was a sign of the changing balance between the two branches of the Habsburg dynasty that had been under way since the early 1640s. In contrast to Ferdinand II’s reign, it was now Austria that assisted Spain. Ferdinand III circumvented the restrictions imposed by the IPM to discharge 4,000 troops directly into the Spanish army by 1651. (Plans four years later to send another 12,700 over the Alps to Milan were thwarted when the men refused to go.) Austria continued to help Spain for the rest of the seventeenth century. In return, Spain transferred its feudal jurisdiction over parts of Italy to the emperor, strengthening the bonds of that region to the Empire and providing a basis for the eventual incorporation of Spain’s Italian possessions into the Austrian monarchy after 1700.⁴⁹

Ferdinand’s cultivation of good relations in the Empire was rewarded by the election of his son, Ferdinand IV, as king of the Romans during the Reichstag in 1654. This triumph confirmed the defeat of the French-backed plans to prevent the election of consecutive emperors from the same dynasty. Ferdinand also thwarted efforts to impose a set of further, permanent restrictions on imperial prerogatives (the capitulatio perpetua). This element of the radical Protestant programme from the 1640s remained on the agenda into the eighteenth century but never became law, because the electors backed the emperor in vetoing it.⁵⁰

Ferdinand IV’s early death on 9 July 1654, just two months after the Reichstag closed, temporarily threatened the imperial recovery. A new successor had not been approved before Ferdinand III died on 2 April 1657, creating an interregnum that lasted fifteen months. Ferdinand III’s second son was eventually elected as Emperor Leopold I thanks to strong Bavarian support.⁵¹ Leopold continued his father’s policies with considerable success. The length of his reign (to 1705) contributed to the consolidation of imperial authority. It is a measure of his achievement that he secured the Empire’s backing, albeit with some reluctance, for Austria’s claim to the Spanish succession opened by the death of the last Habsburg king there in 1700. In contrast to the early 1600s when the Habsburg monarchy lurched towards disaster thanks to a surfeit of quarrelling brothers, Emperor Charles VI’s death in 1740 without a son exposed it to a new succession crisis. Prussia’s seizure of Silesia in December 1740 began an open contest for influence, fundamentally altering the political balance within Central Europe. Austria was thrown increasingly onto its own resources as the other territories tried to avoid being crushed between it and Prussia. Nonetheless, the imperial title remained significant to the Habsburgs’ international prestige and they only relinquished it with great reluctance after their defeat by Napoleon.⁵²

Territorial Sovereignty

The IPO codified existing territorial jurisdictions, rather than granting significant new rights. Though collectively labelled ‘territorial sovereignty’ (Landeshoheit), these jurisdictions did not make the territories independent states, because such rights remained firmly associated with the status of imperial Estate. Those who exercised them remained part of the Empire that both legitimized their authority and protected their status and possessions.⁵³ The war’s main impact was not to loosen the bonds between the Empire and its component territories, but to strengthen the authority of the latter over their subjects. The IPO clearly associated territorial sovereignty with the electors, princes and magistrates of the imperial cities, eliminating all chance of intermediary bodies within the territories claiming such rights themselves. Prior to 1618, provincial Estates like those in Austria and Bohemia maintained militias and sent envoys to foreign powers. Such actions were now clearly illegal under the imperial constitution.

The full implications of this change only emerged slowly. Imperial politics remained a matter of interpretation defined by practice, rather than abstraction. Territorial rulers remained bound by imperial law that took precedence over their own legislation. A good example is their right to make alliances with foreign powers that has often been cited as evidence for their supposed ‘independence’. All alliances remained subject to the restriction that they were not to be directed against the emperor or Empire.⁵⁴ Alliance rights were not new, and princes like the elector Palatine already signed treaties with foreign powers before 1618. In fact, the IPO tightened the restrictions by displacing confession and ‘German freedom’ as legitimate bases for such alliances. All future treaties were to be directed at sustaining the constitution, not promoting particular interests. This stipulation was largely respected after 1648, as the war had proved the redundancy of confession as a viable basis for alliances, and underscored the danger of foreign entanglements generally. Sweden’s manipulation of the elastic concept of ‘German freedom’ made this slogan less attractive than the security offered by the current constitution.

Ambitious princes still used alliances to advance their own dynastic interests. Major powers like France, the Dutch Republic and, later, Britain paid subsidies in return for troops supplied by the princes. Such arrangements were roundly condemned in the nineteenth century as ‘blood money’ and a waste of ‘German’ effort that could have been put to a more ‘national’ purpose. They were expedients used by the princes to win political support to improve their status in a rapidly changing international order. Very few resulted in the soldiers being used against the Empire, and most princes ensured clauses were added that permitted them to supply their contingent to the imperial army, even if this was being sent against their new ally.⁵⁵

Far from leaving the Empire an empty shell, the Westphalian settlement thus injected new life into its constitution and strengthened its political culture. Stabilization of the Empire contributed to European peace by removing a source of tension from the heart of the continent. The spectre of Catholic Habsburg hegemony had been banished, not least because Spain had been bled dry by its own prolonged conflicts. The Empire remained a hierarchical political order, but its internal balance had shifted significantly. The line between imperial Estates and other authorities was more sharply drawn, reducing the number claiming to act beyond local affairs. However, those now recognized as imperial Estates participated more equally in collective decisions through the Empire’s representative institutions. The emperor no longer decided policy in consultation with an exclusive group of electors, but with all Estates, especially once the Reichstag remained in session after 1663. Though cumbersome, this mechanism was still capable of reaching collective decisions, enabling the Empire to defend itself successfully against French and Ottoman attacks between 1664 and 1714. The role of confession in imperial politics declined significantly, and the Empire’s subsequent problems lay in the emergence of Austria and Prussia as separate great powers that outgrew its collective framework.