What possible relevance could the European Religious Wars of the 16th and 17th Centuries have to world peace in the 21st Century, you may ask? Well, other than the fact it’s a fascinating period of history full of Game of Thrones-like intrigue and power struggles, it’s also the period that redrew the religious and political map of Europe from the old Roman Catholic Empire to something resembling the modern community of sovereign states we know today. Plus, with sectarian religious violence raging across today’s Islamic world, it’s not the worst time to look at the sectarian Christian struggles of yesteryear.
Quick summary: The European Religious Wars were a series of bloody wars and conflicts waged between various European powers over a period of more than a hundred years following the onset of the Protestant Reformation (see Chapter 15) in northern, central and western Europe. What started as ideological religious conflict, however, became a wider struggle for regional power dominance with wide-ranging repercussions.
Historical context: The once-mighty Roman Empire dominated Europe (not to mention the Middle East and North Africa) from the 1st Century BCE until its eventual collapse in the 5th Century when it splintered into the Byzantine Empire in the east and utter chaos in the west. From this chaos in the west eventually emerged the new Holy Roman Empire in the 9th Century, a political alliance between the Roman Catholic Church and a succession of regional feudal lords in the Middle Ages who exchanged the throne of the Empire – and with it authority over hundreds of semi-independent states in central Europe. As we pick up the story of religious conflict in the 16th Century, the powerful Austro-German House of Habsburg had held the throne of the Empire (as well as a number of separate kingdoms within it) continuously since 1440.
Religious context: When the perceived corruptions of the Roman Catholic Church were challenged by the German preacher Martin Luther in the early 16th Century (1517 to be exact) the protest movement of Lutheranism found a foothold in Germany (particularly amongst landowners tired of sending high taxes back to Rome) and, as the subsequent religious reform movement began to grow, tensions began to rise across Europe. The German princes and nobility had embraced the new ‘reformed’ Lutheran churches, which led in 1530 to the Catholic Emperor Charles V (both Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain at the time) outlawing these new churches and threatening to crush those who favoured them. The German princes formed a unified opposition to this imperial resistance known as the Schmalkaldic League which had an eventual aim to face down and replace the Holy Roman Empire.
An uneasy stand-off between these two sides emerged for around 15 years which enabled Lutheran Protestantism to entrench its position in the German heartlands. This stalemate ended in 1546 when the Emperor’s forces attacked the princes and full-on sectarian conflict erupted. The Peace of Augsburg was signed in 1555 which allowed the rulers of the 224 German states to choose either Catholicism or Protestantism as their realm’s religion – with the caveat that Catholic bishops converting to Protestantism had to give up their territories. By the end of the 16th Century, Germany had roughly split into a Catholic south, Lutheran north and Calvinist west (Calvinism being a variation of Protestantism led by the theologian John Calvin which had gained traction in parts of Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands).
Elsewhere in Europe, Lutheranism had found purchase in Denmark to the north and, by 1536, Protestant forces had won out after war between the Danish houses saw Catholic bishops imprisoned. Sweden had similarly rejected Catholicism and become a Protestant realm.
England split with the Catholic Church as early as 1533 under King Henry VIII as much for political reasons as religious ones, the result being the unique half-way house of Anglicanism. Scotland to the north became more fiercely Protestant, the Calvinist preacher John Knox leading attacks on Catholic churches in 1560 and establishing the reformed church in Scotland as the norm. Scotland and England unified in the early-17th Century but Catholic loyalists remained and England fell into civil war in 1642, Scotland in 1644. By the end of the 17th Century, however, Protestantism had firmly entrenched itself and Catholicism was all but stamped out in England and Scotland.
France was in tumult as well, the Catholic establishment and Calvinist Huguenots becoming embroiled in a power struggle throughout the latter half of the 16th Century that spiralled into wider factional disputes between the French aristocratic houses (such as the House of Bourbon and House of Lorraine) that left a staggering 2 to 4 million dead. The eventual peace treaty (the Edict of Nantes in 1598) gave the Huguenots substantial rights in the name of civil unity (and in many ways opened the door towards eventual French secularism) but France for the time being would remain a Catholic realm.
Spain also remained Catholic. The Spanish King through dynastic inheritance at this time also ruled the Low Countries (modern-day Holland and Belgium). By the mid-16th Century, Calvinist support in the Low Countries had gained a foothold leading to the destructive ‘iconoclast’ movement where Calvinists stormed churches to destroy what they saw as idolatrous statues and images of the numerous Catholic saints. The Dutch Protestant leader William of Orange led a rebel army to victory over their Spanish Catholic rulers in 1568 but, following a further period of violent civil war, the Netherlands by the late-16th Century had, like Germany, effectively divided into a Calvinist north and Catholic south.
The Thirty Years’ War: All of this religious tumult within individual realms came to a head when the matter of imperial succession in the Holy Roman Empire complicated matters in the early 17th Century. Matthias, the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor since 1612 (not to mention the King of Germany, Hungary and Croatia, Bohemia and Archduke of Austria) had acted as a conciliatory force between Catholics and Protestants across the empire but it became clear he would die with no heir and his cousin Ferdinand, a staunch and uncompromising Catholic, would inherit his lands.
The Kingdom of Bohemia (modern Czech Republic) had as far back as the 15th Century (a good hundred years prior to Luther) led its own religious schism from the Catholic Church known as the Hussite movement (a precursor of the later Protestant movement). The thought of strident Catholic Ferdinand on the throne led to the Bohemian Revolt of 1618, which kicked off a period of further struggle that became known as the Thirty Years’ War, escalating these many regional religious conflicts into a wider battle for political dominance across Europe, primarily between the House of Habsburg and the Kingdom of France (France, having been dominated by the Habsburgs in Europe, now saw an opportunity to exert power over the divided German states). The northern lands of Sweden and Denmark also saw an opportunity to strike at the Habsburgs in an attempt to exert influence over the northern German states bordering the Baltic Sea.
Following the Bohemian Revolt, all hell broke loose. Emperor Ferdinand called on his Catholic cousin King Philip of Spain for support while the Bohemians called on the emergent Protestant Union of German states led by Frederick V, a Calvinist, as well as sympathetic foreign Protestants from Britain, the Netherlands and Denmark. However, the unified Catholic forces of the Habsburgs and the Spanish were too strong and subdued the Protestants at the Battle of White Mountain near Prague in 1620. The Bohemian nobility were crushed and Habsburg Catholicism re-enforced on the region. Emboldened, Emperor Ferdinand turned his attention back to the rebel German states and reclaimed former Protestant lands in the name of Catholicism.
Elsewhere, the Spanish and Dutch fighting raged on; the Danish tried to help the northern German Protestants rise up against the Habsburg Catholics; while the Swedish full-on invaded Germany and pushed inland all the way to Munich, until the Spanish intervened.
Re-enter France. Although the House of Habsburg and the kingdoms of Spain and France were all still Catholic, France had a bigger picture in mind and did not hesitate to form allegiances with Protestants to gain the upper hand over its rivals. The powerful French minister Cardinal Richelieu had become the chief advisor of French King Louis XIII and was secretly funding the Dutch Protestants to fight the Spanish as early as 1624, a move of pure power politics which led to Richelieu being denounced by many as a traitor to the Catholic Church. What Richelieu was doing, however, was driving Habsburg towards bankruptcy – France also funded the Swedish Protestants in 1633 to keep them fighting the Habsburgs in Germany. France and Sweden were now essentially fighting Austria and Spain on German soil for control of the whole continent. This chicanery went both ways as Spain secretly funded the Huguenot rebels to keep the French army occupied while they themselves expanded into Italian territories.
The situation had become untenable: up to 8 million had died as a result of the fighting, including half the male population of Germany, and peace talks began between all the major powers in the German region of Westphalia, with agreement that a ‘balance of power’ needed to be attained.
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was a long, drawn-out process that ended the Thirty Years’ War and produced sweeping changes across the continent. Self-determination in religious matters was restored to the rulers of the German states across the Habsburg territories. Catholics and Protestants were made equal before the law. Spain formally recognised Dutch independence after 80 years of fighting. Switzerland gained independence from the Empire, and France and Sweden gained territories.
Although the Peace of Westphalia did not lead to an idyllic everlasting peace in Europe forever (far from it), it did achieve three significant goals: 1) it temporarily stemmed the bloodletting in Europe, 2) it effectively stripped away the importance of religion in European matters of state, and 3) it created the basis for national self-determination, creating a recognised prejudice against interfering in another nation’s domestic affairs and forming one of the key principles of international law as we know it today, still known as Westphalian sovereignty.
To learn more about the past, present and future of the ‘dark art’, jump to Chapter 95: Politics – content to follow
To learn more about the driver behind political activity, jump to Chapter 96: Power – content to follow
To learn more about the concept of independent self-governing countries (as opposed to empires), jump to Chapter 97: Sovereign States – content to follow
