The Epochs of German History by J. Haller

Author:J. Haller [Haller, J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education, Teaching Methods & Materials, Arts & Humanities, History, General, Ancient, Greece
ISBN: 9781000697537
Google: fS3tDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-06-29T01:36:23+00:00

CHAPTER VIII

THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR

THE Peace of Augsburg had achieved two things: the victory of the princes over the Emperor both on the question of the constitution and on that of the church. Germany remained the country of political decentralization, one may even say of political dissolution, and she remained the country of religious discord. In the fight for the control of the Empire, which had lasted through the whole of Charles V’s reign, the princes had not only maintained their position, defeating the Emperor’s attempts to make himself a real ruler, but gained a very considerable increase of power. In all territories, both Protestant and Catholic, the prince became lord over the church. Where the Reformation had been adopted, that is easy to understand: the Protestant churches were everywhere national churches, their clergy state officials. Moreover, the confiscations of church property naturally brought a great increase in the power of the ruler. But in the Catholic regions as well the prince became the determining factor in ecclesiastical affairs, because without him the church would have been quite unable to maintain itself.

Accordingly, in the two next generations the Emperor was of less importance than ever; in spite of their wider dominions—the addition of Bohemia to Austria greatly increased the predominance of the latter over all the other states in area and population—the Emperors of the House of Habsburg after 1555 had lost their position of influence. They were in constant difficulties in consequence of the fight for Hungary, of which they possessed only a very small part, and where they were threatened by the Turks. They would hardly have been able to maintain themselves without the repeated assistance of the King of Spain. Thus it came about that the Emperors lost their leading position once more as completely as in the time of Frederick III. The princes, with their increased power, and impelled by concern for the maintenance of their particular creeds, pursued a considerably more active policy, especially abroad. This independent appearance on the part of Hesse, Saxony, Brandenburg, and above all of the Palatinate, at the foreign courts, in France, England, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Poland, working side by side with or in opposition to the imperial policy, was a new phenomenon.

It was a consequence of the ecclesiastical split, but not a necessary one. Germany would have been quite contented with the peace of 1555, if she had been left to herself. So far as Germany alone was concerned, 1555 might have been the conclusion of the epoch which began in 1519. That this did not happen, that the struggle was begun again after a time, was entirely due to the renewed and continuous interference of foreign powers.

The religious peace had prescribed that every state of the Empire might choose its religion, and thereby decide the religion of its subjects. An exception was made of the heads of the ecclesiastical states, the bishops, abbots, and abbesses. For these the change to the new faith was forbidden. This was the so-called “ecclesiastical reservation.

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