Peace of Westphalia

• 1. Introduction

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  The Peace of Westphalia was not one treaty but two, signed in October 1648 in two separate cities that had never fully trusted each other. One was Catholic Münster, where only Roman Catholic worship had been permitted since 1535. The other was Protestant-leaning Osnabrück, a city that had been under Catholic occupation for five years before Swedish Lutheran forces recaptured it. The choice of venue was itself a statement. Neither side would meet on the other's ground.

  By the time those treaties were signed, approximately eight million people had died across Europe. The Thirty Years' War had torn through the Holy Roman Empire since 1618. The overlapping Eighty Years' War had been grinding on since around 1568. Between four and a half million and eight million perished in the Thirty Years' War alone. Entire regions were depopulated. Currencies collapsed. Armies fed themselves through plunder because no one could pay them otherwise.

  What emerged from Münster and Osnabrück was more than a ceasefire. It was an attempt to redesign the religious, legal, and territorial order of Europe. Whether it succeeded on every count is still debated. But the arguments it triggered about sovereignty, religious freedom, and the rights of states echo into the present century.

• 2. Why Two Cities

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  Cardinal Richelieu of France set the first precondition for any talks as early as 1636, when negotiations between France and the Habsburg Emperor began in Cologne. Richelieu insisted that all of France's allies be included, whether they were fully sovereign nations or merely states within the Holy Roman Empire. His demand stalled those talks before they got anywhere.

  A preliminary peace framework was eventually negotiated in Hamburg in December 1641, agreed to by Sweden, France, and the Holy Roman Empire. That agreement declared the earlier Cologne discussions and the Hamburg text to be jointly the foundation for a broader settlement. The main negotiations then moved to Westphalia.

  Münster handled talks between the Holy Roman Empire and France, and separately between the Dutch Republic and Spain. It was a strictly Catholic city, governed by the Chapter of the Prince-Bishopric of Münster. Calvinism and Lutheranism were banned within its walls. Sweden refused to negotiate there. Instead, Sweden chose Osnabrück, a bi-denominational city with two Lutheran churches and two Catholic churches, whose city council was exclusively Lutheran. Osnabrück had been subjugated by Catholic League troops from 1628 to 1633, then taken by Sweden. Its divided religious character made it neutral enough for Protestant delegations to accept.

  Both cities were designated as neutral and demilitarized zones for the duration of the talks, a novel arrangement that recognized the diplomats themselves needed a kind of protected space.

• 3. The Congress of Nations

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  No single opening session ever convened. The 109 delegations that eventually arrived did so in waves, between 1643 and 1646, and they departed in waves too, between 1647 and 1649. The largest concentration of diplomats was present between January 1646 and July 1647.

  Those 109 delegations came from sixteen European states, sixty-six Imperial States representing the interests of one hundred and forty Imperial States, and twenty-seven interest groups representing thirty-eight groups. The French delegation was led by Henri II d'Orléans, Duke of Longueville, accompanied by Claude d'Avaux and Abel Servien. Sweden's delegation was headed by Count Johan Oxenstierna, with Baron Johan Adler Salvius assisting. The Habsburg Emperor's delegation was led by Count Maximilian von Trautmansdorff.

  Philip IV of Spain sent two separate delegations. One was led by Gaspar de Bracamonte y Guzmán and included the diplomat-writers Diego de Saavedra Fajardo and Bernardino de Rebolledo. The other represented the County of Burgundy and the Spanish Netherlands, headed by Joseph de Bergaigne, who died before the peace was concluded, and Antoine Brun.

  Mediation fell to two figures who stood somewhat apart from the combatants. Fabio Chigi, the papal nuncio in Cologne, and Alvise Contarini, the Venetian envoy, worked to broker agreement. Johann Rudolf Wettstein represented the Swiss Confederacy, whose legal independence from the Holy Roman Empire was one outcome his presence helped secure. Among the Catholic estates of the Empire, Hugo Eberhard Kratz von Scharfenstein represented Mainz on the moderate side, while Franz Wilhelm von Wartenberg, representing the Electorate of Cologne, held out as a hardliner.

• 4. Redrawing the Map

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  France came out of Westphalia with confirmed possession of the bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun near Lorraine. It also received the cities of the Décapole in Alsace, though Strasbourg, the Bishopric of Strasbourg, and Mulhouse were excluded, and gained the city of Pignerol near the Spanish Duchy of Milan.

  Sweden received an indemnity of five million thalers, used primarily to pay its troops. It also acquired Western Pomerania, Wismar, and the Prince-Bishoprics of Bremen and Verden as hereditary fiefs. That package gave Sweden a seat and vote in the Imperial Diet and in three of the circle diets of the Empire. The treaty's wording created immediate disputes, however. The city of Bremen had already claimed Imperial immediacy to avoid absorption into Swedish Bremen-Verden, and the Emperor had granted that claim by separating the city from the surrounding bishopric. Sweden launched the Swedish-Bremen wars in 1653-54 in a failed attempt to take the city. The Swedish-Brandenburgian border in Pomerania was left unsettled too; both powers had claimed the whole duchy, and while a border was eventually agreed in 1653, the underlying tension continued.

  Brandenburg-Prussia received Farther Pomerania and the Bishoprics of Magdeburg, Halberstadt, Kammin, and Minden. Bavaria retained the Palatinate's vote in the Electoral College, a vote it had been granted when the imperial ban fell on Elector Palatine Frederick V in 1623. Frederick's son received a newly created eighth electoral vote. The Lower Palatinate went to Charles I Louis, Frederick's son and heir, while Maximilian I of Bavaria kept the Upper Palatinate. The Prince-Bishopric of Osnabrück was given an unusual solution: it would alternate between Catholic and Lutheran bishops, with Protestant bishops drawn from the cadets of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg.

• 5. Religion Resettled

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  Calvinism had never held legal recognition as an official religion of the Holy Roman Empire. Westphalia gave it that recognition for the first time, placing it alongside Catholicism and Lutheranism as a permitted faith. The date of the 1st of January 1624 was fixed as the normative date for determining the official religion of any state, with ecclesiastical property to be restored to the condition it held in that year.

  The older settlement that Westphalia superseded was the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which had operated under the principle of cuius regio, eius religio: subjects follow the religion of their ruler. Westphalia did not simply confirm Augsburg. It reinterpreted it. Under the new terms, sovereign rulers could no longer dictate the religion of their subjects. The treaty text stated that "whatever sovereignty the electors, princes, and estates of the Holy Roman Empire enjoyed in their territories, the private exercise of religion was no longer subject to this sovereignty but had effectively been removed from the sovereign domain." The right known as ius reformandi was removed from princely authority.

  The treaty also reformed the Imperial Chamber Court, stipulating that half its judges must be Protestant and calling for fifty judges total to be appointed. That number was rarely reached in practice because of persistent financial difficulties.

  Pope Innocent X responded with fury. In the papal brief Zelo Domus Dei, he declared the entire settlement "null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time." His condemnation had no practical effect. The settlement stood, and the Dutch Republic's independence, guaranteed by the treaty signed in Münster on the 30th of January 1648, provided a state practicing religious tolerance that offered a haven for European Jews.

• 6. The Westphalian Myth

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  Scholars of international relations have long treated the Peace of Westphalia as the founding moment of the modern system of sovereign states, a concept they call Westphalian sovereignty. The idea holds that the treaties established principles of inviolable borders and non-interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states as cornerstones of international law.

  Most modern historians reject this reading. They call it the "Westphalian myth." Their objection is textual: the treaties themselves contain nothing about religious freedom, sovereignty, or balance of power that functions as a principle of international law. The passages that discuss sovereignty and religious equality appear only in the context of the constitutional arrangements of the Holy Roman Empire. These were not new ideas even within that context. The treaties ended a devastating European conflict; they did not write the rulebook for a new international order.

  The counter-narrative has its own history. Several historians have traced the Westphalian sovereignty concept to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when theorists reaching for a usable founding moment projected modern anxieties about sovereignty back onto the 1648 settlement. Whether or not the treaties were genuinely transformative, narratives about them have shaped international legal and political thought for centuries since. Some conflicts that Westphalia did not resolve lingered for years afterward. Fighting between France and Spain continued until the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659. The Dutch-Portuguese War ran until 1663, and the Portuguese Restoration War went on until 1668. The Swiss Confederacy, represented at the congress by Johann Rudolf Wettstein, attained formal legal independence from the Holy Roman Empire through the settlement, though it had been de facto independent since the Treaty of Basel in 1499.