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The Politics of Religion:
The Peace of Augsburg 1555
A Roundtable Discussion Between
Thomas A. Brady, Euan Cameron and Henry Cohn
German History continues the series of round-table discussions by commemorating the anniversary of the conclusion of the Peace of Augsburg, a treaty
signed on 25 September 1555 between the Imperial Diet and the adherents
of the Lutheran confession. The basis for the recognition of the Reformation
in the Empire was the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, by which each
prince could determine the confession of his subjects. The questions relate
to the current issues, rather than to a single specific interpretation of the
Peace. For reasons of space, the questions deliberately exclude the important,
but extensive, related issue of confessionalization. Participants in the discussion were Henry Cohn (University of Warwick, editor Parliaments, Estates &
Representation), Euan Cameron (Union Theological Seminary New York)
and Thomas Brady (University of California, Berkeley). Peter Wilson (University of Sunderland) formulated the questions and sent them out by email.
Everyone was given the opportunity to reply to each other before the answers
were compiled in the form below. We are very grateful to all participants for
agreeing to be interviewed in this format during a busy time of research and
the summer holidays, and reprint their replies below.
Truce or Peace. There is a strong body of opinion, represented for
instance by Geoffrey Parker’s work on the Thirty Years War, that presents the settlement as a truce merely postponing inevitable confessional
German History Vol. 24 No. 1
10.1191/0266355406gh364fa © 2006 The German History Society
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conflict. To what extent is this interpretation still tenable and how far
should we still consider the Peace as ‘flawed’?
HC: The Peace of Augsburg was a political solution to a politico-religious
problem. The German princes deputed their lawyers, not their theologians,
to negotiate terms. The main principles had been outlined in 1552, during
negotiations for the Peace of Passau, when Ferdinand I and twenty-one
princes favoured a compromise founded on the status quo. Nearly all
accepted the priority of a permanent political peace over theological
reunion of the faiths, previous attempts at which had failed. In the end
Charles V would only accept another truce, until the next imperial diet, no
different in this respect from the many temporary solutions since 1523.
The pressures towards peace were strong. Both sides were exhausted
from the intermittent wars which had flared since 1542. The major
Protestant princes were anxious to secure legal recognition for the state
churches they had gone far towards establishing. Especially the bishops
among the Catholic estates felt threatened by the onward march of
Protestant allegiance and wished to preserve the status quo. It was their
negotiator who coined the phrase ‘ubi unus dominus ibi una sit religio’
(where there is one lord there shall be one religion), superseded at the end
of the century by ‘cuius regio, eius religio’. As usual during imperial
diets, the cities, most of them by now Protestant, were only brought into
the discussions at a late stage. When they were asked their opinion, their
customary divisions prevented them from giving any reply. Alex Gotthard
in his recent exhaustive study of the Peace concludes that the Protestant
princes may be exonerated from the responsibility earlier historians
assigned to them for letting down the cities. The outcome was that
many cities were obliged to give extensive religious and political rights
to small Catholic minorities, while receiving no assurance that Catholic
cities which later wished to become Protestant could do so.
The Religious Peace was the best that could be agreed, but severely
flawed, partly because of its lack of even-handedness and partly because
those who made it did not foresee some major later developments. It
did not grant either parity or toleration to Lutheranism alongside
Catholicism, but grudging recognition. Parity was not mentioned in
1555 nor for some twenty years after. Contemporaries spoke of equity
(Billigkeit) being enshrined in the treaty, not equality. Freedom of religion for individuals (Freistellung) was requested in the negotiations by
the Palatinate simply as a means to ensure Protestant expansion, and
Freistellung came to have more limited meanings as well. The southGerman Reformed, at this time not yet Calvinist but Zwinglian by inclination, were excluded (as were the sectaries condemned by all others),
but the number of Calvinist rulers would grow.
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The ecclesiastical reservation became a bone of contention, especially
with the unanticipated development of the majority in some cathedral
chapters becoming Protestant and electing Protestant prelates. The subterfuge of appointing Protestants as administrators rather than bishops
met with Catholic opposition. The Declaratio Ferdinandei, which guaranteed the rights of noble and other Protestant subjects of ecclesiastical
rulers, was merely signed after the treaty by Ferdinand alone and retained
in very few copies. Largely ignored for twenty years, it was resurrected
by the Protestants but declared invalid by their opponents. Confiscations
of church property within Protestant territories were guaranteed if
undertaken before 1552 at the expense of institutions not immediately
subordinate to the Empire, but the special exemptions for such imperial
corporations caused conflict, as did confiscations after 1552. The politically and religiously splintered regions of the Empire, such as Swabia,
Franconia and the Rhineland, the imperial cities and the imperial
knights were all ill-served by a treaty which had mainly the more consolidated principalities in mind when affirming the ius reformandi and
Protestant exemption from ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
Moreover, the understanding of the treaty differed fundamentally in the
two camps. The differences were masked during the first two decades,
but even then began to appear in the Gravamina which Catholics and
Protestants launched at diets against each other. The Catholics came to
regard the terms of the Peace as exceptional amendments to the constitution of the Empire, which they argued should be governed by the
‘common law’ (gemeines Recht), by which they meant canon law as
well as Roman law. Disagreements over interpretation should be
resolved by the Emperor or the courts applying this rule to preserve the
status quo. With time the Protestants considered the underlying principle of the Peace to be parity between the faiths: any disputes should
be settled on this basis by agreement between the Emperor and the diets
or other imperial assemblies. After 1580 even the lawyers in the imperial cameral court (Reichskammergericht) became divided along similar
confessional lines. Therefore the parity secured from 1560 for Protestants
and Catholics sitting in chambers of the court failed to establish calm
through litigation. These opposing views of the treaty helped to cause
the well-known series of breakdowns of the imperial institutions between
1588 and 1608 over the interpretation of the Peace.
Changing circumstances undoubtedly played their part. The Calvinist
electors palatine and counts of Nassau, joined later by other lesser
Calvinist princes, developed strong links with their western European
brethren and provided a counterweight to those Lutheran princes, led
by the electors of Saxony, who remained by tradition strongly loyal to
the emperor. On the other hand, mostly southern bishoprics such as
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Würzburg and secular principalities such as Bavaria, together with the
religious orders, implemented the principles of Trent with increasing
hostility towards their Protestant subjects and neighbours. The western
European religious wars impinged on the major conflicts over bishoprics in neighbouring north-western Germany. As always, the precise
balance of influence in German history between internal tensions and
external pressures is hard to assess. The effect from the East was different, where the threat from the Ottomans—which culminated in the
war of 1593–1606—yoked together in patriotic fervour imperial estates
of both major faiths who voted taxes and sent troops to aid the
Habsburgs. The lifting of this danger in turn allowed greater scope to
the antagonisms which led to the Thirty Years War.
EC: It is interesting to contrast the Peace of Augsburg, a document which
lies in effect embedded in the summative Reichsabschied of the Reichstag
of 1555, with its predecessor, the 1548 Augsburg Interim and its derivatives. These shed, one suspects, some light on the very different intentions of Charles V and King Ferdinand. The Interim was fundamentally
a religious document. Here Charles tried to achieve (another!) impossible task by compiling a moderate Catholic Reformation in respect
both of doctrine and of church liturgy and life. Philipp Melanchthon
spent weeks and months of work negotiating the Leipzig Interim with
Elector Moritz, even though he expected it to be a merely temporary
expedient. In these documents of 1548 the religious content was of
the essence.
In comparison, the Augsburg Peace is quite startling for the manner
in which it takes the religious divisions of the Reich more or less for
granted, and says remarkably little—almost nothing, indeed—about the
content of those divisions. People disagree and must be expected to
continue to disagree: but they are to keep the terms of the Landfrieden
and refrain from abusing and attacking each other, let alone forming
conspiracies against each other. That seems to be the gist of what the
Religious Peace has to say. It is noteworthy that the website of the exhibition being mounted in the Maximilianmuseum at Augsburg to celebrate
the anniversary of the Peace has this epigraph at its head: ‘Religionsfrieden
ist keine geistliche, sondern eine politische und weltliche Angelegenheit’
(www.augsburger-religionsfrieden.de).
It would be easier to understand this approach to the religious question if the Empire in 1555 had reached the end of decades of bitter,
destructive, fratricidal bloodletting, like France in 1598 or Germany in
1648. Yet Germany in 1555 had not suffered such destruction—though
perhaps the years of insecurity, of delayed and undeclared conflict from
the 1530 Augburg Reichstag onwards had left such frayed nerves that
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the psychological pressures had become almost as strong to make some
peace, any peace.
The Peace appears ‘flawed’ or ‘provisional’, one may argue, for two
reasons. First, the Peace stands awkwardly half-way along a long
process of development. At one extreme is the high medieval collectivism that says there is ‘one Universal Church of the faithful, outside of
which there is absolutely no salvation’ (Lateran IV, Constitution 1) and
that all baptized Christians must belong to the one Church on earth. At
the other extreme is the position achieved by the mid-nineteenth century in much of Europe, where all subjects of a state were free to choose
the religious affiliation of their choice, including none, without civil
disadvantages. The 1555 Peace managed at one and the same time both
to infringe the absolutist claims of the Middle Ages and to fall drastically short of the religious emancipation of the modern West.
Much has traditionally been made of the alleged principle of cuius
regio, eius religio that encapsulated the consequences of the Peace for
the subjects of Germany’s territorial principalities. That principle, it
must be said, is more truly implicit than explicit in the text: it derived
rather from the political circumstances of the religious division of
Germany and wishful exegesis of the 1526 Speyer Abschied than from
any specific reference in the terms of the 1555 Peace. Much less is usually made of the fact that the cities of the Empire were explicitly
required (under section 27 of the Reichsabschied) to permit the coexistence of both Catholic and Lutheran worship in those towns and cities
where the latter had become established. City magistrates could be
required to tolerate bi-confessional arrangements in their communities,
but princes could dictate the faiths of all their subjects. It is hard not
to see in this asymmetry the results of political expediency, and a pragmatic response to the very different degrees of political influence wielded
by princes and cities. Moreover, the cuius regio, eius religio principle
would over time prove to be of less and less effect. The Hohenzollern
Electors of Brandenburg failed to drag their Lutheran subjects into
Calvinism in the 1610s. The princes of Hanover in 1651 and of Saxony
in 1697 would think better of insisting that their subjects change their
faith when their rulers did. The ultimate outcome of the Peace was likely
to be, sooner or later, a pattern of religious diversity modelled more on the
condition of the free cities than of the principalities. Yet it was premature
to expect such a conclusion to be reached in 1555.
Second and more tragically, the peace contained within it the seeds
of its own ultimate failure. The clause that required a Catholic prelate who
converted to Lutheranism to resign forthwith (section 18) and the clause
that attempted to arrest and stabilize the secularization of ecclesiastical
property (section 19) opened up whole areas of potential conflict and
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legal dispute, as well as representing magnificent infringements of cuius
regio, eius religio. The terms of the peace, like all previous arrangements
discussed as early as 1530, contained the implication that Catholicism
was the prior and premier faith, and that the Lutheranism of the
Augustana Invariata was a permitted but inferior alternative that must
not exceed certain prescribed boundaries, these to be policed by the
institutions of a Catholic-dominated Reich.
And yet it is probably unrealistic to expect that the 1555 Peace could
have done anything more than it did. Its terms, explicitly and implicitly,
reflected the realities of the religious division of Germany at the time.
Most of the ensuing problems resulted from developments, especially
the hardening of confessional divides and the rise of militant reformed
internationalism, that were almost impossible to foresee in the first half
of the 1550s. Equally unforeseeable—or where foreseeable, clearly
unacceptable—was the ultimate outcome, so obvious with hindsight,
that the Reformation must in the end turn religious allegiance into a
matter of individual choice rather than collective political decision.
TB: Parker’s judgement echoes Ferdinand Foche’s judgement that the Treaty
of Versailles was not a peace but a truce for twenty years, and also the
convention of speaking of the conflicts of 1914–45 as a ‘new Thirty
Years’ war’. A serious objection to Parker’s view is that it requires the
assumption that all of the contributing factors—the French and Dutch
civil wars, the (as yet incompletely explored) relations between the
Bohemian and Austrian Protestant nobles, and the pre-war policies of
Ferdinand II (which are now locked in poorly supported conventional
judgements)—had to develop as they did. The importance of Dutch
military successes in encouraging the Palatine party’s aggressive policy,
and at a time when the Protestant political fortunes within the Empire
were beginning to weaken, also requires study.
The emperor’s role: Volker Press dubbed Maximilian II the ‘emperor of
the Religious Peace’. Has Ferdinand I’s role been underestimated? How
committed was Rudolf II to preserving the peace?
HC: Ferdinand had at first not wanted a permanent peace, as throughout his
life he kept alive the hope of unity under the Catholic faith. The electors had made the running during the first months of negotiations at
Augsburg, but from September it was Ferdinand who tirelessly won
over the reluctant Protestant princes to accept some unfavourable features of the treaty (Gotthard).
Since the 1520s many princely families had continued marital and cultural exchanges across the religious divide. Ferdinand I and Maximilian II
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encouraged and participated in this means of lessening misunderstanding, but it faded when a new generation of princes came to the fore who
had not experienced the harrowing conflicts of mid-century. Communications between the increasingly strident parties broke down. Until c.1580
rulers and/or their advisers met in imperial diets, diets of imperial envoys
(Reichsdeputationstage), meetings of the electors, and the governing
bodies of the circles, but the rapid decline thereafter of such opportunities heightened both mistrust and reciprocal demonization. Calvinists
and Catholics now corresponded with those of like mind in western or
southern Europe, and even the Lutherans turned to Scandinavia. The
failure of more moderate statesmen to communicate with one another
allowed more radical voices to gain the initiative against the background music of shrill learned and semi-popular polemics.
Certainly the Protestant leaders had the firm impression, based on
bitter experience, that Rudolf II always sided with the Catholics seeking to win back territory and allegiances in the Empire. His primary
instrument was to bring religious cases before his own imperial court,
the Reichshofrat, with its exclusively Catholic judges. The records of
the imperial diets, assemblies and courts show that entrenched confrontation and political calculation had gained the upper hand.
TB: Ferdinand I has always been underestimated, beginning with his own
generation, when he stood as he still stands, in the shadow of Charles V.
Ferdinand was more intelligent and better educated than his brother,
and his management of the Treaty of Passau (1552) and the Imperial
diets from 1555 onward reveal his superior understanding of Imperial
politics in general and the German princes in particular. Ferdinand’s role
is appearing in ever clearer light with the publication of the Deutsche
Reichstagsakten for 1542, 1544 and 1558–59. The success with which his
son, Maximilian II, a much less capable monarch, continued Ferdinand’s
policies is also instructive. Maximilian, for all of his reputed cryptoProtestant views, met and mastered the challenge posed by the Elector
Palatine’s forward policy and threw for the first time the emperor’s
diplomatic weight on the side of the north German powers in the
Northern Wars. Rudolph II is a much more difficult subject and the
recent literature on him and his reign is relatively sparse (exceptions:
Evans and Fröschl). His attitudes toward religion and the future of religion in the Empire badly require clarification, and his long history of
mental illness makes more imperative fresh work on his advisers.
Irenicism. The recent, more positive re-evaluation of the Peace places considerable emphasis on irenicist sentiment, both in facilitating the settlement in 1555 and working to preserve it subsequently. However, irenicism
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remains understudied and perhaps hard to identify, given the practice
of ‘dissimulation’ evident in both the peace treaty itself and subsequent
negotiation. How close are we to understanding its role in establishing
and preserving the Peace?
HC: The major participants accepted the Peace as a lesser evil. Peace was no
longer the medieval just peace, but the absence of conflict. There was no
agreement on fundamentals. Contemporaries saw what had been achieved
as a regrettable compromise and a failure on the part of the Empire.
During the lengthy negotiations about the wording of every clause the
participants engaged in ‘dissimulation’ to introduce phrases which might
later be interpreted to their advantage. The whole was shot through
with vagueness, ambiguities, and contradictions between one paragraph
and another. Protestants and Catholics alike were confident that in the
fullness of time they would interpret the Peace in their interest and
their faith would triumph over the other. None was prepared to accept a
permanent division of religion, merely a permanent abandonment
of war as a means to secure their objectives.
The idea that discussion between the faiths should lead to compromise
and concord had been in the air ever since the influence of Erasmus had
been at its height in the Empire during the 1520s and 1530s. Charles V
and some of his advisers like Granvelle had at times seemed willing
to follow this route. As successive religious discussions down to 1541
produced no lasting result, disillusion set in among most imperial
estates. The outcome of the Council of Trent hardly encouraged them to
pursue that course any further. Ferdinand I retained his hope for reconciliation, but like his brother was inspired by the false assumption that
minor outward concessions to the Protestants might bring them back to
the fold. For the first part of his reign Rudolf II encouraged irenicist
groups at his court, but there is little evidence that they influenced his
policy. The literary expression of desires for concord in the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries are attractive from present-day perspectives, but had scarcely any political effect in their day.
EC: The term ‘irenicism’ evokes particular resonances in the religious historian. In the wake of the hardening of confessional identities in the
second half of the sixteenth century, there were thinkers who favoured
a drawing of firm lines between those inside and those outside, and others who preferred to blur those lines as much as possible. Irenicism
became the by-word for a group of Calvinist theologians whose most
prominent member was David Pareus (1548–1622), author of Irenicum,
sive de unione et synodo evangelicorum liber votivus (1614). Works in
the same vein were written by Franciscus Junius (1545–1602) who published Le paisible Chrestien in 1589, and the Silesian mathematician
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and astronomer Bartholomaeus Pitiscus (1561–1613). Pitiscus once
wrote, comparing his two disciplines, ‘What a jewel civility is and how
rare among theologians. How much to be wished that all theologians
were mathematicians; that is, men both civil and easy to consort with’.
However, irenicism is never an entirely transparent attitude. In the
case of Calvinists like Pareus, what it meant was a call for a reformed
(Calvinist) rather than a strictly exclusive Lutheran concept of the
Reformation to prevail. Lutherans, especially after the reconciliation of
the conflicting wings of the movement in 1577–80, viewed their mode
of Reformation as perfect and self-sufficient. On one side were their
Catholic opponents, mired in superstition and idolatry; on the other were
the Calvinists and Anabaptists, given over to extremism and Schwärmerei.
Calvinist theologians, on the other hand, took the posture that Martin
Luther had begun but not completed the work of Reformation. The persistence of a few shreds of Catholic practices in Lutheran life and worship showed that they needed the further instruction that Calvinism
could offer them. The irenicism intended in this form of theological discourse was an attempt to persuade Lutherans to take a more ecumenical
view of their Protestant identity: to see all modes of Reformation as being
about fundamentally the same things. Needless to say, Gnesiolutherans
such as Pappus or Lucas Osiander the elder were not convinced.
The status of the Peace of Augsburg viewed from this perspective is
therefore highly problematic. For it is precisely Clause 17, the shortest section in the entire document, that excludes those who are neither Catholic
nor Lutheran from the Peace. At the time of drafting it is highly probable that this clause was aimed more at Anabaptists than at those southGerman reformed cities who had embraced the Wittenberg Accord in
1536 and could now be herded into the Lutheran pen, let alone the
‘Calvinists’ who had yet to become a factor on the German religious
scene. Nevertheless, in the light of later developments the Peace actually
stood in the way of what would later be called Calvinist ‘irenicism’,
and was one of its most potent obstacles.
Theological and political irenicism are of course different phenomena. However, as stated earlier, it is hard to envisage the sort of ‘peace
frenzy’ being felt in the early 1550s in the same way that it was reportedly felt in Germany some ninety years later.
TB: The most recent literature tends to overestimate the significance of an
irenicism not as a policy but as a belief. In particular, historians of ‘the
Old Reich’ have encouraged a kind of nostalgia about the generation
after 1555 that rather resembles the nostalgia once so common about
the Weimar Republic. Two things must be distinguished. First, the
general expectation of reuniting the church survived the formation of
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confessions, and in the generations after 1648 some writers expressed
a belief in the convergence of the confessions (Lessing). Second, far
more immediate was the policy of toleration of the Lutheran faith (that
is how the Religious Peace of 1555 put the matter until a settlement
could be reached). This policy sustained the peace during the post-1555
years, but it is a mistake to inflate the policy into a general irenicism.
This is very clear in the advice given by Lazarus von Schwendi to
Emperor Maximilian II. A German politique, Schwendi praised formal
political collaboration among the heads of the confessions, while he also
advised that Roman Catholicism was finished, at least in the Empire. That
he wrote this in the 1570s shows how little one could predict then the great
Catholic revival that, beginning in the 1580s, would throw the Protestants
on the defensive within a generation. As for understanding irenicism’s
role, future research needs to focus on its dampening effect on the readiness to resort to arms and its encouragement of willingness to negotiate.
Imperial Reform. By combining a religious settlement with constitutional
reform, the 1555 Peace represents a milestone in the consolidation of the
early modern Reich. To what extent should we see it as a direct continuation of the ‘imperial reform’ process commonly associated with the
1495 Reichstag in Worms?
HC: The Religious Peace was inextricably linked with a strong desire among
the imperial estates to secure effective implementation of the public
peace (Landfriede) which had been established in perpetuity as long ago
as 1495. The resolutions of the Diet of Augsburg included, alongside
the Religious Peace, the last major reform of the Empire’s constitution.
The Diet settled the struggle over the location of power which had run
in tandem with the religious one throughout Charles’s reign. In the
1520s the estates of the Empire had tried to use the imperial regiment
(Reichsregiment) to gain a share in central government, but the Habsburgs
neutralized it. Then the princes put their trust in the decentralized administrative Kreise, six of which had been set up in 1500; by 1555 ten Kreise
were responsible for the whole country and had many devolved taxcollecting, military, judicial, peace-keeping and even economic functions. Until the Kreise were strengthened in 1555 a chorus of Protestant
princes had warned since 1548 that not just they, but all princes, would
lose their ‘liberties’; and all Germans would be treated as serfs under a
‘foreign Spanish servitude and monarchy’. They were referring not just
to Charles’s Spanish army and advisers, but to his attempts first to create leagues in 1548 and 1551/2 which would bypass the traditional
institutions so as to secure the services of a German army for his wider
purposes, and second to make the imperial cameral court his tool by
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gaining for himself at the expense of the German princes the nomination of all its judges, which he had achieved by 1548.
The estates of the Empire would accept a Religious Peace only if it
were linked with secular peace-keeping arrangements of their own choosing. In 1555 the Kreise were subordinated both to the imperial diet, which
represented the estates, and to the individual estates which made up each
of the ten Kreise. The Emperor now had no chance of using an imperial
army for his own purposes, and the Kreise were strictly limited to preserving internal order, not resisting foreign enemies of the Empire.
The constitutional changes of 1555 preserved the unity of the Empire
and the commitment of all estates to its continuance, while guaranteeing the independence of the individual estates, who were assigned
extensive powers of preserving the peace within their own territories.
Quite untenable is the view of nineteenth-century nationalist German
historians that the Augsburg settlement condemned the country to centuries of division among powerful principalities. The growth of those
entities had begun long before and was given little more than recognition and legal encouragement in 1555. The imperial diet now supervised the Kreise, the imperial court and the religious settlement, and the
Emperor had lost most powers to act independently of the estates.
Taken together, the religious and constitutional settlements of 1555
marked the end of the process, which had begun before Charles’s reign
but greatly accelerated during it, by which the Empire was transformed
from the secular body of Christendom into an institution merely for keeping the peace among the German states. The Empire had not become
a federal state, but more federal elements had been introduced into its
hierarchical and feudal structure, and their number would increase in
1648. The struggle against the absolutist tendencies of the Emperor had
seemingly been won in 1555, but stronger safeguards had to be introduced after Ferdinand II’s near success during the Thirty Years War.
TB: One of the great achievements of research since 1960 has been to explore
the Imperial reform and the formation of the early modern Empire as a
largely continuous process since the Public Peace of 1486 (Moraw, Press,
Schmidt). The political achievement of the Protestant princes and cities
is to be seen as the exception, the temporary break, not as a redirection
of Imperial politics into a substantially new direction (Haug-Moritz,
Kohnle). The essential insights are, first, that the early modern Empire
was in the main a creation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and
only in fairly superficial ways a continuation of the German monarchy of
the High Middle Ages. Second, the way it looks now, the Imperial reform
was one sector of a new and enduring institutionalization of governance,
part of a process that was occurring in the formation of territorial states
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out of patrimonial principalities. These insights soften the traditional
contrasts between German politics and those of other early modern
kingdoms (as does the parallel relativization of absolutist monarchy in
France and Spain). This reinterpretation allows us to see the institutionalization of Empire and (not or) principalities as the main theme of
early modern German politics.
Secularization. The Peace is also frequently embedded in a narrative of progressive secularization, not least because it sanctioned Lutheran possession of considerable church lands. However, Klaus Schlaich and Martin
Heckel have both stressed the Reich remained a sacrum imperium, because
the Peace forged an alliance between two legally sanctioned confessions
to the exclusion of all other faiths. Where should we place the emphasis?
HC: The German language has two words for ‘secularization’, making a
useful distinction between Säkularisation, the transfer of persons and
material goods from the ecclesiastical to the secular domain, and
Säkularisierung, the cultural process which alienated men from religion. Altogether ‘secularization’ is a word of many meanings, and so it
was that the Religious Peace could advance both secularization and
confessionalization. The political structure of the Empire lost much of its
religious authority, even if many later Emperors were ardent upholders
of the Catholic Church and cause. Church and state were not separated
in 1555, but the relationships between them altered. In Protestant lands
the institutional churches did become territorialized, and Catholic prelates
were made to give up the combined spiritual and secular overlordship
which Luther had condemned. This accelerated a process which had
gathered momentum from before the Reformation. Catholic states would
later follow in assuming some of the functions of governing the local
churches. All still saw the purposes of the state as religious and used
their new powers to increase control over the lives of their subjects. This
confessionalization of policy intensified as conflicts grew between the
estates of the Empire over disputed church property. The degree of success in securing confessional control varied greatly, but this did not
diminish the widespread, if not universal, existence of such policies. It
took another century to make any progress towards a view of the state
as neutral in religious matters, and even longer for philosophical and
cultural secularization to make headway. For this the political framework of 1555 and 1648 was necessary, but by no means sufficient.
Nor was the Peace of 1555 inspired by high-minded principles of toleration such as those expressed beforehand by Sebastian Franck, Kaspar
von Schwenkfeld and Sebastian Castellio. The only consciences to
receive recognition were those of rulers, as claimed before in the
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Protestation of 1529. Those minorities who had practised their religion
until 1552 were granted a right of emigration (ius emigrandi), with the
right to sell their property and secure release from serfdom. Although
research is at an early stage, it is likely that the concession was worthless. Heavy fines were in practice levied on emigrants. It was not easy
to sell property if sizeable numbers sought to leave. Immigration to
another region was not a practicable proposition for those living on the
land in an era of rising population and subdivision of plots. The right to
emigrate was more often interpreted by rulers as a right to expel. It had
not been drafted as a fundamental human right but as a means to
strengthen the territorial state churches. The distinction sometimes
made by sixteenth-century rulers, Philip II of Spain no less than Queen
Elizabeth I, between liberty of belief, which they would allow, and liberty of religious practice, which they saw as disruptive of order, was an
unreal one in an era when no faith could survive or fulfil its mission
without preaching, teaching and religious observance.
The Peace of Westphalia went further on the road to toleration, without however subscribing to the idea of individual religious liberty. The
imperial estates had to allow minority communities with a different religion established before 1624 to have prayer houses and preachers. Even
where there had been no other confession in 1624 individual households (not individuals) were allowed to worship in their homes, go to
services in neighbouring territories, and have their children educated in
their own faith. No one was to be disadvantaged in society because of
their confession. The threat of ultimate expulsion remained, but those
affected were given better guarantees of their property and safe conduct. This did not entirely prevent future brutal expulsions, especially
from the exempt Habsburg lands, but it did enshrine legal principles
more akin to ‘human rights’ than those of 1555. The new terms showed
how the practical problems of applying the Peace of Augsburg opened
the door towards greater freedoms.
EC: The first point to note is that a document that has so very little to say
about the religious content of the confessions as the Peace of Augsburg
was evidently drafted from a perspective of law, politics and the governance of that peculiar entity that was the Holy Roman Empire. The Peace
is not the place to look for a thoughtful discussion of the relative roles
of church and empire in caring for the souls of its subjects. Indeed, the
general air of the document is one of abdication of responsibility. Let
those who have embraced different and conflicting beliefs look to their
own salvation within either of those systems of faith and life. To that
extent the Peace is a secular document in a century of religiously motivated strife.
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However, one should beware. For secular governments to confine themselves to policing the boundaries between the secular and the spiritual was
the norm, not the exception in medieval Europe. For most of the previous five centuries German politics had been largely about setting the
appropriate limits for the political, jurisdictional and financial claims of
the sacerdotium. The one thing that lay clearly and unambiguously
within the spiritual sphere was issues of doctrine and worship. In that
context, the 1548 Interim, with its painstaking evaluation of doctrinal
and liturgical issues by a secular ruler, was the exception; the 1555
Peace represented a reversion to the medieval standard.
Probably not too much should be made of the issue of church lands
per se. After all, the government of Mary I Tudor in England—hardly a
beacon of secular principles in the history of that nation—found itself
obliged to sanction precisely just such a continued retention of not only
ecclesiastical lands but also ecclesiastical revenues and patronage in
the hands of laypeople in 1554, or the restoration of papal authority
would almost certainly have been held up in Parliament. It is in fact
peculiarly striking that Charles V was encouraging and facilitating just
such a pragmatic acceptance of the secularization of church property in
England as the price of re-catholicization of the entire nation, at the
same time that his brother was accepting the fait accompli of Lutheran
secularizations within their own territories, for a much lesser reward. It
is therefore somewhat spurious to point to the secularization of lands in
Germany as the decisive factor on its own.
It is absolutely correct that a confessional standard determined who
was or was not included within the Peace. However, the resolution of
matters in Germany entailed an abdication of responsibility far more
profound than that involved in coming to terms with the history of
land-grabs in Habsburg-dominated England. Ferdinand, and tacitly
Charles V, did what Philip II would later refuse to do: they accepted and
institutionalized the reality of ruling or at least reigning over subjects
whose beliefs, according to the Catholic Church, must lead to inevitable
damnation. This should give the historian more than a moment’s pause.
From an absolutist theological perspective, the Empire was doing one
of two things: either it was resigning its pastoral responsibility for the
souls of its subjects; or it was casting into question the rigorous exclusivity that said ‘outside the [Catholic] Church no salvation’. It was entirely
consistent with such absolutism that the popes, throughout the sixteenth
century, sought to condemn and discourage any peace treaties that stabilized bi-confessional arrangements, and to discourage Catholic monarchs from conniving at the toleration of organized, structured heretical
religions. If toleration were permitted, then either the distinction between
truth and falsehood was not so clear after all; or the damnation of the
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souls of one’s subjects was perfectly acceptable. (That last argument,
incidentally, was made not by any pope, but by a Calvinist preacher in
seventeenth-century Scotland, James Durham, 1622–1658.)
The text of the Peace does not really help us in resolving which of
those alternatives were uppermost in the minds of those who drafted it. In
all probability most of the participants were in some measure of denial
over precisely that dilemma. The sensible conclusion must surely be
that the logic of events, rather than any clear vision of a religious Reich
or a secular Reich, was driving developments at this period. It was the
logic of those events, combined with the extreme difficulty of achieving
a coherent religious posture consistent with that logic, that forced the
political leaders of Europe to blunder and stumble by many painful steps
towards the eventual de-sacralization of the body politic. It was far too
soon to expect principled analysis of these questions in 1555.
TB: The views of Schlaich and Heckel reflect a narrowly legal perspective.
Whatever sacral attributes the Reich retained, they were not those of the
medieval monarchy. The medieval Reich derived its sacral character
entirely from the emperor, who gained it both from his ordination as a
deacon and from his role as protector of Christendom. It is useless to
attempt to define the legal consequences of this sacrality, which was
precisely the object of contention between medieval popes and emperors.
Current research recognizes that the secularization of the Empire began
before the Reformation, because the reformulation of authority in
terms of emperor and Empire (that is, the estates) did not transfer the
old sacrality to the estates. In parallel ideological change, the early
German humanists (Celtis, Wimpheling, Bebel, Irenicus, Hutten) understood the Empire in the sort of historical terms humanism fostered.
They regarded the Holy Roman Empire more as a German empire than
as a sacral-universal one. This involved huge problems of knowledge
and reasons which they were by no means equipped to solve (Fasolt).
Yet the essential fact remains that before the Reformation the Empire
was losing sacrality both structurally and ideologically. What survived
the Reformation were the religious rituals surrounding the monarchy—
elections, coronations, funerals—but more and more the jurists, especially the Protestants, sought the legitimacy of the monarchy in Roman
law and, therefore, also in history.
International context. The more positive reassessment of the Peace stresses
relative tranquillity within the later sixteenth-century Reich compared
with religious and civil wars in France and the Netherlands. However, the
perspective changes when we also include the religious settlements
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achieved in Poland and Transylvania. How should we evaluate 1555 in
the context of wider European efforts to address the explosive consequences of the Reformation?
HC: The Religious Peace undoubtedly saved the Empire for sixty-three
years from the religious and civil wars which afflicted France and the
Netherlands. It was often cited elsewhere in Europe as an example to follow. Yet it is arguable that the solutions found in Switzerland, Transylvania
or Poland provided a more durable basis for religions to live side by
side, as indeed had happened in medieval Spain.
The unresolved problems of later sixteenth-century Germany were a
major factor in the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. It was neither a
mere foreign import nor just the resolution of European-wide conflicts
on German soil. Among the many potential triggers for war, it was perhaps no coincidence that the one which proved unstoppable was a
politico-religious conflict in Bohemia (formally a part of the Empire)
very similar in nature to those within Germany. The surprise was not
that war occurred, but that it was postponed for so long. The Protestant
Union and Catholic League did not build up effective military power
before 1618, but at least they established contacts throughout Europe
which later encouraged European-wide involvement in the conflict
which they had anticipated and to which they contributed.
The Religious Peace contained many opportunities which might
bring about its own destruction. While not all the developments of the
last quarter of the century were inevitable, it would be hard to conceive
a situation in which there would not have been enough of them to trigger the eventual collapse. At its creation the Peace was intended to be
perpetual, but all harboured the hope that the religious balance would
be altered by peaceful means in their own favour. Events would show
that this could not be done peaceably, and it took a very long war to
demonstrate that this was not the way either.
The peacemakers in 1648 realized that religious issues had brought
about the war within the Empire and needed to be resolved. The Treaty
of Osnabrück gave more space to religious issues than to any others,
and altered the religious settlement more than it did the political constitution. It confirmed the Religious Peace of Augsburg as one of the fundamental laws of the Empire, but amended it to such an extent that a new
settlement emerged that was much closer to the parity sought by
Protestants and largely a victory for their aims. Not only was Calvinism
now included, but the ‘exact equality’ of all three faiths was proclaimed.
The settlement was described as a compositio between Emperor, electors,
princes and the Empire, just as the Protestants had wanted. The principle
of parity between faiths was applied to membership of all the imperial
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institutions which had collapsed through want of such arrangements.
As this was not practicable in the imperial diet, the device of Itio in
partes avoided majority decisions on matters of religion by regrouping
the three houses for such purposes into two faith bodies which had to
reach agreement. Any party could define an issue as religious, which
left the initiative to the Protestant minority. The confessional parties
were institutionalized and domesticated by making it in their interest to
seek compromise.
For Church property the normative year was now 1624, rather than
as previously 1552 in the Augsburg Peace or 1627 in the Edict of
Restitution (1629), both of which had favoured the Catholics. If a ruler
later converted, the subjects were not obliged to follow. The ius reformandi was confirmed for all imperial estates, but also severely limited
in this way. Only the Habsburg lands remained under the unfettered
religious control of the ruler. The 1648 settlement resolved all the
major problems left in 1555, but time was to reveal that it had created
others. Nevertheless, the difficulties arising from the growing number
of Catholic rulers by succession or conversion from the late seventeenth century and the linking of confessional with political conflicts in
the eighteenth did not lead to major conflict or wars.
Four hundred and fifty years later the Peace of Augsburg furnishes
an example, albeit an imperfect one, of how a temporary accommodation may be reached between opposing fundamentalist parties, each of
which believes that its own world view is the only true one and must
ultimately triumph over its opponents. It allowed a lengthy breathing
space for reconsideration, but when fundamentalism grew rather than
declined, it required much human suffering before a better and more
durable solution was found. No lessons are offered for conflicts where
one party is ‘fundamentalist’ and the other ‘liberal’ and inspired by the
Enlightenment tradition.
TB: It is a mistake to regard tranquillity as a generally normal state endangered
by strife between the religious communities. Rather, the Imperial settlement of 1555 should be regarded as a relative success at pacification,
achieved after two very brief and not very destructive wars (1546–47
and 1552). The German states thus form a middling peace between the
two types of official violence with religious components: the strong
convivencias of Poland-Lithuania and Transylvania and the intransigent civil wars of France and the Netherlands. The main strength of the
settlement of 1555 lay in the tradition and situation of decentralized
governance in the Empire, which made possible collaboration across
confessional lines between the Catholic emperors and the Lutheran
princes led by the Saxon elector. This polity gained in stability during
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the half-century that followed the Peace (as Winfried Schulze and others
have shown). The possibilities for Catholic resistance to the Peace were
slight, because the emperor normally enjoyed at least acquiescence
from the Catholic prince-bishops, and because, except for Austria, only
one Catholic lay prince—Bavaria—remained in the princes’ chamber of
the Imperial diet. On the other hand, the Religious Peace embodied but
one moment in an unstable religious situation. It was made as Catholic
fortunes approached their nadir. The great weakness of the Religious
Peace, therefore, was its vulnerability to two future changes in the religious situation: the Catholic revival and, beginning a bit earlier, the unsettling of the Protestant party by the Calvinist challenge to Lutheranism.
It seems correct to say, therefore, that the Religious Peace of 1555 was
made possible by the stable tradition of Imperial governance and doomed
by the unstable nature of German religious loyalties. The possibility for
seeing 1555 in the broader context of European efforts to deal with the
Reformation’s consequences depends on our ability to keep both threads,
political and religious, in mind. This entails comprehending polities
from Poland-Lithuania to England with one set of concepts (à la Perry
Anderson). The very popular confessionalization thesis cannot do this,
for, helpless before political differences, it takes refuge under the
abstract concept of ‘the State.’ Seeing 1555 in this light also entails
comprehending the very fluid character of the relative strengths and
weaknesses of the religions within and between polities. We must resist
looking at sixteenth-century Europe in terms of the more stable (and
even then deceptive) confessional map of later times.
EC: Anyone who teaches the Reformation era sooner or later confronts the
cliché resorted to by generations of historians, that to accommodate more
than one faith peacefully within a single political entity was unthinkable
in sixteenth-century Europe. One then looks at the map of Europe and
realizes that, if anything, confessional plurality was as much the norm as
confessional uniformity by the mid-century. Those regions where uniformity was established with any degree of success (Catholic Spain or
Lutheran Scandinavia for example) stand in as much in need of explanation as do France or Germany.
The first country of Europe to grapple with the issue of bi-confessionalism, and that in a particularly extreme form, was the Swiss Confederation. The Confederation was not only divided into some dozen
major cantons or Orte; it also comprised a complex and highly confusing
matrix of mandated territories, jointly administered territories, and areas
where several larger Orte, including in due course Catholic and reformed
states, had rights of control and the appointment of officials. Not surprisingly, then, it was the Swiss who achieved some of the earliest
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agreements on religious coexistence. The second Ilanz articles agreed
for the Grisons or Graubünden in 1526 probably constituted the first
local but durable agreement to preserve and stabilize religious diversity: these devolved the choice of pastor, and therefore the choice of
religious affiliation, down to the individual commune and disabled
ecclesiastical discipline. Far more important, of course, was the Second
Landfrieden of Kappel agreed after the disastrous war between Zürich
and the central cantons that led to the death of Huldrych Zwingli in
1531. The Peace of Kappel stabilized, not to say petrified, most of the
religious arrangements in force at the time. Where jointly administered
territories were allowed to engage in further gradual Protestantization by
the will of their inhabitants, that choice remained a possibility. Elsewhere,
new reformed communities could be subjected to overwhelming pressure
to convert or leave, as the Protestants of Locarno were in 1555. The Peace
of Kappel contrived to stabilize the internal relations of the Confederation for over three centuries, until a constitutional crisis in 1847 prompted
the refashioning of the polity into a much more cohesive and unitary
federal state.
Needless to say the Habsburgs would hardly have wished to draw
any lessons from their rebellious and intransigent Swiss subjects in
managing religious difference. Neither would they have regarded the
state of affairs on their eastern borders as representing an ideal for the
heart of Europe. Religious pluralism was already an issue for parts of
the East even before the Augsburg Peace, and became even more so
afterwards. Utraquists, Unity of Brethren and remaining Catholics coexisted in Bohemia even before the advent of Protestantism. PolandLithuania (as those lands became known after 1569) comprised both
Latin Catholic and Eastern Orthodox communities as well as Lutherans,
Calvinists and Czech Brethren in due course. Hungary had since 1526
been divided into Austrian Hungary, Transylvania and the central debatable lands of Turkish Hungary, where not only various forms of Christianity but also Islam jostled for position and competed for adherents.
In Eastern Europe even those faiths that were denied any form of toleration or state support in the West such as Anabaptism (in Moravia) or
Antitrinitarianism (in Transylvania and Poland) could gain not only
secure footholds but something like a permanent and settled position.
One need not belabour the point: when the perspective broadens, it
becomes clear that religious diversity appeared to rulers, by the middle
to late sixteenth century, as a sign of political weakness rather than of
political prudence. It characterized above all those countries where the
monarchy was disabled by a powerful nobility, driven into irrelevance
by a militant confederacy, or overwhelmed by an external threat from
the East. In these circumstances religious peace based on confessional
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pluralism was a humiliation to fear rather than an opportunity to grasp.
One does not need to share the unitary religious values of the monarchs
of the age to be able to understand their responses.
It remains true, nevertheless, that Germany (sometimes by the skin
of its teeth, as in the disputes over the archbishopric of Cologne in the
1580s) contrived to keep the peace even despite the instabilities provoked by the ecclesiastical reservation and the illogical and ineffective
exclusion of the German reformed or Calvinist movement, the most
dynamic and seductive to the aristocracy of the Protestant creeds after
1560. In contrast to Germany stand the sequence of fratricidal wars and
innumerable local disturbances in France between 1562 and 1598, and
the long, bitter, brutal struggle for the independence of the northern
provinces of the Low Countries fought in the mud of Zealand and
Brabant from the mid-1560s onwards.
The difference in socio-religious geography between Germany and
these two classic countries of ‘reformed’ Protestantism demands our
attention. As Philip Benedict has recently pointed out, Luther actively
discouraged his followers from founding voluntary, unauthorized congregations where the princely authority or other magistrate was not yet
favourable to the Reformation. In contrast, Calvin was entirely supportive of voluntary and still illegal congregations in regions like
France where royal support for the reformed faith was a distant dream.
Consequently, it would seem that the assumption that one should wait
for the prince, or migrate to a supportive territory, became embedded
in German society fairly early on. When princes faced resistance from
their subjects, it was often because the ruler wished to move farther in
a reformed direction than was acceptable to his people.
This is to argue that the conditions that predisposed Germany to social
and religious stability under the increasingly iron grip of its princes
actually pre-dated the 1555 Peace by some years. That may be the final
lesson of the curious and sometimes opaque wording of the Augsburger
Religionsfrieden. It does not articulate cuius regio, eius religio explicitly
because it was not necessary to do so. It could be taken more or less for
granted that the people would respect the religious preferences of their
immediate overlord, at least in respect of their public worship. Even when
there was a significant and unfulfilled lay aspiration to Reformation
thwarted by the prince, as in later sixteenth-century Bavaria and Austria,
the strategies documented by F. L. Carsten were essentially centripetal:
petition, lobby, disobey in a low-key and generally non-violent way.
One is a world away from the iconoclasm and hedge-preaching of the
Netherlands in 1566 or the furious rioting of one side against the other
documented by Natalie Davis for France.
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Obviously the Habsburg monarchy handled the post-1555 German
situation far better than did the Valois-Angoulême monarchy in France
after the death of Henri II in 1559. Nevertheless, it is questionable
whether, even if Henri II had never made his fatal joust, he could entirely
have restrained the enthusiasm for Calvin’s Reformation among so many
of his nobility. On the other hand, even if Germany had had a much less
adroit and skilful (and ambivalent) manipulator than Maximilian II, its
religious situation would only have become parlous when the constitution of the Reich itself was endangered, as when the possibility of a
majority of Protestant electors surfaced in the 1580s and again in the
1610s. That may be the lesson of the failings and foibles of Rudolf II’s
later years: that even a partisan, remote and at times ineffective monarch
did not simply by his own conduct destabilize the Reich. It took an exceptional collision of irresistible forces, the Bohemian revolt, the overreaching folly of Friedrich V of the Palatinate and the intransigent and militant
Catholicism of Ferdinand II and Maximilian of Bavaria to turn the armed
truce of the early 1600s into the Thirty Years’ War. That it took so long
and so much to bring about that catastrophe is a tribute to the Peace of
1555, but also to the conditions that made the peace possible.