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Asked the tavern drinkers in Goethe’s Faust—and the answer is no easier to find today than in the late 18th, or early 17th, century. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was a land of many polities. In the empire there were some 1,000 separate, semiautonomous political units, many of them very small—such as the Imperial Knights, direct vassals of the emperor and particularly numerous in the southwest, who might each own only part of one village—and others comparable in size with smaller independent states elsewhere, such as Scotland or the Dutch Republic. At the top came the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs, covering the elective kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary, as well as Austria, the Tyrol, and Alsace, with about 8,000,000 inhabitants; next came electoral Saxony, Brandenburg, and Bavaria, with more than 1,000,000 subjects each; and then the Palatinate, Hesse, Trier, and Württemberg, with about 500,000 each.
These were large polities, indeed, but they were weakened by three factors. First, they did not accept primogeniture: Hesse had been divided into four portions at the death of Landgrave Philip the Magnanimous, Luther’s patron, in 1567; the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs were partitioned in 1564 and again in 1576. Second, many of the states were geographically fragmented: thus, the Palatinate was divided into an Upper County, adjoining the borders of both Bohemia and Bavaria, and a Lower County, on the middle Rhine. These factors had, in the course of time, created in Germany a balance of power between the states. The territorial strength of the Habsburgs may have brought them a monopoly of the imperial title from 1438 onward, but they could do no more: the other princes, when threatened, were able to form alliances whose military strength was equal to that of the emperor himself. However, the third weakness—the religious upheaval of the 16th century—changed all that: princes who had formerly stood together were now divided by religion. Swabia, for example, more or less equal in area to modern Switzerland, included 68 secular and 40 spiritual princes and also 32 imperial free cities. By 1618 more than half of these rulers and almost exactly half of the population were Catholic; the rest were Protestant. Neither bloc was prepared to let the other mobilize an army. Similar paralysis was to be found in most other regions: the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had separated Germany into hostile but evenly balanced confessional camps.
The Religious Peace of Augsburg in 1555 had put an end to 30 years of sporadic confessional warfare in Germany between Catholics and Lutherans by creating a layered structure of legal securities for the people of the empire. At the top was the right (known as cuius regio, eius religio) of every secular ruler, from the seven electors down to the imperial knights, to dictate whether their subjects’ religion was to be Lutheran or Catholic (the only officially permitted creeds). The only exceptions to this rule were the imperial free cities, where both Lutherans and Catholics were to enjoy freedom of worship, and the Catholic ecclesiastical states, where bishops and abbots who wished to become Lutherans were obliged to resign first. The latter provision, known as the reservatum ecclesiasticum, gave rise to a war in 1583–88 when the archbishop of Cologne declared himself a Protestant but refused to resign: in the end a coalition of Catholic princes, led by the duke of Bavaria, forced him out.
This “War of Cologne” was a turning point in the religious history of Germany. Until then, the Catholics had been on the defensive, losing ground steadily to the Protestants. Even the decrees of the Council of Trent, which animated Catholics elsewhere, failed to strengthen the position of the Roman church in Germany. After the successful struggle to retain Cologne, however, Catholic princes began to enforce the cuius regio principle with rigour. In Bavaria, as well as in Würzburg, Bamberg, and other ecclesiastical states, Protestants were given the choice of either conversion or exile. Most of those affected were adherents of the Lutheran church, already weakened by defections to Calvinism, a new creed that had scarcely a German adherent at the time of the Religious Peace of Augsburg. The rulers of the Palatinate (1560), Nassau (1578), Hesse-Kassel (1603), and Brandenburg (1613) all abandoned Lutheranism for the new confession, as did many lesser rulers and several towns. Small wonder that the Lutherans came to detest the Calvinists even more than they loathed the Catholics.
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