(1543–1592), a prince of very marked Calvinist sympathies and of some military experience. Just before this time much unrest in the north-west of Germany had been caused by the settlement there of a number of refugees from the Netherlands. Spreading their advanced religious views, these settlers were partly responsible for two serious outbreaks of disorder. At Aix-la-Chapelle the Protestants, not being allowed freedom of worship, took possession of the city in 1581. The matter came before the diet, which was opened at Augsburg in July 1582, but the case was left undecided; afterwards, however, the Reichshofrat declared against the insurgents, although it was not until 1598 that Protestant worship was abolished and the Roman Catholic governing body was restored. At Cologne the archbishop, Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg, married and announced his intention of retaining his spiritual office. Had this proceeding passed unchallenged, the Protestants, among whom Gebhard now counted himself, would have had a majority in the electoral college. The Roman Catholics, however, secured the deposition of Gebhard and the election in his stead of Ernest, bishop of Liége, and war broke out in 1583. Except John Casimir, the Protestant princes showed no eagerness to assist Gebhard, who in a short time was driven from his see, and afterwards took up his residence in Strassburg, where also he instigated a rebellion on a small scale. Thus these quarrels terminated in victories for the Roman Catholics, who were successful about this time in restoring their faith in the bishoprics of Würzburg, Salzburg, Bamberg, Paderborn, Minden and Osnabrück. Another dispute also ended in a similar way. This was the claim made by the administrator of the archbishopric of Magdeburg, a Hohenzollern prince, Joachim Frederick, afterwards elector of Brandenburg, to sit and vote in the imperial diet; it was not admitted, and the administrator retired from Augsburg, a similar fate befalling a similar claim made by several other administrators some years later.
After the death of Augustus of Saxony in February 1586 there was another brief alliance between the Protestant parties, although on this occasion the lead was taken not by the Saxon, but by the Palatine prince. Less strict in his adherence to the tenets of Lutheranism than The Protestant grievances. Augustus, the new elector of Saxony, Christian I., fell under the influence of John Casimir. The result was that Protestant princes, including the three temporal electors, united in placing their grievances before the emperor; obtaining no redress they met at Torgau in 1591 and offered help to Henry IV. of France, a proceeding which was diametrically opposed to the past policy of Saxony. But this alliance, like its forerunner, was of very short duration. Christian I. died in 1591, and under Christian II. electoral Saxony re-established a rigid Lutheranism at home and pursued a policy of moderation and neutrality abroad. A short time afterwards the militant party among the Protestants suffered a heavy loss by the death of their leader, John Casimir, whose policy, however, was continued by his nephew and pupil, the elector Frederick IV. But neither desertion nor death was able to crush entirely the militant Protestants, among whom Christian, prince of Anhalt (1568–1630), was rapidly becoming the most prominent figure. They made themselves very troublesome at the diet of Regensburg in 1593, and also at the diet held in the same city four years later, putting forward various demands for greater religious freedom and seeking to hinder, or delay, the payment of the grant for the Turkish war. Moreover, in 1598 they put forward the theory that the vote of a majority in the diet was not binding upon the minority; they took up the same position at Regensburg in 1603, when they raised strong objections to the decisions of the Reichshofrat and afterwards withdrew from the diet in a body. Thus, under Maximilian of Bavaria and Christian of Anhalt respectively the two great parties were gaining a better idea of their own needs and of each other’s aims and were watching vigilantly the position in the duchies of Cleves, Jülich and Berg, where a dispute over the succession was impending. While wars and rumours of wars were disturbing the peace in the west of Germany the Turks were again harassing the east. The war between them and the Empire, which was renewed in 1593, lasted almost without interruption until November 1606, when peace was made, the tribute long paid by the emperor to the sultan being abandoned. This peace was concluded not by Rudolph, but by his brother, the archduke Matthias, who owing to the emperor’s mental incapacity had just been declared by his kinsman the head of the house of Habsburg. Rudolph resented this indignity very greatly, and until his death in January 1612 the relations between the brothers were very strained, but this mainly concerns the history of Hungary and of Bohemia, which were sensibly affected by the fraternal discord.
By this time however, there were signs of substantial progress on the part of the great Catholic reaction, which was to have important consequences for Germany. This was due mainly to the persistent zeal of the Jesuits. For a long time the Protestants had absorbed the intellectual The Counter-Reformation. strength of the country, but now many able scholars and divines among the Jesuits could hold their own with their antagonists. These devoted missionaries of the church gave their attention mainly to the young, and during the reign of Rudolph II. they were fortunate enough to make a deep impression upon two princes, each of whom was destined to play a great part in the events of his time. These princes were Maximilian, duke of Bavaria, and Ferdinand, archduke of Styria, the former a member of the house of Wittelsbach, and the latter of the house of Habsburg. Maximilian became prominent in 1607 by executing an imperial mandate against the free city of Donauwörth, where a religious riot had taken place, and afterwards treating it as his own. Rendered suspicious by this arbitrary act, the Protestant princes in 1608 formed a confederation known as the Evangelical Union, and in response the Roman Catholics, under the guidance of Maximilian, united in a similar confederation afterwards called the Catholic League. This was founded at Munich in July 1609. As the Union was headed by the elector palatine of the Rhine, Frederick IV., who was a Calvinist, many Lutherans, among them the elector of Saxony, were by no means enthusiastic in its support. It acquired, however, immense importance through its alliance with Henry IV. of France, who, like Henry II., wished to profit by the quarrels in Germany, and who interfered in the disputed succession to the duchies of Cleves and Jülich. War seemed about to break out between the two confederations and their foreign allies over this question, but after the murder of the French king in May 1610 the Union did not venture to fight.
Ferdinand was even more vigorous than Maximilian in defence of his religion. On assuming the government of Styria he set to work to extirpate Protestantism, which had made considerable progress in the Austrian archduchies. Soon afterwards he was selected by the Habsburgs Ferdinand II. as the heir of the childless emperor Matthias, and on coming to Vienna after the death of that sovereign in March 1619 he found himself in the midst of hopeless confusion. The Bohemians refused to acknowledge him as their king and elected in his stead Frederick V., the elector palatine of the Rhine, a son-in-law of the English king James I., and the Hungarians and the Austrians were hardly less disaffected. As Ferdinand II., however, he succeeded in obtaining the imperial crown in August 1619, and from that time he was dominated by a fixed resolve to secure the triumph of his church throughout the Empire, a resolve which cost Germany the Thirty Years’ War.
He began with Bohemia. Although supported by Spain he
could not obtain from this quarter an army sufficiently strong
to crush the Bohemians, and for some time he remained
powerless and inactive in Vienna. Then at the
beginning of 1620 he came to terms with Maximilian
The congress
in Bohemia.
of Bavaria, who, after carefully securing his own
interests, placed the army of the League, commanded by the
celebrated Tilly, at his disposal. Conditionally the Union
promised assistance to Frederick, but he wasted several months
and vaguely hoped that the English king would help him out
of his embarrassments. Meanwhile Tilly advanced into Bohemia,
and in November 1620 Frederick’s army was utterly routed at
