Ending the Last War of Religion

The Thirty Years War killed a proportion of the German population that has few parallels in European history, and it took five years of negotiation in two towns to end it, Catholic powers at Munster and Protestant powers at Osnabruck, with the parties refusing to meet in one place. The treaties signed in 1648 settled territory, imperial constitutional questions and religion together.

The religious provisions repaired the defects of Augsburg with some precision. The Reformed churches were admitted to the peace alongside Catholics and Lutherans. A normative year of 1624 was fixed: whatever the religious arrangement of a territory had been in that year was the arrangement to be restored, which removed the endless disputes over secularised church lands by referring them to a date rather than to a principle. Subjects whose religion differed from their ruler's were granted the right to private household devotion and to emigrate, a real if limited protection where before they had none.

What the treaties did not do is establish toleration in any modern sense. Public worship remained a matter of territorial law, minorities remained minorities on sufferance, and the settlement applied to the empire rather than to Europe. What it did achieve was substantial: after 1648 the European powers stopped fighting wars whose stated purpose was the religion of another state.