The Peace of Westphalia

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.

Few historical documents have been credited with as much as these treaties. In international relations theory, Westphalia routinely appears as the origin of the sovereign state system, the moment when territorial sovereignty, non-interference and the modern states system were established, so that the whole post-1648 order is called Westphalian.

Historians who work on the actual treaties have been dismantling this for some time. The texts do not proclaim sovereignty as a principle. They confirm the empire's constitutional structure rather than abolishing it, leaving the imperial estates with rights that fall well short of independent statehood and leaving imperial institutions in place. The provisions on religion are explicitly interference in the internal arrangements of member territories, guaranteed by foreign powers. The word sovereignty appears in a narrower and more technical sense than the theory requires.

The myth appears to have been assembled in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by writers looking for a founding moment for the system they inhabited, and it has been repeated in textbooks ever since with little reference to the documents.

The atlas records the settlement rather than the legend, and flags the legend, because the same pattern recurs in this atlas: a real event acquires a later significance that becomes better known than the event, and the correction never travels as fast as the story.