Peace of Westphalia
The treaties signed at Münster and Osnabrück in October 1648 ended the Thirty Years' War and are conventionally taken as the beginning of the modern state system. The negotiation took five years and involved 194 states, with Catholic powers meeting in one city and Protestant in the other because they could not agree on precedence in the same room. The settlement's religious terms extended the Peace of Augsburg to include Calvinists, fixed 1624 as the year determining which confession each territory held, and gave subjects of a different faith from their ruler the right to worship privately and to emigrate. The political terms recognised the practical sovereignty of the German states, including the right to make alliances so long as they were not against the emperor, which reduced the empire to a framework. Switzerland and the Dutch Republic were recognised as independent. France took Alsace in a formulation deliberately left ambiguous, and Sweden took territory on the Baltic coast that made it a member of the imperial diet. The idea that Westphalia invented sovereignty and non-interference is a later reading — the term Westphalian sovereignty was popularised by twentieth-century political scientists, and the treaties themselves are full of guarantees that are interventions by another name. What is not in dispute is the cost of what they ended. The German lands lost perhaps a fifth to a third of their population over thirty years, some regions far more, and did not recover for a century. The papacy declared the treaties null and was ignored.
- Year: 1648 CE
- Category: Political
