Thirty Years War: Martin Luther And The Protestant Reformation

Background The Thirty Years War first began when religious matters were initially disrupted all across Europe with the Protestant Reformation. The Protestant Reformation was a religious revolution that introduced a sect of Christianity that was different from Catholicism, which had been the only form of Christianity in Europe before then. The Reformation began primarily with Martin Luther, a German monk who attacked the all-powerful Catholic Church, saying that many of their practices were not in line with the Bible’s teachings. To convey his message, he wrote his 95 Thesis on all that was wrong and corrupt within the Catholic Church and what he believed should be reformed. While Luther’s specific version of faith was known as Lutheranism,

The Protestant movement grew rapidly and led to uprisings and insurrections, as more and more Germans embraced the Protestant version of Christianity, valuing individual faith and the independent study of the scripture above the Pope’s “infallible” authority. The Holy Roman Emperor at the time, Charles V, saw the princes’ conversions to Christianity as equivalent to treason, and so he moved to banish Luther and outlaw the budding sect of Christianity of his Protestant followers. In 1531, the Protestant princes decided to form a defensive alliance, calling it the Schmalkaldic league, to protect themselves against the emperor. The problem remained that essentially half of the empire now adopted Lutheranism, and the old concerns of loyalty and treason based on religion did not die. Over next few years, Charles V worked to come to an agreement with the Protestant princes on the matter while also dealing with various smaller conflicts and revolutions throughout the empire. Finally, Charles called in his brother Ferdinand to conduct negotiations with those that remained of the Schmalkaldic

The only legal basis they had to go on before the Treaty of Westphalia was decided upon was the Peace of Augsburg. The Peace of Augsburg contained three main principles: The principle of cuius regio, eius religio meaning “whose realm, his religion,” provided for internal religious unity within a state. The religion of the prince became the religion of the state and all its inhabitants. Those inhabitants who could not conform to the prince's religion were allowed to leave. The second principle was known as reservatum ecclesiasticum, intended to cover the special status of the ecclesiastical state. If the bishop of an ecclesiastic state changed his religion, the inhabitants of that state did not have to do so. Instead, the bishop was expected to resign from his post. The third principle, Declaratio Ferdinandei translated to Ferdinand’s Declaration, exempted knights and some of the cities from the requirement of religious uniformity if the reformed religion had been practiced there since the mid-1520s. This allowed for a few mixed cities and towns where Catholics and Lutherans had lived together, and it also protected the authority of the princely families, the knights and some of the cities to determine what religious sameness meant in their