Germany: history 1519–1815

For the earlier history of Germany see Germany: history to 1519.

The beginning of the German Reformation After the reign of Maximilian I (1493–1519) the steady growth of the Free Imperial Cities (the cities and towns that were subject only to the emperor or German king) shows that an active municipal life was developing in Germany. While the great Gothic cathedrals, like those of Strasbourg and Cologne (begun in 1248), bear testimony to the faith and religious zeal of the German people in the medieval period, the Great Schism and the abuses produced by the sale of indulgences led to a certain amount of popular antipapal feeling. It was strongest in the universities, where the ‘New Learning’ of the Renaissance had cultivated religious criticism.

This antipapal resentment was set ablaze by Martin Luther in 1517, when he denounced the Dominican monk Johann Tetzel, one of many who were selling indulgences for the building fund of St Peter's in Rome. This was the beginning of the Reformation in Germany. In spite or possibly because of the papal bull of 1520 that condemned him, and the imperial Diet of Worms of 1521, which declared him an outlaw and a heretic, Luther obtained considerable support from the princely rulers of various German states. A gathering of such princes, as well as the representatives of many cities, issued a formal protest against the religious intolerance of the Catholic majority at the Second Diet of Speyer (1529), and thus became known as Protestants.

The Habsburg emperor Charles V (reigned 1519–56) – who was also king of Spain from 1516 – tried to reconcile the opposing religious factions. However, the stubbornness by the theologians on both sides, and the vested interest of the Protestant princes who had acquired vast church property in the religious revolution and had no intention of returning it, helped to make a reconciliation impossible. Luther realized that his religious movement rested primarily on the goodwill of the Protestant princes and not of the people, and this manifested itself in his conduct in the Peasants' War (1525), when he urged extreme ruthlessness in repressing a popular revolt founded on genuine grievances.

Charles V's foreign wars Charles V's position was weakened by his constant need to pacify the German princes of whatever religious persuasion in order to gain their help in his external wars. One of the most pressing threats came from the Ottoman Turks. Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman sultan, had already besieged Vienna (1529), and was advancing westward with overwhelming forces to attack the emperor's dominions. Charles lost no time in making a patriotic appeal to the Germans to forget their differences in the face of the common enemy, and had soon assembled a substantial army, more than sufficient to intimidate the Turks. To the Protestants he had granted provisional toleration by the Peace of Nuremberg. However, the Catholics decreed, at the Diet of Augsburg (1530) that the Protestants must immediately return to the Catholic faith. The Protestants responded with the first distinct formulation of Protestantism (the Confession of Augsburg), and formed the League of Schmalkalden for their own defence.

Charles continued to be concerned with non-German affairs for many years. The expedition against the Turks at Tunis (1535), the suppression of the rebellion in Ghent (1539–40), attacks on the Algerian corsairs (pirates), and two more ravaging wars with the French king, Francis I (see France: history 1515–1815), kept Charles fully occupied until the Treaty of Crépy (1544) restored the status quo with France.

The crushing of the Protestant League It was not until the year of Luther's death (1546) that Charles began his work of crushing the League of Schmalkalden, the alliance of German Protestant princes. This proved an easy task, for at the eleventh hour Maurice, duke of Saxony, one of the pillars of the Reformation, deserted to the imperial side having been promised the electorship of Saxony (see elector). The League crumbled, its forces defeated by Charles V at the Battle of Mühlberg (1547); its leaders were executed, and fines were exacted from Protestant cities.

The religious settlement in Germany Once his immediate objective was achieved, Maurice went over to the Protestants again. In addition, Francis's successor on the French throne, Henry II, was eager to grab any means of humbling his father's rival, and accordingly lent substantial aid to the oppressed Lutherans. Although France was a Catholic power, its intervention was based on its fundamental distrust of Habsburg power – a pattern that was to be repeated in the following century.

These developments resulted in Charles being forced to make major concessions to his enemies at the Diet of Augsburg (1555). It was arranged that in future every German prince should be allowed a free choice between the the Confession of Augsburg (the summary of Lutheran orthodoxy drawn up by Philip Melanchthon) and Roman Catholicism, and that once his choice was made he should be at liberty to enforce his religion upon his subjects and to drive the latter out of the kingdom should they refuse his faith. This principle was far-reaching, for it precipitated the subsequent religious wars and persecutions of the old religion in the new Protestant states; in the short term, however, it brought peace.

The Peace of Augsburg had treated the Calvinists (followers of the Protestant doctrines of John Calvin) as non-existent, yet in Germany, as elsewhere, many had come to prefer Calvinism to Lutheranism. The result was perpetual strife among the various Protestant sects, for the Lutherans showed small mercy to the Calvinists or to any reformers who ventured to follow a different creed from that of the Augsburg Confession.

The impact of the Counter-Reformation After Charles there were two moderately enlightened emperors, and then followed Rudolph II (reigned 1576–1612), during whose reign the Catholic Church showed a marked recovery (the Counter-Reformation). Dread of oppression impelled the Protestant states towards mutual alliance, and in 1608 a Protestant confederation was duly formed called the Evangelical Union, headed by the Calvinist prince, Christian of Anhalt. This was followed, in 1609, by a counter-move on the part of the Catholics, who founded the Holy League, at the head of which was Maximilian of Bavaria.

Little provocation was needed to set these leagues at war with one another, and that came when a band of Protestant nobles of Bohemia, infuriated by the vacillating policy of the emperor, marched to the royal castle at Prague, and hurled the two imperial representatives and their secretary out of the castle window (1618).

The Thirty Years' War The ‘Defenestration of Prague’ marked the outbreak of a Protestant revolt in Bohemia against Catholic imperial rule. The suppression of this revolt, complete by 1620, comprises the first chapter in the Thirty Years' War (1618–48).

The second chapter centres on the intervention of Christian IV of Denmark, who now came forward to help his Protestant co-religionists. Other notable Protestant leaders on his side were Christian of Anhalt and Count Mansfeld, while ranged against them were the two formidable generals Count von Tilly and Albrecht von Wallenstein.

Mansfeld died shortly after his crushing defeat by Wallenstein at Dessau on the River Elbe (1626), and his death was soon followed by that of Christian of Anhalt. The Danish king was vanquished by Tilly at the Battle of Lutter, and the remnants of Lutheranism were wiped out from Austria as well as from Bohemia. Wallenstein swept with his plundering armies over the greater part of northern Germany, and completed his destruction by breaking the backbone of the once flourishing and influential Hanseatic League. The year 1629 is marked by the retirement from the war of Christian IV, and also by the Edict of Restitution, which restored to the Catholics all the church properties that the Protestants had appropriated since the religious settlement of the previous century.

In 1630 another Scandinavian champion of the Protestant cause, the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, intervened in the war, helped by subsidies from the French chief minister Cardinal Richelieu. This opened the third period of the war. Gustavus twice defeated Tilly, then defeated Wallenstein at Lützen (1632), although Gustavus himself was killed in the battle.

The final chapter of the war opened in 1635, with the direct military intervention of Catholic France against the Habsburgs (see also France: history 1515–1815). The war had now largely lost its religious character, and had developed into a European contest in which the one object of the combatants was either to despoil the Empire themselves, or to hinder their rivals from territorial expansion.

The Treaty of Westphalia and the aftermath of the war Eventually the war was ended by the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). The terms of the treaty were fundamentally prejudicial to the interests and prestige of the emperor, and the treaty also marks a further step in the emergence of France as a leading power in Europe.

France received a great part of Alsace and three bishoprics of Lorraine, Metz, Toul, and Verdun; Sweden received important tracts of land in northern Germany, to hold as fiefs of the Empire; and the independence of Switzerland and of the Netherlands was finally acknowledged. In Germany Lutherans, Catholics, and Calvinists were placed on an equal footing, but princes might still impose their own creeds upon their states. A crushing blow was dealt to the Empire, as now the German states were for all practical purposes independent, and might even forge their own foreign alliances.

The war had a crippling effect on the German economy, culture, and political development. It appears that the population of Germany fell during the brief space of 30 years from 20 million to 12 million, largely as a result of famine and disease. The once-proud Hanseatic League was broken up, flourishing towns were levelled to the ground, agriculture was neglected, industries and commercial routes were obliterated, and education, science, and the fine arts languished.

The emergence of Prussia The rise of Prussia took place against this background. Prussia, the name of which was taken from the Borussi, a fierce Slavonic tribe, lay along the Baltic coast east of the River Vistula, incorporating parts of present-day Poland, Russia, and Lithuania. The Slavonic tribes had been converted and their territory occupied in the 13th century by the military-religious order of Teutonic Knights. In 1525 Albert Hohenzollern, the grand master of the order, declaring himself a Protestant, appropriated the territory for himself, and declared it to be a secular duchy. This became formally independent of Polish suzerainty in 1660.

In 1618 the duchy of Prussia was linked with the electorate of Brandenburg (in present-day northeast Germany and northwest Poland) under a single Hohenzollern ruler, and when these lands fell into the hands of the ‘Great Elector’, Frederick William (ruled 1640–88), the foundation of the future greatness of Prussia was laid. Frederick was an able ruler who determined to make his mark in European politics. For this purpose he drilled an excellent and permanent military force, and was successful in wars against Sweden and Poland. It was, however, in the reign of his son, Frederick I (ruled 1688–1713), that Prussia achieved the status of a kingdom. Frederick was succeeded by Frederick William I (ruled 1713–40), who, in spite of his eccentricities, proved an energetic if brutal tyrant.

The wars of Frederick the Great Frederick William I left to his son, Frederick (II) the Great (ruled 1740–86), a large, thoroughly disciplined, standing army. Frederick the Great was gifted with a genius for war, and it was largely on this that he relied in establishing his little kingdom as a power to be reckoned with in Europe.

In 1740 the male line of the Habsburgs became extinct. The Emperor Charles VI had earlier issued the ‘Pragmatic Sanction’ decreeing that all his possessions and titles should be passed on to his daughter Maria Theresa, and most other European states had promised Charles to support his daughter's claim to the imperial throne. But on his death Frederick immediately claimed Silesia from Austria, and invaded it. The War of the Austrian Succession resulted, with Britain, Sardinia, and the Dutch supporting Austria, and France and Spain supporting Prussia. The war ended in 1748 with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which acknowledged Frederick's claim to Silesia.

The Seven Years' War (1756–63) was an unsuccessful attempt to humble Prussia. Maria Theresa of Austria had as her allies France, Russia, Saxony, Sweden, and Poland, while Frederick could rely only on Britain, but British subsidies were an invaluable help to him. Although forced to fight on a number of fronts, Frederick defeated the French at the Battle of Rossbach and the Russians at the Battle of Zorndorf, but was really saved by the accession to the Russian throne of Peter III, who was an enthusiastic admirer of Frederick. Russia abandoned the war, and Prussia was left with Silesia; Prussia's ally, Britain gained an overseas empire by the peace of Paris (1763) with France.

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars The French Revolution (1789) caused considerable anxiety in the other European monarchies. Prussia, under Frederick William II (ruled 1786–97), invaded France in 1792, but was defeated, and in the following year Prussia joined Britain and many of the other European powers in the First Coalition against France, although this was unsuccessful. From 1795 Prussia was neutral; in 1801 Prussia, now under Frederick William III (ruled 1797–1840), joined Denmark, Sweden, and Russia in the so-called ‘armed neutrality of the north’, which opposed Britain's attempt to end their trade with France, but this failed.

Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz (December 1805) was the death knell of the Holy Roman Empire, and Francis II, in 1806, took the less grand title of emperor of Austria. Thus the long era of Habsburg ascendancy over Germany began to end. Prussia was comprehensively defeated at Jena (see Jena, Battle of) in the same year. After the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, Napoleon set up the Confederation of the Rhine, a grouping of 16 German states under his protectorship, including the newly-created kingdom of Westphalia, established for Napoleon's brother, Jerome Bonaparte.

The French were much weakened by the disastrous Russian campaign (1812), and the Confederation of the Rhine collapsed in 1813. The Battle of the Nations (16–18 October 1813) saw Napoleon's forces utterly defeated by a combination of Germans, Austrians, and Russians under Prussian Field Marshal von Blücher. Following Napoleon's return from exile in 1815, Prussian forces under Blücher played an important role in his final defeat at Waterloo.

For subsequent developments in Germany see Germany: history 1815–1919 and Germany: history 1919–49. For the history of Germany since 1949 see Germany.