Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
had become Protestant. In 1555 Karl V signed the Peace of Augsburg, which gave the
Catholic and Protestant churches equal standing and allowed each local prince to decide
the religion of their principality. The more secular northern principalities of the German
lands adopted Lutheran teachings, while the clerical lords in the south, southwest and
Austria remained Catholic or adopted Catholicism. Not only does this explain the patch-
work of Protestant and Catholic religions today in many regions that used to be part of
the Holy Roman Empire, but it also made a mess of one Habsburg vision: Emperor Karl
V had dedicated his life to creating a so-called 'universal Catholic monarchy'. Seeing the
writing clearly on the wall, he abdicated in 1556 and withdrew to a monastery in Spain to
lick his wounds and die.
The spoils were divided up among Habsburgs. The brother of Karl V, Ferdinand I, in-
herited Austria as well as Hungary and Bohemia, and Karl V's only legitimate son, Philip
II (1527-98) got Spain, Naples and Sicily, the Low Countries, and the overseas colonies.
To bolster Catholicism in Austria, Ferdinand I invited the Jesuits to Vienna in 1556; in
contrast, his successor Maximilian II was extremely tolerant of Protestantism and the
ideas of the Reformation. When the fanatically Catholic Ferdinand II took the throne in
1619 and put his weight behind a Counter -Reformation movement, the Protestant nobles
in Bohemia finally rebelled in an armed conflict that quickly spread and developed into
the pan-European Thirty Years' War; Sweden and France had joined this by 1635. In
1645 a Protestant Swedish army marched to within sight of Vienna but did not attack.
Calm was restored with the Peace of Westphalia (1648) but it left the Habsburgs'
Reich - embracing more than 300 states and about 1000 smaller territories - a nominal,
impotent state. Switzerland and the Netherlands gained formal independence, and the
Habsburgs lost territory to France.
