It was an independent supreme court composed of Catholic and Lutheran judges selected by the imperial Estates.

The Imperial Cameral Court ( Reichskammergericht) was entrusted with adjudicating disputes arising from the 1555 treaty. Unfortunately, the theologians could not agree, while many people found it hard in practice to distinguish between religion and law, since Christian morality was a benchmark for both. Disputes over doctrine were supposed to be settled by theologians, while those over legal jurisdictions and other matters would be adjudicated by the two imperial supreme courts. The 1555 treaty has entered history as the Religious Peace, but it was referred to in the later sixteenth and seventeenth century as the ‘Religious and Profane Peace’ because it also addressed other issues like public order. If (('gtm=off') const isAppRedirect = ('appRedirect') Ĭonst isAndroid = /Android/i.test(erAgent) Ĭonst isIphone = /iPhone|iPad|iPod/i.test(erAgent) As late as the 1960s, Germans placed it ahead of both world wars and the Black Death as their country's greatest disaster. In a major reassessment, Wilson argues that religion was not the catalyst, but one element in a lethal stew of political, social, and dynastic forces that fed the conflict.īy war's end a recognizably modern Europe had been created, but at what price? The Thirty Years War condemned the Germans to two centuries of internal division and international impotence and became a benchmark of brutality for centuries. The sweeping narrative encompasses dramatic events and unforgettable individuals-the sack of Magdeburg the Dutch revolt the Swedish militant king Gustavus Adolphus the imperial generals, Wallenstein and Tilly and diplomat Cardinal Richelieu. Bohemia was ravaged by mercenary troops in the first battle of a conflagration that would engulf Europe from Spain to Sweden. When defiant Bohemians tossed the Habsburg emperor's envoys from the castle windows in Prague in 1618, the Holy Roman Empire struck back with a vengeance. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world. The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike.

Peter wilson the thirty years war