The Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War that had ravaged Germany since 1618. The war marked religious controversy between Protestantism and the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the advance of Absolutism. The medieval privileges that defined Europe’s many estates, cities and provinces came to an end in many of Europe’s large nations. On the other hand, Germany and Italy crumbled into small and medium sized Principalities. This process had been going on since the late medieval period.
The results are shown in this map. The central feature is the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. It has lost its Italian lands, Switzerland and the Dutch Republic and some territories adjacent to France. Its constituent parts, Electorates, Duchies, Principalities, Counties and Church lands, gained virtual sovereignty, an item more or less defined by this Peace Treaty. The Emperor’s authority was now restricted to his own possessions within the Empire (Austria and Bohemia). Outside the Empire, he was also the King of Hungary, a country recently overrun by the Turks. Only a small strip of it remained within the bounds of Christendom. The Austrian Habsburg domains have one colour on the maps.
The Empire was one of the successors to Charlemagne’s Frankish Kingdom and Empire that encompassed Western Europe in the early Middle Ages. France was the other. While the French Kingdom succeeded in uniting its constituent fiefs into a nation state with an absolute King, the Empire, originally comprising the Kingdoms of Germany, Italy and Burgundy, crumbled into a loose confederation consisting of the estates of the Empires magnates, who took on royal and sovereign status for themselves. The Empire lost its nominal sovereignty over the Northwest Italian states and Switzerland in 1648. The Dutch Republic of United Provinces had unilaterally seceded from the Empire in 1607.
The year of the Westphalian peace can be viewed as the beginning of the State System as we still know it today. As a world of sovereign states that came into existence by mutual recognition of each others unalienable jurisdictions.
The core of this world was heavily crumbled, as can be seen on this map. The Empire and Italy were divided in countless territories Most of them were owned by local Princes. Others were owned by foreign Kings. The Spanish Habsburg dynasty owned the three Italian Kingdoms of Sardinia, Naples and Sicily, and the Duchy of Milan. They were also Lords of the Southern Netherlands and the County of Burgundy, the remnant of the heritage of the Burgundian dukes.
On the periphery of the system larger states existed. In the West the absolutely ruled modern nation states of France and Spain. In the East, the enormous domains of the Poles, Turks and Russians stood out.
Many dynasties ruled over more than one territory. The Spanish Habsburgs are an example. Their possessions were strictly not one state, but a number of states that happened to have the same monarch. They are coloured as the domain of one ruler. The above mentioned advance of Absolutism however undermined the ancient freedoms of these states. The emergence of the Dutch Republic was a conservative reaction against the advance of Absolutism. They seceded from the Spanish Habsburg Dominions in order to retain their medieval freedoms and privileges. This process was helped by the religious controversy that sparked the wars now ended by the Peace of Westphalia.
