The Rise of Confessional Tension in Brandenburg's Relations with Sweden in the Late-seventeenth Century

Abstract

Thediplomatic and religious climate in Protestant Northern Europe during the era of Louis XIV was filled with competing and at times contradictory impulses, and the repercussions of Louis's expansionist and anti-Protestant policies on the relations between the Protestant states were varied and complex. Taken in conjunction with the ascension of Catholic James II in Britain in February 1685 and the succession of the Catholic House of Neuburg in the Palatinate following the death of the last Calvinist elector in May of that year, Louis's reintroduction of the mass ins the “reunited” territories and his increasing persecution of the Huguenots in France added to an acute sense among European Protestants that the survival of their religion was threatened. It is a well-established theme in the standard literature on seventeenth-century Europe that the culmination of Louis's attack on the Huguenots in his revocation of the Edict of Nantes in October 1685 galvanized the continents Protestant powers in a common sense of outrage and united them in a spirit of political cooperation against France. Indeed, such an astute contemporary observer as Leibniz was to write in the early 1690s that it appeared now “as if all of the north is opposed to the south of Europe; the great majority of the Germanic peoples are opposed to the Latins.” Even Bossuet had to declare that “your so-called Reformation … was never more powerful nor more united. All of the Protestants have joined forces. From the outside, the Reformation is very cohesive, more haughty and more menacing than ever.”