Union und Liga 1608/09: Konfessionelle Bundnisse im Reich - Weichenstellung zum Religionskrieg?, ed. Albrecht Ernst and Anton Schindling

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This stimulating volume of essays edited by Albrecht Ernst and Anton Schindling contests the still deeply entrenched view that the Thirty Years War was the inevitable outcome of the tensions inherent in the Holy Roman Empire. Its focus is the establishment of a Protestant Union at Auhausen in 1608, countered the following year by the formation of a Catholic League (the text of the statutes of each are included in this volume), which has often been viewed as the beginning of an extended ‘phoney war’. Recently this traditional view has been revived in Heinz Schilling's argument that the Thirty Years War was the outcome of a period of religious fundamentalism. The conflict, Schilling has suggested, was a necessary ‘modernisation crisis’ that cleared the ground for the emergence of the secular state and the modern international state system. The contrary case is argued here by Georg Schmidt in a masterly survey of imperial politics around 1600. There were heated political disagreements over specific issues, but Schmidt emphasises the forces which held the Imperial Estates together. War was not the necessary outcome of the political crisis. The patriotic appeals of the Union and its aspiration to found national unity on principles of freedom, toleration and peaceful coexistence were more significant than the activities of religious extremists among both Protestants and Catholics. In an essay on Württemberg and Baden, Axel Gotthard emphasises how little the members of the Union could actually agree on. Lutheran and Calvinist princes were divided on key issues and the Union disintegrated almost as soon as the hostilities broke out. Both territories distrusted the Habsburgs, but they were at root loyal to the Reich and committed to its continuing existence. Margrave Georg of Baden-Durlach's main aim, as Lars Adler shows, was to secure his hold on the Catholic territories of Baden-Baden which he had inherited from Margrave Eduard Fortunat in 1600 against the claims of the latter's children by a morganatic marriage.