The Westphalian Congresses Open

DEC 04 1644 · 12:00

The Friedenssaal of Osnabrück town hall, where Imperial and Swedish envoys negotiated from 1644. Place: Münster (Catholic powers and France) and Osnabrück (Protestants and Sweden), prince-bishoprics of Westphalia Figures: Maximilian Graf Trauttmansdorff, principal Imperial plenipotentiary · Henri II d'Orléans-Longueville, French · Johan Oxenstierna, Swedish · Fabio Chigi, papal nuncio (later Pope Alexander VII) · Alvise Contarini, Venetian mediator Two Cathedral Towns, Thirty Miles Apart Preliminary negotiations on a German peace have been underway since the Treaty of Hamburg of 1641, which agreed the place and the procedure. On 4 December 1644 the formal congresses finally open. Catholic and Protestant powers cannot share a single negotiating table without each side compromising its own confessional theology of who may legitimately treat with whom. The improvised solution is to hold two congresses simultaneously, thirty miles apart, in two prince-bishoprics on the neutralized Westphalian Circle: Münster for the Catholics with France, Osnabrück for the Protestants with Sweden. Mounted couriers shuttle drafts between the two towns; the papal nuncio Chigi and the Venetian Contarini mediate at Münster but never set foot in Osnabrück. The Estates of the Empire are admitted as participants in their own right, not as delegates of the Emperor: 194 polities of various sizes eventually send representatives. The result is the largest diplomatic gathering Europe has ever assembled. The Infrastructure of the Settlement The first eight months are spent on questions of precedence. Who enters which door first; what title each delegation addresses the others by; whose carriage yields to whose in the streets; whether the Swedish chancellor's son outranks an Imperial count. These are not delays in the negotiation. They are the negotiation. The new system being designed at Münster and Osnabrück is an order in which sovereigns of incompatible doctrines must transact with each other on terms that none of them can claim as a victory of principle. Precedence is the syntax of that order being argued into existence. Four years of substantive bargaining follow. By the time the treaties are signed on 24 October 1648 (see [[peace-of-westphalia-1648]]), the procedural innovations of the Westphalian congresses (resident plenipotentiaries, secular mediation, written drafts, parallel tables, recognition of small powers as legal equals) will have become the operating manual of European diplomacy for the next three and a half centuries. The settlement is not only what the treaties say. It is also the way they were negotiated.