The Peace of Prague

MAY 30 1635 · 12:00

Ferdinand II, who reconciled with Saxony at Prague in 1635, hoping to end the German war. Place: Prague, Bohemia Figures: Emperor Ferdinand II · Johann Georg I, Elector of Saxony · most Lutheran imperial estates, as signatories or accessors What the Empire Agreed Six months after Nördlingen the Emperor and the Elector of Saxony sign a separate peace. The Edict of Restitution is suspended for forty years on a 1627 normal date, a compromise the Lutheran princes can live with. Saxony receives Lusatia. The various Protestant armies are to be merged into a single Imperial army under Imperial command. Swedish forces in the Empire are declared unlawful occupiers and to be expelled. Within a year most of the Lutheran imperial estates have acceded. On paper, this is the end of the German war. The confessional question that began at Prague in 1618 has been settled by another Prague compromise in 1635. The Imperial constitution survives largely intact. Sweden, isolated, would be expected to withdraw within a campaigning season or two. Eight million people are still alive at this point who will be dead by 1648. Why the War Did Not End France will not let it end. Eleven days before Prague is signed, on 19 May 1635, a French herald in Brussels has declared war on Spain (see [[french-intervention-1635]]). Richelieu has correctly read the Nördlingen result: a Habsburg-pacified Germany frees Spanish and Imperial forces to consolidate the Burgundian-Italian-Iberian axis around France's frontiers, and France will not survive that consolidation as a Great Power. So the German war does not end. France subsidizes Sweden to remain in the field; the Heilbronn Protestants who refused Prague (Hesse-Kassel, Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar) fight on with French money; the war that was theological in 1618 and dynastic in 1630 is now nakedly and only geopolitical. It will run another thirteen years and kill perhaps three million more people for reasons that have nothing to do with the question Saxony just signed away. The principle being demonstrated has a name in Richelieu's chancery: raison d'état. The Westphalian settlement will spend twenty volumes formalizing what 1635 already does in practice.