The Long War
The Thirty Years' War. What begins as a Bohemian succession dispute over a window in Prague becomes a 30-year continental war that kills perhaps eight million people, ends the Holy Roman Empire as an effective polity, and forces Europe to invent a new principle for organizing itself.
Part of Farewell To Westphalia
13 moments in this segment.
- — The Defenestration of Prague. Imperial governors hurled from the chancery windows of Prague Castle, 23 May 1618. Place: Bohemian Chancellery, Prague Castle, third-floor eastern wing Figures: Heinrich Matthias von Thurn, Protestant leader · Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice, regent · Vilém Slavata of Chlum, regent · Filip Fabricius, secretary The Letter of Majesty Emperor Rudolf II signed the Majestätsbrief in 1609, guaranteeing Bohemian Protestants the right to build churches. His successor Matthias and his cousin Ferdinand, the future Ferdinand II, read it narrowly. Two Protestant churches at Hroby and Broumov are closed. The Protestant Estates meet in May 1618 with a list of grievances and a list of those responsible: Martinice and Slavata, both Catholic regents, both at the Castle. On the morning of 23 May, a delegation led by Count Thurn climbs to the chancellery. There is shouting, an attempt at justification, and then, around nine o'clock, the act. The Window and the War Martinice goes first, headfirst from the third-floor window: seventy feet to the moat. Slavata follows, clinging to the sill until his fingers are beaten loose. The secretary Fabricius, who has done nothing in particular, is thrown after them. All three survive (Catholic propaganda credits the Virgin Mary; Protestant chronicles credit a soft landing on accumulated household refuse in the dry moat). Within a year Bohemia is in open revolt. A Calvinist count, Frederick V of the Palatinate, is elected king. Within two years Frederick loses everything at the Battle of White Mountain. The defenestration is the conventional starting gun of the Thirty Years' War, which kills perhaps eight million across the empire and ends with the Peace of Westphalia (see [[peace-of-westphalia-1648]]) thirty years and five months later. Video: Peter Wilson, the leading modern historian of the war, opens with the act that lit the fuse.
- — The Battle of White Mountain. Contemporary depiction of Bohemian and Imperial armies meeting outside Prague, November 1620. Place: Bílá hora, west of Prague Figures: Christian I of Anhalt-Bernburg, Bohemian commander · Maximilian I of Bavaria, Catholic League · Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, field commander · Frederick V of the Palatinate, the Winter King Two Hours on a Hill The Bohemian Estates have spent two years improvising a state. They elected a Calvinist king, Frederick V of the Palatinate, after deposing Ferdinand of Habsburg; they raised an army on credit; they waited for the foreign aid that Frederick's father-in-law James I of England conspicuously did not send. By autumn 1620 Christian of Anhalt has perhaps 21,000 men, unpaid for months, dug in along the chalk ridge of Bílá hora west of Prague. Tilly and Bouquoy, with a combined Catholic League and Imperial force slightly larger, attack on the morning of 8 November. The Bohemian line breaks within ninety minutes. Anhalt's cavalry scatters; the Moravian infantry are cut down where they stand. Perhaps 4,000 Bohemians and 700 Catholics die. By early afternoon Tilly's lead squadrons are at the gates of Prague. A Settlement Destroyed in One Afternoon Frederick flees the city that night with his English wife Elizabeth and the crown jewels, riding for Breslau and eventually The Hague, where he will live out his exile as the Winterkönig: the king of a single Bohemian winter. The Defenestration of Prague (see [[defenestration-of-prague-1618]]) had opened a question; White Mountain closes it, for Bohemia, for a century. Ferdinand II's reprisal is methodical. Twenty-seven Protestant leaders are executed on Prague's Old Town Square on 21 June 1621, their heads displayed for ten years on the Charles Bridge tower. The Verneuerte Landesordnung of 1627 abolishes the elective monarchy, makes Bohemia hereditary Habsburg, German co-official with Czech, Catholicism the only permitted faith. Three quarters of Bohemia's noble estates change hands; the Protestant nobility goes into exile and never returns. A confessional settlement, a constitution, and a political class are erased in one afternoon and the seven years that follow. Video: Frederick V loses Bohemia in an hour. Tilly and Bucquoy reset the war's opening phase.
- — Gustavus Adolphus Lands at Peenemünde. Gustavus Adolphus meets Duke Bogislaw XIV of Pomerania after landing his army on the Baltic coast. Place: Peenemünde, isle of Usedom, Pomeranian coast Figures: Gustavus II Adolphus, King of Sweden · Axel Oxenstierna, Swedish Chancellor · Cardinal Richelieu, First Minister of France · Bogislaw XIV, Duke of Pomerania Thirteen Thousand at Peenemünde Gustavus Adolphus comes ashore on 6 July 1630 at the head of roughly 13,000 troops, with Chancellor Oxenstierna's logistics behind him and the Baltic at his back. He kneels on the sand and prays in front of his army, a gesture the Swedish chroniclers will not allow anyone to forget. His stated cause is the defense of German Protestantism against the Edict of Restitution of 1629, by which Ferdinand II proposed to reclaim every ecclesiastical territory secularized since 1552. His actual financing is more interesting. The Treaty of Bärwalde, signed the following January, commits Catholic France to subsidize the Swedish army at one million livres a year. The First Minister of France, Cardinal Richelieu, has decided that the strategic problem of a Habsburg-dominated Empire outweighs the theological problem of funding Lutherans to fight Catholics. He is right, and the war will run another eighteen years on the logic he has just made explicit. Confession Becomes Pretext Before Peenemünde the Thirty Years' War can still be narrated as a war of religion: Protestant Bohemia against Catholic Emperor, the Catholic League against the Protestant Union. After Peenemünde the narration falls apart. A Catholic cardinal is paying a Lutheran king to fight a Catholic emperor, in order to prevent a Catholic dynasty consolidating power that would threaten a Catholic kingdom on the Atlantic. The principle is not yet named, but it is now operational. What matters in European politics is not the confession of the sovereign but the balance among sovereigns. The war's remaining eighteen years are a tutorial in this principle, conducted at a cost of roughly six million further dead. The Westphalian settlement of 1648 will be the codification of what Peenemünde already demonstrated in 1630. Video: Gustavus Adolphus debarks at Usedom in July 1630. The Lion of the North enters Germany.
- — The Sack of Magdeburg. Magdeburg in flames after the Imperial sack of 20 May 1631, the war's defining atrocity. Place: Magdeburg, free imperial city on the Elbe Figures: Tilly, Imperial and Catholic League commander · Gottfried Heinrich Graf zu Pappenheim, cavalry commander · Dietrich von Falkenberg, Swedish-appointed city commandant (killed) · Christian William of Brandenburg, deposed administrator The City and the Promise Magdeburg, a free imperial city of perhaps 30,000 souls on the Elbe, has declared for Sweden in autumn 1630 on the strength of Gustavus Adolphus's promise to relieve any siege. Tilly's army arrives that November. Through the spring of 1631 the siege tightens; Swedish relief does not come, blocked by the diplomatic maneuvering required to extract a guarantee of passage from the Elector of Brandenburg. On the morning of 20 May the city falls. What follows over the next three days is the most notorious atrocity of the war, and one of the most notorious in European history. The fires that begin during the assault, possibly set by the defenders, possibly by Pappenheim's cavalry, possibly both, become unstoppable. By 23 May the city is ash. Perhaps 20,000 to 25,000 inhabitants are dead, the great majority of the population. Approximately 5,000 survivors are pulled from the cathedral, where Tilly has belatedly ordered the killing to stop. A Verb Enters the Language The pamphlet literature explodes. Roughly two hundred separate broadsheets and prints on the sack circulate within a year, the largest media event of the seventeenth century to date. Magdeburgisieren enters German as a verb meaning to obliterate utterly. The Swedish recruitment offices in the Protestant cities fill within weeks. Gustavus Adolphus, militarily late, is rhetorically transformed: the man who could not save Magdeburg becomes the man who will avenge it. Tilly, who had ordered no general massacre and could not control his troops once the assault opened, is now indelibly the butcher of Magdeburg in Protestant memory. The propaganda asymmetry is total. By autumn Saxony, which has spent twelve years trying to remain neutral, signs an alliance with Sweden. The next battle, three months later at Breitenfeld, will be Sweden's first major field victory and the beginning of the war's tactical revolution. Video: Twenty thousand dead in four days. The massacre that turned Protestant Germany toward Sweden.
- — The Battle of Breitenfeld. Swedish and Saxon forces shatter Tilly's veterans at Breitenfeld, 17 September 1631. Place: Breitenfeld, north of Leipzig, Saxony Figures: Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden · Johann Georg I, Elector of Saxony · Tilly, Imperial commander · Pappenheim, cavalry Three-Pounder Field Pieces Tilly fields a tercio-based army of roughly 35,000 in the conventional Habsburg style: dense squares of pikemen with musketeers at the corners, cavalry on the wings, heavy artillery that has to be sited before the battle and stays there. Gustavus Adolphus, with about 23,000 Swedes and 18,000 freshly allied Saxons, fields something the European battlefield has not seen at scale: a linear deployment six ranks deep, mixed musketeer-pikeman brigades, cavalry interleaved with mobile musketeer platoons, and the famous Swedish three-pounder regimental guns, light enough to be repositioned by four men during the engagement. Pappenheim charges early, against orders, and shatters himself against the Swedish cavalry's salvo-and-countercharge drill. The Saxon wing collapses on contact and flees the field with Johann Georg; the Swedes redeploy under fire to plug the gap, swing their reserve onto Tilly's now-exposed flank, and turn his own captured artillery against his own infantry. By dusk the Imperial army has ceased to exist as a formation. A New Way of Fighting Perhaps 7,000 Imperial dead, 6,000 captured, the rest scattered. Tilly, wounded three times, escapes with a few hundred horse. The Catholic strategic position in northern Germany, intact for thirteen years, evaporates in an afternoon. Within weeks Sweden is in Würzburg, in Frankfurt, on the Rhine. Within six months Gustavus is in Munich. The tactical lessons travel faster than the political ones. Within a generation every army in Europe will be reorganizing along Swedish lines: lighter artillery, linear infantry, integrated combined arms, professional officers. The tercio is finished, though it will take Rocroi in 1643 (see [[battle-of-rocroi-1643]]) to make that obvious to Spain. Breitenfeld is the moment the early-modern battlefield becomes legible as the ancestor of the modern one. Video: Swedish-Saxon forces shatter Tilly's tercios. A landmark battle in the art of war.
- — The Battle of Lützen. 16 November 1632, where Gustavus Adolphus was killed in the fog. Place: Lützen, Saxony, southwest of Leipzig Figures: Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden (killed) · Albrecht von Wallenstein, Imperial generalissimo · Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, Swedish second · Axel Oxenstierna, Swedish Chancellor (assumes direction after) Fog at Lützen Wallenstein, recalled to Imperial command after Magdeburg and Breitenfeld, has spent 1632 maneuvering Gustavus across Saxony. On 15 November he detaches Pappenheim's corps north to Halle, judging that the campaigning season is closed. Gustavus, learning of the dispersion that night, marches at dawn through fog so thick that the two armies cannot see each other across a sunken road. The battle opens around eleven. Pappenheim races back at the gallop and is killed by a falconet ball mid-charge. Gustavus, leading the Swedish right cavalry through smoke that has mixed with the fog, becomes separated from his escort, takes a pistol ball through the arm, then a musket ball through the back, and finally a coup de grâce while lying in the mud. His riderless horse, returning to the Swedish lines smeared with the king's blood, becomes one of the war's most reproduced images. Victory and Subtraction Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar holds the army together through the afternoon, takes the Imperial guns, and forces Wallenstein from the field. The Swedes have technically won. They have also lost their king and roughly a third of the army that he made. The Lion of the North is dead at 37, of wounds inflicted at close range in conditions where neither commander could see his own line. Oxenstierna, in Mainz when the news reaches him, takes effective command of the Swedish war effort and will hold it for the next sixteen years. The war loses its presiding personality. Without Gustavus the Protestant cause has no figure who can be both a king and a general; without the king the German Protestant princes drift back toward separate negotiations with the Emperor. The war becomes longer, grimmer, more attritional. The political shape of the Westphalian settlement is being prepared, in negative, by everything Lützen subtracts. Video: Sweden wins the field and loses its king. Gustavus Adolphus falls in the November fog.
- — Wallenstein Assassinated at Cheb. Wallenstein cut down in his chamber at Eger by his own officers, 25 February 1634. Place: Pachelbel House, Cheb (Eger), western Bohemia Figures: Albrecht von Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland, Imperial generalissimo (killed) · Emperor Ferdinand II, who signed the order · Colonel Walter Butler, Irish dragoon · Captain Walter Devereux, Irish dragoon (struck the blow) A Private Army of a Hundred Thousand Wallenstein, born minor Bohemian gentry, has by 1634 made himself the largest single military entrepreneur in European history. His estates in Bohemia, consolidated after White Mountain at distressed prices, finance an army that at peak fielded 100,000 men under contract, equipped from his own foundries at Jičín. The Emperor pays him in titles (Duke of Friedland, of Mecklenburg, of Sagan) and in the right to tax his own occupation zones. For Ferdinand II, he is the indispensable man and the most dangerous subject the Habsburgs have ever had. After Lützen, Wallenstein retires to Bohemia and begins separate negotiations: with the Saxon court, with the Swedes through Oxenstierna's agents, with the Bohemian exiles. His exact intentions remain disputed by historians and were probably also disputed by Wallenstein. The Emperor, in any case, has heard enough. On 24 January 1634 Ferdinand signs a secret patent stripping Wallenstein of command and authorizing his arrest, alive if possible. In His Nightshirt On the night of 25 February at the Pachelbel House in Cheb, Wallenstein's senior officers are dispatched first at a banquet given by Colonel Butler: Trčka, Kinsky, Ilow, Neumann, hacked down between courses. The Irish dragoon captain Walter Devereux then leads a small party up to Wallenstein's chamber. The Duke of Friedland, woken by the noise, comes to the door in his nightshirt. Devereux runs him through the chest with a partisan. There are no last words on record. The estates are confiscated within months and redistributed to the men who killed him. Ferdinand orders three thousand Masses said for his soul, which is the seventeenth century's way of acknowledging that the killing was unclean. The structural lesson is harder to ritualize. The Emperor has demonstrated that a general too useful, too rich, too independent, with too much of his own diplomacy, will be removed by the sovereign he serves. Fourteen years before the Settlement, the principle that sovereignty does not share itself even with its own indispensable instruments has been established in a Bohemian nightshirt. Video: Bohemian-born generalissimo, killed at Cheb on his emperor's order. The Thirty Years War's most powerful private subject.
- — The Battle of Nördlingen. Spanish tercios and Imperial forces crush the Swedish-Protestant army at Nördlingen, September 1634. Place: Nördlingen, Swabia Figures: Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Spain · Ferdinand, King of Hungary (the future Emperor Ferdinand III) · Gustav Horn, Swedish commander (captured) · Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, Swedish-Protestant commander The Cardinal-Infante's March The Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, brother of Philip IV of Spain, has marched the Army of Flanders from Milan up the Spanish Road in the summer of 1634, eight thousand veteran tercio infantry brought to reinforce his Habsburg cousin. He joins the Hungarian-Imperial army outside the besieged free city of Nördlingen at the end of August. The combined force, perhaps 33,000, faces Horn and Bernhard with a Swedish-Protestant army of roughly 25,000, much of it raw. Horn attacks on the morning of 6 September up the slopes of the Albuch hill, where the Spanish tercios are entrenched in depth behind hastily dug field works. The Swedes assault fifteen times. Each time the Spanish squares hold, reload, and break the Swedish brigades coming up the broken ground. By midafternoon the Swedish left has fragmented. The Imperial cavalry sweeps in across the plain; Horn is taken prisoner; perhaps 12,000 of his men are killed and 4,000 captured. Spain Is Still Spain The strategic consequences are immediate. Sweden's hold on southern Germany evaporates in weeks; the Protestant Union collapses; Saxony begins the negotiations that will produce the Peace of Prague the following May. The Heilbronn League, Oxenstierna's project for organizing the Protestant estates under Swedish leadership, ceases to function. The tactical lesson of Breitenfeld is partially un-taught: a disciplined Spanish tercio in prepared positions, properly supported, can still break a Swedish-style assault. And Spain, which the Protestant pamphleteers had buried as a continental power, is visibly not buried. The Cardinal-Infante marches on into the Spanish Netherlands and reinforces the army that will hold the Low Countries for another decade. The war, however, does not end. Within seven months Richelieu will see exactly what Nördlingen means for the European balance, and France will enter the war directly to prevent the Habsburg recovery from completing itself. Video: Spanish tercios and Imperial brigades crush the Swedish army. The end of Swedish dominance in Germany.
- — France Declares War on Spain. Cardinal Richelieu, architect of France's open entry into the war on the Protestant side in 1635. Place: Grand-Place, Brussels (the French herald) · the Council, Paris (the declaration) Figures: Cardinal Richelieu, First Minister of France · Louis XIII of France · Philip IV of Spain · the French herald Jean Gratiollet, who read the declaration A Herald in the Grand-Place On the morning of 19 May 1635 a French herald, Jean Gratiollet, presents himself in the Grand-Place of Brussels and reads aloud Louis XIII's formal declaration of war against Philip IV of Spain. The pretext is technical: Spanish troops have seized the Elector of Trier, a French ally, the previous spring. The substantive reason had been visible since Nördlingen the previous September: the Habsburg recovery in Germany threatened to free Spanish forces to envelop France from the Pyrenees, Italy, the Low Countries, and Franche-Comté simultaneously. Catholic France has been subsidizing Lutheran Sweden against Catholic Habsburgs since the Treaty of Bärwalde (see [[gustavus-adolphus-lands-1630]]) four years earlier. With Sweden visibly faltering and the Peace of Prague (see [[peace-of-prague-1635]]) being signed eleven days later, the subsidies are no longer enough. Richelieu commits French armies directly. The Catholic-Catholic war runs from this declaration to the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659, twenty-four years. The Principle Operationalized Richelieu's own justification, recorded across his Political Testament and his correspondence with Père Joseph, is unambiguous. The interest of the state is distinct from the interest of the faith. A Catholic king has a duty to defend France that is logically prior to, and operationally overrides, his duty to defend a particular configuration of Catholic powers. Raison d'état is the formula. Henri de Rohan's De l'intérêt des princes et États de la chrétienté, published in Paris three years later, makes it a Europe-wide vocabulary. What 1635 does to confessional politics is what 1789 will do to dynastic legitimacy and what 2008 will do to monetary monopoly: it makes the inherited justification optional. The war's confessional pretext, already strained since Bärwalde, is now publicly discarded by its largest belligerent. The remaining thirteen years of the Thirty Years' War run on raison d'état alone. The settlement at Westphalia in 1648 is the constitutional document of a Europe whose states will, from this point, organize their wars and peaces around the same principle.
- — The Peace of Prague. 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.
- — The Battle of Rocroi. The young Duc d'Enghien breaks the Spanish tercios at Rocroi, 19 May 1643. Place: Rocroi, Ardennes, northern France Figures: Louis II de Bourbon, Duke of Enghien (the future Grand Condé), 21 years old · Francisco de Melo, Spanish governor of the Netherlands · the Spanish Army of Flanders · the tercios of Alburquerque, Garcíez, Castelvi, Villalba and Visé A Twenty-One-Year-Old in Command Louis XIII has died five days before the battle. The Duke of Enghien, 21, in his first independent command of a French army, marches to relieve the besieged frontier town of Rocroi against the explicit advice of his veteran second, Marshal L'Hôpital. Francisco de Melo, with the Spanish Army of Flanders, accepts battle on 19 May in open country south of the town. The Spanish line is built around five veteran tercios in the center, perhaps 8,000 of the best infantry in Europe. Enghien opens with a cavalry charge on the right that breaks the Spanish horse, then wheels behind the Spanish line, then breaks the Spanish horse on the other wing, then turns the captured Spanish artillery on the tercios from the rear. The center holds, in the open, on three sides, against everything Enghien sends at it. Three assaults are repulsed. Enghien is reported to have offered the same terms a fourth time as he had offered the first. The tercios accept on the fourth offer. The End of an Era of European Warfare The Army of Flanders is destroyed as a field force. Perhaps 8,000 Spanish dead, 7,000 captured. The tercios that had broken Horn at Nördlingen nine years earlier (see [[battle-of-nordlingen-1634]]) are buried where they stood. Spain will fight on for another sixteen years, until the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659, but never again will Spain dictate the European tempo. France's military century begins here; the Spanish century, which had begun at Pavia in 1525, ends. Five years and five months later, the Peace of Westphalia (see [[peace-of-westphalia-1648]]) will codify the European order that Rocroi has just made legible: France ascendant, Spain receding, the Habsburg cousins separated in fact if not in title, the Dutch independent, Sweden a Baltic power, the Empire reduced to constitutional fiction. The political-military map the Westphalian negotiators will spend five years drawing already exists, in outline, on the field south of Rocroi on the evening of 19 May 1643. Video: The young Condé breaks the Spanish tercios at Rocroi. France ascendant, Spain in eclipse.
- — The Westphalian Congresses Open. 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.
- — Kingdom of Westphalia fictional anthem ( Also Blood & Iron version )
