The Settlement
Five years of parallel negotiations at Münster (Catholic powers + France) and Osnabrück (Catholic powers + Sweden, plus the Protestant Estates) produce a single treaty system. The Peace of Westphalia recognizes the sovereign equality of states and establishes the principle that what happens inside a state's borders is its own business.
Part of Farewell To Westphalia
6 moments in this segment.
- — Grotius and the Precedent. Hugo Grotius, jurist of the law of nations, painted in his French exile. Place: Paris (exile), and the chanceries of Münster and Osnabrück Figures: Hugo Grotius (Huig de Groot), Dutch Remonstrant (Arminian) jurist in French exile · the negotiators of Münster and Osnabrück, Catholic and Protestant, reading his treatise in common A Book Written in Exile Hugo Grotius escapes from Loevestein Castle in 1621, smuggled out in a book chest after being sentenced to life imprisonment in the Dutch confessional struggles of the Remonstrant crisis. He settles in Paris under a small French pension. There, in 1625, he publishes De Jure Belli ac Pacis, On the Law of War and Peace, three books in Latin dedicated to Louis XIII. He has already written, in his twenties, Mare Liberum (1609), the brief defending Dutch navigation of the open seas that founds the modern law of international waters. The treatise's premise is that there exists a law binding sovereigns toward one another that derives neither from the Pope nor from the Emperor but from natural reason. Even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, this law would still hold. The argument is offered first as philosophy, then as a practical handbook for diplomats who can no longer agree on a common religious authority. The Thirty Years' War, well underway when the book appears, is precisely the kind of confessional war it is designed to make obsolete. The Treaty as the Book Enacted The negotiators who gather at Münster and Osnabrück from 1643 onward read Grotius. Catholic and Protestant delegations cite him in common, because his arguments do not depend on a shared confession. The principles he names, sovereign equality, the binding force of treaties (pacta sunt servanda), the distinction between just and unjust war, the personality of states under a law of nations, are the principles the treaty drafters operationalize. Grotius dies at Rostock in August 1645, three years before the settlement is signed. He does not see the peace his book made thinkable. The Peace of Westphalia (see [[peace-of-westphalia-1648]]) is, in part, De Jure Belli ac Pacis turned into a treaty: a system of sovereign states regulated by mutual law, with religion expelled from the law's foundation. The discipline that grows from his book, taught for three centuries as the law of nations and now as public international law, supplies the language in which Westphalian sovereignty has been argued, defended, and challenged from 1648 to the present.
- — The Treaty of Münster (Spain–Dutch). Spanish and Dutch envoys swear the Treaty of Münster, ending eighty years of war. Place: Münster, Westphalia Figures: Adriaan Pauw and the Dutch plenipotentiaries · Gaspar de Bracamonte y Guzmán, Count of Peñaranda, for Spain · the Estates General of the United Provinces ratifying at home Eighty Years to a Signature The revolt of the Seventeen Provinces against Philip II begins in 1568. The Dutch declare independence in the Plakkaat van Verlatinghe of 1581, an act of formal abjuration that drafts, in advance, language the American colonies will borrow almost word for word in 1776. No European power recognizes the new republic for two generations. The Twelve Years' Truce of 1609 pauses the war without resolving its status question. Fighting resumes in 1621 and folds into the larger Thirty Years' War. By the early 1640s the Spanish treasury is exhausted by simultaneous wars in the Low Countries, against France, and against revolts in Catalonia and Portugal. The Dutch fleet has taken Brazil and lost it, taken the Caribbean salt trade, and made Amsterdam the busiest port in Europe. Peñaranda arrives at Münster with instructions to settle on the best terms still available. The Dutch arrive with eighty years of accumulated leverage and no need to compromise on the status question. Negotiation begins in 1646 and concludes 30 January 1648, five months before the main Westphalian instruments. Ratification at Münster follows on 15 May. A State Born by Revolt, Recognized by Treaty Article I of the treaty acknowledges the United Provinces as free and sovereign states, provinces, and lands, with Spain renouncing all claim in perpetuity. The Scheldt is closed to navigation past Antwerp, locking Dutch commercial primacy into the new map and condemning the Spanish Netherlands to a century of decline. The Republic keeps its conquests in Brabant, Flanders, and the East and West Indies. The Dutch East India Company's possessions in the Cape, Ceylon, and the spice islands pass under Republic sovereignty as colonial extensions of a state Spain has now conceded exists. The Treaty of Münster is the first instance under the new sovereign-state framework of a polity born by armed revolt being formally recognized as a peer of the powers it broke from. The Dutch state is not granted; it is acknowledged. The pattern will be invoked, with variations, by the United States in 1783, by the Spanish American republics after 1810, and by every secessionist movement that learns to speak the Westphalian language thereafter. Pope Innocent X protests this article especially. Peñaranda signs anyway. (See [[peace-of-westphalia-1648]] and [[innocent-x-denounces-westphalia-1648]].) Video: Eighty years of war ending at Münster, the first treaty of the Westphalian settlement.
- — The Peace of Westphalia. The Historic Town Hall of Münster, whose Friedenssaal hosted the signing of the Treaty of Münster on 24 October 1648. Place: Münster (Empire and France) and Osnabrück (Empire and Sweden), Westphalia Figures: Maximilian Graf Trauttmansdorff, imperial · Henri II d'Orléans-Longueville, French · Johan Oxenstierna, Swedish · Fabio Chigi, papal nuncio in Cologne and mediator at Münster (later Pope Alexander VII) Five Years at Two Tables Negotiations begin formally in 1643 and last five and a half years. The Catholic powers cannot share a table with Protestants without compromising their own theology; the solution is two cathedral towns, thirty miles apart, with mounted couriers shuttling drafts between them. Münster handles the Empire-France treaty and the Spain-Dutch Republic settlement; Osnabrück handles the Empire-Sweden treaty and the imperial constitution. Much of the diplomacy concerns precedence and procedure: which delegation enters which door first, who sits where, what title each negotiator is addressed by. These are not trivia. They are the questions the new system is being built to answer at scale. What the Treaty Settles The settlement does several things at once. It extends cuius regio, eius religio from 1555 to include Calvinism alongside Lutheranism and Catholicism, ending confessional war as an organizing principle of European politics. It recognizes the Dutch Republic and the Swiss Confederation as independent states. It awards territory to France (Alsace cities) and Sweden (Western Pomerania, Bremen, Verden). And it formalizes the principle that the sovereign of a state has supreme authority within its borders, and other sovereigns shall not intervene in matters within that domestic jurisdiction. Pope Innocent X denounces the treaty as null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, and devoid of meaning for all time. The signatories ignore him. The Westphalian system has begun. Video: Westphalia as the resolution of the 17th-century crisis of religion, state, and dynasty.
- — Innocent X Denounces Westphalia. Pope Innocent X, who condemned the Peace of Westphalia as null and void. Place: Rome Figures: Pope Innocent X (Giovanni Battista Pamphilj) · Fabio Chigi, papal nuncio at Münster, drafter (later Pope Alexander VII) · the Catholic signatory crowns who ignore the protest The Bull The papal brief is dated 26 November 1648, one month after the treaties of Münster and Osnabrück are signed. It is promulgated formally as the bull Zelo Domus Dei on 20 November 1650, after the treaties have already taken full effect across the Empire. The text was drafted at Rome from despatches sent by Fabio Chigi, the papal nuncio who had been a witness at Münster, signed nothing, and would himself be elected pope as Alexander VII in 1655. Chigi had warned Rome from the beginning that the negotiations would conclude on terms the Holy See could not accept. He was right; he was ignored at every stage. The denunciation is total. The settlement is declared null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect, for all time. Particular protest is registered against the recognition of Calvinism alongside Catholicism and Lutheranism, the secularization of church lands in the Empire as of the 1624 reference year, the cession of the bishoprics of Bremen, Verden, Halberstadt, and Minden to Sweden and Brandenburg, and (above all) the recognition of the Dutch Republic against Catholic Spain. The Silence That Followed The signatory powers, Catholic crowns among them, ignore the bull. The Emperor does not withdraw his ratification. Spain does not unsign Münster. France, the most powerful Catholic monarchy on the continent, treats the brief as a matter for its archives and continues to occupy the cities of Alsace assigned to it by treaty. The diplomatic instruments themselves had anticipated the protest: clauses in the treaties declare in advance that any ecclesiastical condemnation, by whomever issued, shall be of no force against the peace. The negotiators had drafted, in effect, an immunity clause against Rome. Westphalia is the first major European settlement to be concluded without papal mediation and to proceed in defiance of papal sanction. It dates, in retrospect, the moment at which the Roman pontiff ceases to be a recognized arbiter of continental political authority. The Vatican will remain a moral voice and a diplomatic actor, but it will not again sit at the table where sovereign states are made. The bull's vehemence is the measure of what has been lost.
- — The Peace of the Pyrenees. Louis XIV and Philip IV meet on Pheasant Island to seal the Peace of the Pyrenees. Place: Pheasant Island (Île des Faisans), in the Bidassoa river, on the Franco-Spanish border Figures: Jules Cardinal Mazarin, for France · Luis Méndez de Haro y Guzmán, for Spain · Louis XIV, marrying Maria Theresa of Spain as a clause of the treaty The War That Outlasted Westphalia The Franco-Spanish War, opened in 1635 as France's overt entry into the Thirty Years' War, does not end at Münster in 1648. Spain, refusing France's terms, fights on for eleven further years against a France itself convulsed by the Fronde, the noble and parlementaire revolt that nearly unseats the young Louis XIV. The Spanish victory at Valenciennes in 1656 briefly suggests Madrid might recover its position. The Anglo-French victory at the Battle of the Dunes in 1658, fought partly with English New Model Army veterans loaned by Cromwell, closes the question. The Treaty of the Pyrenees is the closing instrument of the wider Westphalian round, signed eleven years after the main peace, on a small island in the river that separates the two crowns. Pheasant Island is chosen because it belongs to neither kingdom. A wooden pavilion is built across the border line laid through its center; Mazarin and Luis de Haro meet there for twenty-four conferences over three months. The island is, for the duration of the negotiations, the most carefully neutral square mile in Europe. Marriage as Clause France gains Roussillon, parts of Cerdagne, and Artois. Spain retains the rest of the Spanish Netherlands and its overseas empire, but its continental primacy is finished. The settlement extends the Westphalian framework to the Iberian peninsula and confirms what the war had decided: France is now the leading land power of Europe, and will remain so until 1815. The treaty's most consequential clause is a marriage. Louis XIV is to wed Maria Theresa of Spain, eldest daughter of Philip IV. She renounces her Spanish inheritance in exchange for a dowry of 500,000 gold écus; the renunciation is conditional on the dowry's payment. Spain, broke, never pays. The conditional renunciation becomes the legal pretext on which Louis claims Spanish territory in the War of Devolution (1667) and, more consequentially, the Spanish inheritance itself in the war that will end at Utrecht (see [[peace-of-utrecht-1713]]). The wedding takes place on the same island in June 1660. The bride crosses from the Spanish to the French half of the pavilion and is delivered to her husband at the border line.
- — The Treaty of Oliva. First page of the Treaty of Oliva, closing the northern war between Sweden, Poland, Brandenburg and the Habsburgs. Place: Oliva (Oliwa) Cistercian monastery, near Danzig (Gdańsk) Figures: John II Casimir Vasa of Poland-Lithuania · Charles XI of Sweden (a minor, represented by his regents) · Emperor Leopold I · Frederick William, the Great Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia · French mediation by Antoine de Lumbres The Deluge Settled The Second Northern War (1655 to 1660) is, for Poland-Lithuania, Potop, the Deluge: a Swedish invasion that occupies most of the Commonwealth within months, joined opportunistically by Brandenburg, Transylvania, and Russia. Warsaw and Kraków fall. The king flees to Silesia. Poland's recovery is partial, costly, and accomplished only with Habsburg and Tatar help, and only after a national mobilization rallied around the icon of the Black Madonna at Częstochowa. Sweden, having overreached, accepts a French-mediated peace at the Oliva monastery outside Danzig. John II Casimir Vasa, last of the Polish Vasas, renounces his hereditary claim to the Swedish throne for himself and his line. Sweden returns most of its Polish conquests but keeps Livonia, consolidating its eastern Baltic empire. Poland keeps its borders with Brandenburg substantially intact, though hollowed by the war. The settlement is filed as a coda to the Westphalian round, the eastern bookend to the Pyrenees in the west, completing the post-1648 grid of sovereign equality across the continent. A Hohenzollern Sovereignty The article that matters most is Article 2 on Ducal Prussia. Since 1525, Ducal Prussia had been a fief of the Polish crown, held by the Hohenzollern Electors of Brandenburg in vassalage. The Treaty of Wehlau (1657), confirmed at Oliva, releases the duchy from Polish suzerainty. Frederick William, the Great Elector, becomes a sovereign prince outside the Holy Roman Empire for the territory of Ducal Prussia, while remaining an Imperial Elector for Brandenburg. The implication is structural. The Hohenzollerns now hold sovereign territory that no Emperor can revoke, on which they can crown a king. Frederick III of Brandenburg does precisely that in 1701, crowning himself King in Prussia at Königsberg, a title legally permissible because Prussia lies outside the Empire. The kingdom that emerges, expanded by Silesia in 1742 and by the Polish partitions thereafter, will unify Germany in 1871 and propel two world wars in the twentieth century. The Cistercians of Oliva witness, in their abbey church, the founding clause of a state that will outlive their order in those provinces by less than three centuries.
