Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, Volume 1: Maximilian I to the Peace of Westphalia, 1490-1648
Joachim Whaley
Language: English
Pages: 745
ISBN: 2:00142123
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Germany and the Holy Roman Empire offers a new interpretation of the development of German-speaking central Europe and the Holy Roman Empire or German Reich, from the great reforms of 1495-1500 to its dissolution in 1806 after the turmoil of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Going against the notion that this was a long period of decline, Joachim Whaley shows how imperial institutions developed in response to the crises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notably the Reformation and Thirty Years War, and assesses the impact of international developments on the Reich. Central themes are the tension between Habsburg aspirations to create a German monarchy and the desire of the German princes and cities to maintain their traditional rights, and how the Reich developed the functions of a state during this period.
The first single-author account of German history from the Reformation to the early nineteenth century since Hajo Holborn's study written in the 1950s, it also illuminates the development of the German territories subordinate to the Reich. Whaley explores the implications of the Reformation and subsequent religious reform movements, both Protestant and Catholic, and the Enlightenment for the government of both secular and ecclesiastical principalities, the minor territories of counts and knights and the cities. The Reich and the territories formed a coherent and workable system and, as a polity, the Reich developed its own distinctive political culture and traditions of German patriotism over the early modern period.
Whaley explains the development of the Holy Roman Empire as an early modern polity and illuminates the evolution of the several hundred German territories within it. He gives a rich account of topics such as the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, Pietism and baroque Catholicism, the Aufklarung or German Enlightenment and the impact on the Empire and its territories of the French Revolution and Napoleon. It includes consideration of language, cultural aspects and religious and intellectual movements. Germany and the Holy Roman Empire engages with all the major debates among both German and English-speaking historians about early modern German history over the last sixty years and offers a striking new interpretation of this important period.
Volume I extends from the late fifteenth century through to the Thirty Years War.
emperor’s sister Isabella, Queen of Denmark, taking communion under both kinds.35 Now, in addition to a free council, the Estates also demanded a national council to be convened at Speyer in November 1524 as an interim measure. The Edict of Worms was renewed, but pending the resolution of the religious question each Estate was enjoined to execute the edict ‘as far as possible’. The decision taken in February 1523 was evasive for, among other things, it effectively allowed princes or magistrates
beginning of the sixteenth century, but the result of a long process over the next hundred years. The variety on the periphery was matched by variety in the interior. This is perhaps best approached by turning first to the imperial constitution, before surveying the territorial map of the ‘German’ Reich itself. For the fragmented patchwork that existed there was itself the result of the way that the imperial framework had developed in the later Middle Ages. The culmination of that development in a
frontiers of Germany in 1914 gives a total of 9 million for 1500. Another estimate based on different frontiers gives 11.5–12 million for the same year (plus 2 million each for the Netherlands and Bohemia, and some 600,000 for Switzerland).4 What is not in doubt, however, is the fact of overall growth. The increase was generally greater in the west, particularly the south-west, than in the east. In the Zurich area, for example, a population growth rate of 2.4 per cent per annum has been
were called in contemporary chronicles, was to claim the money forcibly and to punish all the corrupt Berne patricians who had connived at the delay in payment. Here a force drawn from several localities gathered to fight a battle of principle, to assert the will of the communes over the recalcitrant authorities. The perceived seriousness of the threat is underlined by the fact that it united the fractious city and rural states of the Confederacy in a rare demonstration of solidarity in the
fear of death that generated his conversion experience in 1505 continually frustrated his efforts to settle into the monastic routine. However much he applied himself and strove to live up to the monastic ideals, he remained beset by temptations and by a sense of inadequacy and futility. There was nothing that he could do to redeem himself. No amount of penance could eradicate his sin; even the thought of having made a full confession incurred the sin of pride.9 Luther’s fear of God’s judgement