The Holy Roman Empire
The Holy Roman Empire, encompassing present-day Germany and portions of neighbouring lands, was the single area most devastated by the Wars of Religion. The Empire was a fragmented collection of semi-independent states with an elected Holy Roman Emperor as its head; after the 14th century, this position was usually held by a Habsburg. The Austrian House of Habsburg was a major European power in its own right, ruling over some eight million subjects in present day Germany, Austria, Bohemia and Hungary. The Empire also contained regional powers, such as Bavaria, the Electorate of Saxony, the Margraviate of Brandenburg, the Electorate of the Palatinate, Hesse, the Archbishopric of Trier and Württemberg. A vast number of minor independent duchies, free imperial cities, abbeys, bishoprics, and small lordships of sovereign families rounded out the Empire.
Lutheranism, from its inception at Wittenberg in 1519, found a ready reception in Germany, as well as in formerly Hussite Bohemia. The preaching of Martin Luther and his many followers raised tensions across Europe.
In Northern Germany, Luther adopted the stratagem of gaining the support of the local princes in his struggle to take over and re-establish the church along Lutheran lines. The Elector of Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse and other North German princes not only protected Luther from retaliation from the edict of outlawry issued by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, but also used state power to enforce the establishment of Lutheran worship in their lands. Church property was seized and Catholic worship was forbidden in most lands which adopted the Lutheran reformation. The political conflicts thus engendered within the Empire led almost inevitably to war.
Read more about this topic: European Wars Of Religion
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“The descendants of Holy Roman Empire monarchies became feeble-minded in the twentieth century, and after World War I had been done in by the democracies; some were kept on to entertain the tourists, like the one they have in England.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
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—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“My first childish doubt as to whether God could really be a good Protestant was suggested by my observation of the deplorable fact that the best voices available for combination with my mother’s in the works of the great composers had been unaccountably vouchsafed to Roman Catholics.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The war shook down the Tsardom, an unspeakable abomination, and made an end of the new German Empire and the old Apostolic Austrian one. It ... gave votes and seats in Parliament to women.... But if society can be reformed only by the accidental results of horrible catastrophes ... what hope is there for mankind in them? The war was a horror and everybody is the worse for it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)