Germany

Question: Analyze the factors that prevented the development of a unified Germany state in the sixteenth seventeenth centuries. What were the three most important reasons that Germany did not become a state along the lines of France or Spain?
Answer To Above Question The Holy Roman Empire (HRE) was the most powerful Kingdom during the middle Ages, but during the broken reign of the HRE, no strong centralized form of government existed. The kingdom was torn apart religiously and then the 30 Years’ War devastated the land, economy and severely destroyed the population. The fact that the Germanic states existed as separate governments with no desire to give up power and the fact that no central idea for a government could be reached made the
His protest led to the rise of a brand new religion. Religious wars raged between the catholic and Protestant princes. Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor was distracted by other affairs, notably the wars he was sustaining against the French, and was unable to suppress the Lutherans (Coffin & Stacey, pg. 372). The princes in the German states saw this as an opportunity to become more independent. “Charles failed because the Catholic princes of Germany feared that if Charles succeeded in defeating the Protestant princes, he might suppress their own independence,” (372). The religious wars ended with the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 (372), which made an agreement throughout the Holy Roman Empire that the prince of the state may pick his religion and the rest of the state would be inclined to follow that religion (372). This meant that throughout the HRE, there was no religious unity, which made potential unification that much harder. Southern german states remained catholic and the northern states became Protestant (376). The German States were run by princes who liked the idea of ruling and keeping their power. There was no way that they were going to let a unified German state arise at the cost of them being in control of their own religion. On the other hand, small, individual states also ment that there was no one religion strong enough to unite Germany. Although at the time there was no
This began as a war between Catholics and Protestants but eventually encompassed major foreign powers as well. It started in 1618 when “Ferdinand who was the Catholic Habsburg prince of Poland, Austria, and Hungary, was elected the king of the Protestant territory of Bohemia,” (376). This caused a problem because he began to suppress the Protestant, and in effect this caused them to rebel. He launched a counter attack in not only Bohemia, but also Germany, and then in 1619 he became the Holy Roman Emperor. “This caused the Lutheran king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus,” (376) to March into Germany to try and protect the Protestants. He was even funded by Catholic France because it was in their interest to protect themselves from being surrounded by Spain. In 1632, Gustavus Adolphus fell in battle which forced France’s hand and they entered the war on Sweden’s side. France and Sweden would clash with Austria and Spain. By the end of the Thirty Years’ War none of the German states were still participating but a brutal war was still being fought on their soil. French and Swedish armies marched throughout the states. Bringing total war to the German states causing many civilians to die and making the land utterly useless. This intense period of war and the destruction of the economy forced the German States to worry about recovering individually and prevented them from even thinking of