How Did The Thirty Years War Affect The Last Religious War?

During the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Europe was plagued with long years of different religious wars that would affect the course of history thereafter. The Thirty Years’ War, the last and final religious war of its time period, came to be one of the most devastating conflicts in Europe. Religiously and politically, the Thirty Years’ War reconstructed European life and was a significant turning point in history, as many religions and countries fought each other in a struggle for both power and religious freedom. For almost two entire centuries, European nations found themselves among three different wars, all derived from the same problem. Essentially, religion was one of the main driving factors for each of these conflicts, and the
Within the Holy Roman Empire, Protestants and Catholics had a near equal population size, and when the war was approaching, each group began to invade territories and convert the states to their own religion, causing a territorial reversal. These events led to suspicion and tension between the religious communities before the battles even truly began. Undoubtedly, there was an entrenched hatred among Protestants and Catholics, and religion often influenced European politics. After the Treaty of Westphalia had been signed, multiple religious differences were sorted out. The Habsburg dominance receded when the treaty disallowed them from dictating the religious beliefs of many European lands and the people in it, and established France as Europe’s most predominant power. Especially in the autonomous states of Germany, the capability of mandating religion belonged to the prince of each region, which affected Germany going into the seventeenth century, as religious
After the Protestant Reformation, England, Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire were the four leading powers in Europe, and Habsburg Spain was at the forefront of trade and authority. These roles were hardly ever challenged, with the occasional battle only slightly reshaping a few of the territories. Once the Treaty of Westphalia had been laid out, the geographical sections of Western Europe changed dramatically. The hostility within the Holy Roman Empire dispersed; the Swiss Confederacy and the United Provinces of the Netherlands were legally declared independent, and the Empire itself would ultimately fall. The Germanic states, once a collection of several autonomous regions, would further plunge into political decentralization, only being able to recover many years later. Along with the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, Habsburg Spain ceased to exist, as France became the most powerful nation when they signed the Treaty of Pyrenees. The decline of Spanish authority would be one of the most important outcomes of the war, yet there were so many political shifts of power and land that the entirety of Western Europe felt the impact of the Thirty Years’