an peoples. It
was vetoed by the Reichstag, with its powerful contingent of
ecclesiastical members. Of course here the economic side of the
question played a great part. The ecclesiastical potentates and those
favourable to them dreaded the spread of Protestantism in view of the
secularization of religious domains and fiefs. This, notwithstanding
that there were not wanting bishops and abbots themselves who were not
indisposed, as princes of the empire, to appropriate the Church lands,
of which they were the trustees, for their own personal possessions.
After a short civil war an arrangement was come to at the Treaty of
Passau in 1552, which was in the main ratified by the Reichstag held
at Augsburg in 1555 (the so-called Peace of Augsburg); but the
arrangement was artificial and proved itself untenable as a permanent
instrument of peace.

During the latter part of the sixteenth century two magnates of the
empire, the Duke of Bavaria on the Catholic side and the Calvinist,
Christian of Anhalt, on the Protestant, played the chief role, the
Lutheran Markgrave of Saxony taking up a moderate position as
mediator. Of the Reichstag of Augsburg it should be said that it had
ignored the Calvinist section of the Protestant party altogether, only
recognizing the Lutheran. In 1608 the Protestant Union, which embraced
Lutherans and Calvinists alike, was founded under the leadership of
Christian of Anhalt. It was most powerful in Southern Germany. This
was countered immediately by the foundation under Maximilian, Duke of
Bavaria, of a Catholic League. The friction, which was now becoming
acute, went on increasing till the actual outbreak of the Thirty
Years' War in 1618. The signal for the latter was given by the
Bohemian revolution in the spring of that year.

The Thirty Years' War, as it is termed, which was really a series of
wars, naturally falls into five distinct periods, each representing in
many respects a separate war in itself. The first two years of the war
(1618-20) is occupied with the Bohemian revolt against the attempt of
the Emperor to force Catholicism upon the Bohemian people and with its
immediate consequences. It was accentuated by the attempt of the
Emperor Matthias to compel them to accept the Archduke Ferdinand as
King. This attempt was countered through the election by the Bohemians
of the Pfalzgraf, Friedrich V (the son-in-law of James I of England),
who was called the Winter King from the fact that his re