The Origins of the Thirty Years War? 13Those negotiations, again led for the Imperial side by Ferdinand,
were tortuous and encompassed many political subjects as well as the
religious issue. Eventual agreement was only reached through a com-
bination of compromise and pressure, so that the resulting peace of
Augsburg of 1555 had many imprecisions and loopholes which were
to be the source of subsequent disputes. Nevertheless for all its defects it
was the principal reason why the Empire was able to avoid a major reli-
gious war for the next sixty years. This is all the more surprising in that
many on both sides, but particularly the Catholics, viewed the religious
divide as temporary and were still expecting a reunification at some not
too far distant time. The agreement was thus not intended to perpetu-
ate the split, but to prevent it from descending into open warfare in the
interim. The term ‘peace’ was also something of a misnomer, as there
was little thought of peace or tolerance in a wider sense, but only of
avoiding this greater evil.
Rather confusingly, the Augsburg Confession of 1530 was the key doc-
ument underlying the peace of Augsburg of 1555, as this provided the
definition of the form of Protestantism which was to acquire legal rights
within the Empire. Apart from the Catholics, only those whose doctrines
conformed to the Confession qualified for future toleration and pro-
tection, a limitation which became problematic once the Reformation
started to sub-divide, as only the Lutherans really met the test. Although
the Anabaptists and smaller groups had established themselves to a
limited extent in parts of the Empire, Calvinism had scarcely reached
Germany by 1555, so that these variants were not so much specifi-
cally excluded as ignored by the peace. The Calvinists later argued that
their theology did in fact comply, but this position became increasingly
untenable as they gained strength, including recruiting a few princes,
and thereby provoked growing Lutheran hostility.
Princes were central to the terms of the peace, as it was to them rather
than to the wider population that a degree of religious tolerance was
to be extended. Moreover they were accorded aius reformandi, a right
of reformation, enabling them to determine not only their own con-
fession but that of all their subjects, a power which was later summed
up in the well-know legal formulacuius regio, eius religio. Subjects who
did not wish to conform were granted the right to emigrate with their
possessions to a territory espousing their own religion, although as Asch
notes this was scarcely a privilege, as banishment was normally one of
the severest punishments a court could inflict.^10
There were two limitations on theius reformandi, the first being the
ecclesiastical reservation, which provided that while an ecclesiastical