The Origins of the Thirty Years War? 15liable to forced conversion in any case, but principally lands and the
income derived from them, and as such it quickly became central
to the enduring confessional antagonism. Secularisations continued,
and some of these were contested in the Imperial law courts, giving
rise to a number of long-drawn-out cases in which the interpretation
of the ill-defined provisions of the peace of Augsburg was the central
problem.
Nevertheless the first twenty years after the conclusion of the peace
were relatively quiet, which is often attributed to an anxiety among the
princes and bishops who had been in office during the Schmalkaldic
wars to avoid a further crisis. Both Emperor Ferdinand I, who died in
1564, and his son and successor Maximilian II have also been viewed as
personally half-inclined towards Protestantism, and during their reigns
they maintained a more even-handed approach to the confessions than
was the case before or afterwards. This changed with the accession
of Emperor Rudolf II in 1576, as at least initially he was much more
openly a Catholic partisan, although as he grew older and increas-
ingly eccentric his personal religion became as unfathomable as much
else about him. By the mid-1570s there was also a new generation of
prince bishops in office, and a number of these, notably in central
Germany and Franconia, began to take a more aggressive approach to
enforcing Catholicism or emigration in their domains, relying in so
doing on theirius reformandibut frequently ignoring the countervail-
ing rights accorded to the Protestant nobility and some towns by the
accompanyingDeclaratio Ferdinandea.
This new Catholic militancy reflected the internal reforms and regen-
eration which had been forced on the church by the challenge of the
Reformation. The Council of Trent had commenced its deliberations
for the purpose as far back as 1545, leading to the issue of decrees
in 1563 which redefined Catholicism, thereby laying the foundations
for the Counter-Reformation. The Society of Jesus (Jesuits), founded
in 1540, also quickly became a powerful agent for the propagation
of Catholic revival. Hence by the 1570s the church had regrouped to
stop the loss of lands and people in the Empire, and it had indeed
started to recover some of what had been lost. In the same period
Calvinism began to spread into Germany, most notably with the conver-
sion of the leading secular prince of the Empire, Elector Friedrich III of
the Palatinate, in the early 1560s. Although their numbers remained
relatively small the Calvinists quickly became disproportionately influ-
ential, particularly since, as Schmidt notes, they adopted ‘a markedly
more dynamic approach in which further advance for the Reformation