The Origins of the Thirty Years War? 17while papal confirmation was awaited the overlord could make provi-
sion for the lands through aLehnsindult, a dispensation providing the
necessary temporal authority on an interim basis. The peace of Augsburg
provided that a prelate who changed his religion had to resign his office,
but a different problem arose when, as later began to happen, cathedral
chapters elected bishops or administrators who were already Protestants.
Clearly such appointees were not going to receive papal confirmation,
but in these circumstances Emperor Maximilian II had circumvented the
problem and avoided confrontation by issuing them with aLehnsindult,
which not only enabled them to act in their capacity as temporal rulers
but also served as credentials in relevant cases, qualifying the holder to
take his seat and vote in meetings of Imperial institutions. When the
more strictly Catholic Rudolf II came to the throne in 1576 he refused
to follow this practice.
Lutheranism established itself early in the large and wealthy arch-
bishopric of Magdeburg, but it was not until the early 1560s that the
archbishop himself converted. When he died in 1566 the cathedral
chapter elected as administrator his nephew, the Protestant son and heir
of the elector of Brandenburg, who had thus been in office for some six-
teen years by the time of the Reichstag meeting of 1582. Without either
papal confirmation or aLehnsindultfrom the emperor, however, he was
then refused his seat and not allowed to participate, a precedent which
was thereafter extended to other Protestant administrators. This created
a furore, but the consequences were not to acquire practical significance
until six years later.
Instead the focus shifted to Cologne, scene of one of the very few
military conflicts within the Empire between the peace of Passau in
1552 and the start of the Thirty Years War in 1618. Here the prob-
lem started with the archbishop, Gebhard Truchsess, who in 1582 not
only converted to Lutheranism (or Calvinism, as some say) but married,
moreover announcing his intention not to resign but to continue as
ruler and administrator of his secularised territory. This was not only
seen as outrageous but also had major implications, as Cologne was
one of the seven electorates, and if it switched sides it would create
a Protestant majority in the Imperial electoral college. Truchsess had
only been elected five years before, in a close and disputed vote which
pitted the supporters of the candidacy of Ernst of Bavaria, brother of
the ruling duke, against his own more liberal supporters who were
not inclined to the strict Catholicism of the Bavarians. His conversion
not only reactivated this split in the cathedral chapter, but also gave
rise to a corresponding split in the landed nobility of the territory, so