The Origins of the Thirty Years War? 23by Bavaria, but Rudolf ignored all protests, and moreover he later
granted Maximilian the town as a pledge for his expenses. The duke
had not waited, quietly converting Donauwörth into a Bavarian town
from the first months of his occupation, when he instructed the coun-
cil to remove all references to being a free Imperial city from their
documents and official seal.^21 On religion he initially moved more cau-
tiously, before eventually forbidding Lutheran worship and causing a
considerable number of the population to emigrate.
News of the seizure of Donauwörth was still fresh when the Reichstag
met in Regensburg barely a month later, in January 1608. As ever, the
emperor’s first concern was money, and even though a twenty-year
truce had been agreed with the Turks in 1606 Rudolf was still seek-
ing taxes to pay off some of the accumulated debts from the earlier
years of war. By then it was a long-established practice for Estates, and
not just in the Empire, to counter princely requests for taxation with
demands for concessions on other matters, so the Protestant group,
led once again by the Palatinate, duly responded by seeking greater
rights for Calvinists and an increase in Protestant representation on the
Hofrat. They also put forward a proposition that the Reichstag should
formally reconfirm the peace of Augsburg, which in their opinion had
been brought into question by the most recent Catholic actions, par-
ticularly over Donauwörth. The young Archduke Ferdinand of Styria,
the later emperor, was Rudolf’s official representative at the meeting,
and he took up this demand, but only in order to give it a different
thrust. A reconfirmation of the Augsburg peace had also to include
the ecclesiastical reservation, he maintained, as well as being accompa-
nied by the return of all church properties which had been secularised
since 1552. This argument, eagerly taken up by the Catholic major-
ity in the Reichstag, aroused a furious reaction from the Protestants,
although it was, says Parker, a bargaining move intended to force the
latter to be more accommodating on other issues, particularly taxa-
tion, in order to have it withdrawn.^22 Neither side was inclined to
compromise, and the protracted dispute eventually culminated in a
Palatinate-led walkout, supported by Brandenburg, Ansbach, Kulmbach,
Baden-Durlach, Hessen-Kassel and Württemberg, so that Ferdinand was
forced to dissolve the meeting.
Barely a week later, in May 1608, most of the same group who had
walked out met at the nearby secularised monastery of Auhausen, where
they quickly agreed to form an alliance with the declared purpose of
defending the rights of all members within the Empire against unlawful
attacks. The Palatinate and Hessen-Kassel, both with Calvinist princes,