An Inevitable War? 43city into his own domains. The disturbances in Cologne, which had sim-
ilarities with the Fettmilch uprising in Frankfurt, started in 1680 with a
dispute between the council and citizen critics. This was followed by the
unconstitutional deposition of the council in 1683, and by the eventual
suppression of the new regime in 1685.^34
Viewed against this background, the case of Aachen, and for that mat-
ter Donauwörth, appear less like significant events in an escalation of
inter-confessional tension leading towards war. Rather they fit into a
much longer history of urban disturbances in which religion was only
one of a number of potential rallying cries. Donauwörth was exceptional
not because of the initial circumstances but as a result of the particularly
inept handling of the situation by the ageing, unbalanced and politically
threatened Emperor Rudolf II, which allowed the city to fall victim to
the private territorial ambitions of Maximilian of Bavaria.
Calvinists, the Palatinate, and Christian of Anhalt
The Calvinists
Discussion of the years leading up to the Thirty Years War is often
confused by the tendency of historians (including the present author)
to refer for convenience to ‘Catholics’ and ‘Protestants’ in describing
the opposing confessional groups. For some purposes this is adequate,
but in other cases it is seriously misleading, implying that there were
effectively only two parties, and that insofar as there were differences
within them these were not generally significant. On the Catholic side
this may suffice, because although there were disagreements these were
tactical rather than doctrinal, reflecting attitudes ranging from the mod-
erate to the militant. Among the Protestants, however, there were sharp
divisions, particularly between the Lutherans and the Calvinists, and
matters were even more complicated in Bohemia. At times the various
Protestant denominations were forced together by pressure from the
Catholics, particularly the growing Counter-Reformation, but at oth-
ers they pursued fundamentally different courses, displaying a mutual
antipathy which matched or even exceeded their hostility towards the
Catholics. This was to have major consequences for the course of the
Bohemian revolt, but it also had an important influence on the earlier
events in Germany outlined in Chapter 1, so that it is appropriate to
deviate here to look more closely at the Calvinists in particular.
The term ‘Calvinist’ is itself a piece of shorthand and something of a
misnomer, as the German ‘Calvinists’ were not limited to direct follow-
ers of the doctrine and practices introduced by the French reformer John