An Inevitable War? 47de factoemperor, although never formally crowned. The Imperial crown
had been monopolised by the Habsburgs ever since, and moreover a
Habsburg emperor had frustrated an attempt to unite the Wittelsbach
territories, thus creating an entity to rival the Austrian lands, through
a marriage between the heir to the Palatinate and the duke of Bavaria’s
daughter. This had led to the Landshut inheritance war of 1503 to 1505,
in which the emperor backed the elector of the Palatinate’s enemies, so
that he was defeated, losing both territory and political influence as a
result.^40 Even a century later this still rankled.
Calvinist militancy added a wider European perspective to Palatine
policy, as they saw the wars in the Netherlands and against the
Huguenots in France as part and proof of their concept of a Spanish
and Habsburg-led drive to eliminate Protestantism. Both confessional
solidarity and a view that it was better to confront the challenge abroad
than to wait to be attacked at home dictated that they should offer sup-
port. This they did, providing financial assistance in the Netherlands
and troops in France, the latter led in person by Elector Friedrich III’s
second son in two campaigns in the 1560s and 1570s, while a younger
son fell in battle fighting for the Dutch against the Spanish. Though the
military success of these interventions was decidedly modest they were
nevertheless expensive, and as they were principally financed with bor-
rowed money the debts soon mounted, limiting the scope for further
direct Palatine involvement.
Instead the wish to create an outward-looking Protestant alliance with
both German and foreign participation became a long-standing central
objective of Palatine policy, although it met with little initial success.
The other territories under Calvinist rule were mostly too small to con-
tribute much, while the Lutherans did not share the fear of a Catholic
crusade and were unwilling to be linked with Palatine activism. A brief
exception occurred with the accession of a Calvinist-influenced elector
in Saxony in 1586, leading to a joint Saxon–Palatine effort to build an
implicitly anti-Habsburg, anti-Imperial association. Saxon involvement
elicited wider Protestant support and first steps were taken at a meeting
in 1591, but with the death of the elector of Saxony soon afterwards
his territory reverted to moderate Lutheranism and the project col-
lapsed. The sole result was the raising of a small joint army to assist the
Huguenots in France in 1591 and 1592, a force which was commanded
by the young Prince Christian of Anhalt.
For most of the 55 years from the adoption of the Calvinist Heidelberg
Catechism in 1563 to the commencement of the Thirty Years War
in 1618 the Palatinate was the extreme case among the Protestant