4 Counter-Reformation
The early years
In formal religious terms the Counter-Reformation began with the
Council of Trent of 1545 to 1563, and with the reforms and renewal
of the Catholic church which stemmed from it. In political practice,
however, the Counter-Reformation can also be seen in the actions of
Catholic princes who set out to reverse the rise of Protestantism in their
domains, and to re-establish Catholicism as the sole religion of their
subjects. Their motives were also political, in that religious dissent was
viewed as going hand in hand with other potential challenges to the
established social order, so that regaining confessional uniformity was
seen as essential to maintaining political compliance.
There was some truth in this thesis, as after the Reformation efforts
to secure concessions in respect of religious freedoms quickly became
bound up with the longer-running struggle between princes and their
Estates over the division of power. In most of Europe the medieval tradi-
tion of government by a prince in the ‘parliament’ of his peers, primarily
the nobility and prelates, still applied, but the practice was becoming
steadily more confrontational than cooperative, with each side seek-
ing the upper hand. By the beginning of the early modern period the
Estates had in many places reached a high point in their share of author-
ity, and a princely fight-back was beginning to emerge, a turning of
the tide which would eventually lead to eighteenth-century absolutism.
In the late sixteenth century this was still a distant prospect, but the ten-
sions between rulers and Estates were very much current, and nowhere
more so than in the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs. Religious differ-
ences exacerbated the problems, and although both sides were doubtless
sincere in their convictions their respective efforts to secure or deny
religious freedoms also became central to the wider conflict.
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