2AnInevitableWar?
‘Were the last years before 1618 therefore a highroad to war?’ asks Asch,
before adding that ‘they have certainly often been depicted as such’.^1
Parker has no doubt: ‘It is a source of wonderment to historians, as it
was to contemporaries, that a general conflict did not break out between
the already embattled parties in Germany for a whole decade after the
Donauwörth incident, despite several serious clashes.’^2 Other historians,
without being quite so specific, have described the events in the Empire
in the latter years of the sixteenth and early years of the seventeenth
centuries as representing a steadily building crisis to which the logical
outcome was war. The familiar items appear, much as set out in the
previous chapter: the Bishops’ War for Cologne, the exclusion of the
administrator of Magdeburg and others from the Reichstag, the block-
ing of the Kammergericht appeals committees, the Donauwörth affair,
the Reichstag walk-out of 1608, the formation of the Protestant Union
and the Catholic League, the Cleves-Jülich succession dispute, and the
breakdown of the Reichstag in 1613, all in the context of growing efforts
at Counter-Reformation. Kampmann’s conclusion is clear:
The ever-sharper confessional conflict had led to the crippling of the
key institutions of the Empire, and had brought all other conflicts
within the Empire under its malign influence. That, summed up in
a few words, is the central cause of the severe crisis in the Empire
before the outbreak of the Thirty Years War.^3‘The crippling of the key institutions of the Empire’ is a recurrent theme
among historians. Asch refers to ‘the cause of the breakdown of the
Empire’s constitution before 1618, and thus of the war’, Schmidt notes
that ‘all the institutional forums of Imperial politics were blocked’, and
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