Religious Politics in the Holy Roman Empire

Germany emerged out of the eastern half of what had been the Carolingian Empire during the 10th century. German King Otto the Great (936-73) was crowned emperor by the Pope in 962, establishing the Holy Roman Empire, which kindled the popular medieval hope of a unified Christendom. However, a conflict of authority soon emerged between Pope and emperor, which became particularly severe during the Investiture Controversy and the subsequent civil war (1075-1122), leading to a weakening of Imperial authority. Martin Luther began his protest against the excesses of the medieval Catholic Church in 1517, and over the next decades many dukes and princes adopted the new creed, igniting a violent conflict with the emperor that was temporarily pacified by the Peace of Augsburg (1555), which allowed local rulers to choose either Lutheranism or Catholicism as the religion of their lands. In 1618, a Protestant revolt in Bohemia grew into the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), which devastated Germany and crippled the Empire’s political viability. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) granted freedom of worship to Catholics and Protestants regardless of the established church in a territory. Over the next century, Catholic Austria and Protestant Prussia developed as the dominant powers in Germany, setting the stage for the rivalry that would define Germany through the end of the Holy Roman Empire (1806) and the German Confederation, a loose association of states, including much of Austria and Prussia, created in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna.