דת ופוליטיקה שזורים זה בזה

Religion sharpened existing conflicts

• Issues of religious reform exacerbated 加剧 conflicts between the monarchy and the nobility, as in the French wars of religion.
• The CED's verb is exacerbated, not caused — the monarchy-nobility conflict of 1.5 was already there.
• So religion supplied a new language and new allies for a struggle that predated it.

The Habsburgs on two fronts

• Habsburg rulers confronted an expanded Ottoman Empire while attempting unsuccessfully to restore Catholic unity across Europe.
• Two commitments at once, and the CED marks the second unsuccessful.
• A state fighting on two fronts must choose, and the choices it makes are the evidence for what it valued.

Only one of these ends the conflict, and it is not the one most rulers tried first

States used religion instrumentally

• States exploited religious conflicts to promote political and economic interests.
• The CED says this plainly, and it applies to Catholic and Protestant states alike.
• So an alliance that crosses a confessional line is not a puzzle — it is evidence for this sentence.

And a few chose pluralism

• A few states, such as France with the Edict of Nantes, allowed religious pluralism in order to maintain domestic peace.
• The CED gives the motive explicitly: domestic peace, not principle.
• A few is its qualifier — toleration in this period is an exception adopted for order.

Westphalia ended an ideal

• The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which marked the effective end of the medieval ideal of universal Christendom, accelerated the decline of the Holy Roman Empire by granting princes, bishops and other local leaders control over religion.
• Two consequences in one sentence: the end of an ideal, and the decline of an institution.
• It also closes unit 1's sovereignty thread: religion is now decided locally, which is the opposite of 1.5's monarchical monopoly at the imperial level.