The negotiations began in 1643 and took five years, while the war went on. Nearly two hundred states, principalities, cities and bishoprics sent representatives, and at times there were well over a hundred delegations in the field.
They met in two towns twenty five miles apart because the parties would not sit together. The Catholic imperial and French negotiations happened at Münster, the Protestant Swedish ones at Osnabrück, and messengers rode between them. Nobody could agree on precedence, that is, who entered a room first and who sat where, and a great deal of time went on it, which sounds absurd and was not: in a world where rank was the currency of diplomacy, conceding a doorway conceded a claim.
There was no plenary session and no single negotiation. It was a mesh of bilateral talks, and what emerged was two treaties, signed on the twenty fourth of October 1648, which are known collectively as the Peace of Westphalia.
It is the first European congress of its kind: multilateral, professionalised, held while the fighting continued, and aimed at settling a whole system of disputes at once rather than a single war between two parties. That procedural innovation may be the most genuinely durable thing about it.
Mostly they are extremely specific, and reading them dispels a good deal of the mythology.
On religion, they extended the settlement of 1555 to include Calvinists, and then did something cleverer: they fixed a reference year, 1624, and provided that the religious condition of each territory should be restored to what it had been in that year and left there. It converted an unanswerable theological question into a documentary one about what had been the case on a particular date, which is the kind of thing lawyers can settle.
They also provided that subjects whose religion differed from their ruler's should not be expelled and should be allowed private worship, which is a real if narrow concession, and one that had not been in the 1555 settlement.
On territory, the usual redistribution. Sweden took lands on the Baltic coast, France gained rights in Alsace which were deliberately drafted with an ambiguity that produced two centuries of argument, several German princes were compensated, and the independence of the Dutch Republic and of the Swiss Confederation from the empire was formally recognised, in the Dutch case ending an eighty year war.
There is also a general amnesty, and it is one of the more remarkable clauses. All injuries done during the war were to be perpetually forgotten, all prosecutions arising from them forbidden, and property restored to its pre war holders. After three decades of atrocity the parties agreed, in writing, that nobody would be called to account for any of it. It is not justice and it was probably the only basis on which men who had burned each other's provinces could sign anything, and versions of the same clause appear in European peace treaties for the next two centuries.
On the empire's constitution, the princes were confirmed in their right to conduct their own foreign policy and make alliances, provided these were not against the emperor or the empire. That proviso is important and is usually dropped from the summaries.
Since about 1948 it has been standard, particularly in the study of international relations, to speak of the Westphalian system and to mean by it a set of principles: that states are sovereign within their territory, that they are legally equal regardless of size, that no external authority may intervene in their internal affairs, and above all that religion is an internal matter.
The objection from historians who have actually read the treaties is blunt, and it has been made repeatedly and in detail over the last thirty years.
The treaties do not contain a principle of non intervention. They do the opposite: France and Sweden were made guarantors of the German settlement, with an explicit right to intervene by force if it was violated, which is a formal foreign right of intervention in the empire's internal affairs.
They do not declare states sovereign and equal. They are documents of the empire's internal constitution plus territorial adjustments, and the German princes remained subject to the emperor and to imperial law and courts.
They do not establish that religion is a domestic matter beyond outside concern. They regulate religion in enormous detail across borders, which is the opposite.
And the concept of sovereignty they are said to have invented had been articulated seventy years earlier by the French jurist mentioned in chapter twenty seven, in a book written to end a civil war, not by any negotiator in Westphalia.
One thing that genuinely was being invented in these years, and which the congress both used and advanced, was professional diplomacy.
Permanent resident embassies had begun in fifteenth century Italy, where a dense cluster of independent states needed continuous information about each other. By the seventeenth century the practice had spread across Europe, and with it a body of custom: diplomatic immunity, ciphered correspondence, the rules of precedence that consumed so much time at Münster, and a literature of manuals on how the job should be done.
The most quoted of these was written by a French diplomat who had been at Westphalia. His argument was that an ambassador's business is not to deceive but to inform, that a reputation for honesty is a working asset because a negotiator who is caught lying is useless afterwards, and that the interests of states are more reliable guides than their professions. It is the beginning of a professional ethic, and it grew directly out of the experience of a congress where nothing could be settled without trust between men whose masters were still at war.
The congress also normalised the idea of the mediator: neutral parties, in this case a papal nuncio and a Venetian, whose function was to carry proposals between delegations that would not meet. Third party mediation of a general settlement was not new in principle and had never been done at this scale.
And it produced a working practice of writing everything down in parallel authoritative texts, with each party's claims recorded even where unresolved. Much of the machinery of later congresses, at Utrecht, at Vienna in chapter thirty nine, and at Paris in chapter forty six, is recognisably descended from what was worked out in these two towns.
Traced back, the modern usage is remarkably recent. Eighteenth and nineteenth century writers treated the treaties as an important German constitutional settlement, which is what they are. The elevation of Westphalia into the founding charter of the international order happens mainly in the twentieth century, and it took hold in the years after 1945 among scholars building a discipline that needed an origin point.
It has stuck because it is useful. There genuinely is a system of territorially bounded states claiming exclusive authority within their borders and recognising no superior, and it genuinely did emerge in Europe and spread to the rest of the world. Having a date and a place for it is convenient.
The honest account is that Westphalia is a symptom rather than a cause. The trend towards states that monopolise authority inside a border had been running since the tax and army building of chapter twenty one, and it continued afterwards for reasons of war finance and administration that had little to do with any treaty.
What the treaties did contribute, and it is not nothing, is the demonstration that a general European settlement could be negotiated by a congress of powers rather than imposed by a victor or arbitrated by a universal authority. Nobody appealed to the pope or the emperor to resolve it, and when the pope denounced the settlement, which he did, in the strongest terms, declaring it null and void, every party ignored him. That is the moment the medieval claim of a supreme spiritual authority over Christian politics stops being operative.
It is worth being concrete about who gained and lost, because the abstractions obscure it.
France gained the most. It got Alsace, a permanent role in German affairs, and, most importantly, the fragmentation of its eastern neighbour into three hundred plus entities that could not act together. That was the strategic objective and it was achieved for a century and a half.
Sweden gained a Baltic empire it could not afford, and spent the following seventy years losing it.
The Habsburgs lost their bid to convert the empire into a real monarchy, but consolidated their own hereditary lands, Austria, Bohemia and Hungary, into what became a serious state in its own right. The Bohemian nobility that had thrown the officials out of the window was gone, replaced by loyal Catholic families, many of them foreign.
The Dutch got recognition of what they had held for two generations, and were the outstanding commercial and financial power of the century.
The Palatinate, whose elector had accepted the Bohemian crown in 1619 and started the whole thing, got about half its territory back and a newly created eighth electoral vote, after thirty years, having been the most thoroughly devastated region in the empire. That is the ledger entry worth remembering.
Germany got peace and paid for it with permanent division. And the smaller German states got the thing that mattered to them, which was a legal guarantee that neither the emperor nor anyone else could absorb them.
The Ottoman Empire, which held a large part of south eastern Europe and had been a decisive factor in the politics of the previous century, was not present and was not considered a party. That absence is worth noticing, because the system later described as universal was, at its supposed founding, a settlement among Latin Christian powers about themselves.
The war between France and Spain was not settled at Westphalia and continued for eleven more years, which is a useful corrective to the idea that the peace ended the era's conflicts.
Firm: the texts. The treaties survive, are published, and can be read by anybody, which is why the historians' objection to the mythology is so confident.
Firm: the negotiations, documented in instructions, dispatches and protocols in several archives.
Contested: the significance, as set out above. The scholarly consensus among early modernists is that the international relations usage is a myth; the usage persists anyway because it labels something real. Both of those statements are true at once and it is worth being able to hold them together.
A caution about origin points generally. This book has now met several: 476 for the fall of Rome, 1453 for the end of the Middle Ages, 1215 for constitutional liberty, 1648 for the modern state. In each case the date was chosen afterwards by people who needed a beginning for something they cared about, and in each case the process it labels was longer, messier and already under way. That is not a reason to abandon the dates. It is a reason to know what they are doing.