The Peace of Westphalia: Origins, Character, Significance

Ready to take your journey of Discovery? Renaissance: Journeys of Discovery at BRLSI is a year-long programme of talks and events exploring the many joys, revelations and something of the broader cultural legacy of a movement still making waves in the 21st century.  Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Martin Luther, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Hieronymus Bosch… if you love culture then you’ll love our new talks series!

So what of the Thirty Years War?  A conflict widely seen as a contributory factor in the decline of the Renaissance.

The Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War (1618-48), Europe’s most destructive conflict prior to the twentieth century world wars. The peace involved three interrelated treaties which, together, are widely accepted as foundations for a modern secular world order composed of sovereign states.

This interpretation is not only historically inaccurate, but it conjures up a model which is no longer fit for purpose in understanding today’s world. This talk will argue that the way to understand Westphalia is to look at the conflict it was intended to settle. Especially, to understand why that war took so long to resolve. In doing so, we gain new insight into the problems of resolving complex conflicts in an age of fragmented sovereignty – circumstances which are perhaps more pertinent to today’s problems than the textbook model of an international order defined by sovereign states.

Professor Peter H Wilson is the Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of All Souls College. His work has been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish, and includes Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-speaking Peoples since 1500 (2022), The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe’s History (2016), and Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War (2009).

Ahead of our Peace of Westphalia talk: what was the Thirty Years war and how did it impact on the Renaissance?