Peace of Westphalia
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The Peace of Westphalia was a set of treaties signed in Munster and Osnabruck in October 1648 that ended the thirty years war in the Holy Roman Empire and the eighty years war between Spain and the Dutch Republic. The negotiations were the first of their scale in Europe, with plenipotentiaries from across the continent living in two cities for years, haggling over precedence as much as over substance. The treaties recognised the Dutch Republic and Swiss Confederation as independent, gave the German princes the right to conduct their own foreign policy and to choose the religion of their territories between Catholicism, Lutheranism and Calvinism, and confirmed France's gains in Alsace. Sweden took western Pomerania and the archbishoprics of Bremen and Magdeburg, Brandenburg was compensated, and the religious settlement of Augsburg of 1555 was extended to Calvinists. Papal protests were ignored. The peace did not create the modern state system overnight, and historians now argue that the idea of sovereign states resting on it came later, but the treaties did transfer authority from the emperor to the constituent territories and set a pattern for diplomatic negotiation that lasted for two centuries. The two cities had been at war for thirty years and were exhausted.