Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Princesses Sybil, Emilia and Sidonia of Saxony (1535)
From The Habsburg Struggle for Europe (1940) by Perez Wolfman
In early 1552 it seemed the fate of the Holy Roman Empire hung on whether the Emperor Charles V would accept help from, and in so doing pardon the innumerable crimes of, the Elector Friedrich IV of Saxony. The key matter, in the eyes of the emperor, was actually not as to whether the Emperor could trust Friedrich, even after the long history of betrayals running between the two men. Instead the hindrance was, now as ever with Charles, the acceptance of religious division within the empire as a permanent, rather than a provisional, state of affairs.
As ever, Charles's court was sharply divided. By and large his Spanish advisors were fiercely opposed to any conciliation with any of the Protestant heretics whatsoever, while the Burgundians and Germans considered this alliance not the best step, nor even the obvious step, but the only step Charles could take to save his throne as emperor. What cannot be underestimated in the Spanish argument was that it lay outside secular notions of power politics: it was not about the secular well-being of the emperor's dominions, or the survival of his rule, but the risk to his immortal soul should he facilitate the sundering of Christ's Church. In our focus on the pragmatic politics of the time, we cannot just set aside the immediate spiritual consequences that dominated the principles' consideration of their choices.
But whether Charles could come to no decision, or found the options available to him at that moment unsatisfactory and so decided to wait for the situation to change and thus offer him new ones, did nothing. And Friedrich, even as he made his preparations for war, heard nothing. Realizing Charles's silence could itself be the result of a strategy, luring him into action against his former allies in the hopes of inducements the emperor had not yet approved, Friedrich carefully observed an absolute neutrality toward the French and the members of the league.
It was by way of Charles's court that Ferdinand, King of the Romans, King of Bohemia, King of Hungary, found out about Friedrich's offer. And because of his own war, Ferdinand was in his own predicament requiring an end to the knotted controversies impeding the assistance of the rest of the Empire against the Turks. So Ferdinand answered instead of his brother. And he did so favorably to Friedrich's terms, but Friedrich had not been involved in these controversies for so long without learning that an agreement was only as good as the authority of the prince one dealt with to bind himself and his state.
Thus, for all Ferdinand's power as King of Bohemia and King of Hungary, and for the significant role he exercised in imperial affairs as King of the Romans, Friedrich plainly understood that he could not enter into an arrangement with Ferdinand that Charles could later overrule. He understood in this way the Protestant princes could be lured into destroying each other for no lasting benefit at all. In fact, this was becoming more and more the consensus of the electoral court, that whatever merits Julius's idea of siding with the Habsburgs against the French had originally, clearly a moment of immense opportunity was now being squandered: after all, the evangelical princes of the empire had in the field a significant enough ally to win them outright and forever on the battlefield the same terms Friedrich was now trying to needle out of the intransigent Habsburgs by way of negotiation.
The Duke Johann in particular was all but ready to leave his brother behind and go fight for the King of France himself.
The other parties however felt no compunction about waiting for the Ernestine Wettins and Habsburgs to figure things out. Henri II seized Lorraine without much difficulty. Philip of Hesse and Moritz had marched south from Frankfurt, seizing first Ulm, and then Augsburg, the town which had so often hosted the court of the emperor. The impositions of Charles and his Spanish courtiers had left behind a sour taste, and the townspeople welcomed the Landgrave Philip and Duke Moritz as their deliverers. By now Charles V had realized the stakes in the game being paid north of the Alps were much higher than his contest with the Farnese over a minor Italian duchy, and he marched north in a frantic effort to prevent the League of Chambord from closing the passes to him, bottling his forces in Italy.
Moving with astonishing speed, the Emperor beat his enemies, crossing the Ehrenburg pass into Tyrol just in time.
Unfortunately though, enough of Charles's resources had been committed to Hungary in the war against the Ottomans, and in the west against the French, that his councils advised against confronting the League directly. In fact, the Duke Johann and the pro-French party at the Saxon court were right about one thing: had Friedrich fielded the large army he was assembling against the Emperor at that moment, the Evangelical princes would have been unbeatable.
All the emperor could do was once again beg his brother Ferdinand for assistance, but the situation with the Ottomans was no less dire than it was previously, and Ferdinand could give no answer to the emperor better than he had before. Worse still for the emperor, his treasury was depleted, the willingness of his usual sources to replenish his funds with it. Not for nothing had the League moved so aggressively on Augsburg, home of Charles' bankers of last resort, the Fuggers.
By late spring the pressure on Friedrich to act, one way or the other, was immense. He held by far the largest uncommitted force in the war, and it was plain to every one some ultimate resolution was fast approaching. News of Henri II's seizure of Metz and Verdun ratcheted up the pressure on both the Emperor and the King of the Romans to come to some arrangement. But still, Charles could not be moved to either accept or reject Friedrich's offer. Finally, less in eagerness to usurp his brother's authority than in exasperation, Ferdinand agreed to meet personally with Friedrich at the tiny village of Schandau, just inside Saxony's border with Bohemia.
Their exchanges now had a distinctly different tone than the prior negotiations, founded on the joint recognition that the present situation was wholly unsustainable. Friedrich may have had his differences with the Hapsburgs. Nonetheless, he understood, Henri II's appropriation of his rhetoric about German liberty aside, that a complete French victory as now seemed a very real possibility would mean the end of the imperial constitutional order. Most likely it would also mean trading Charles V for a new Emperor, Henry VIII.
Though Philip and Moritz were glad to think this would be an improvement, to Friedrich this meant the man whose father had been the perpetrator of the Massacre of Merindol, the very crime the depiction of which hung at Friedrich's back. For his part Ferdinand was still fighting the existential threat of the Ottomans with virtually no assistance from the rest of the Empire, in particular his brother. By now he surely regretted the accumulated provocations that had led Germany so divided that a fair number of its princes regarded the potential conquest of Hungary by the Turks was indifference or even a spiteful glee.
Thus, both men came willing to concede that matters could no longer be left to the Emperor.
The two princes met in the tiny village on the Elbe, and with them the ambassadors of the two broken halves of the German nobility, which had gone for almost a decade without speaking, one side because they were deemed traitors and heretics and the other side as allies of a foreign tyrant. It quickly became apparent that the ambassadors from the most important princes, in particular the various secular and ecclesiastical electors, had been entrusted with wide discretion as to what agreements they would subscribe their princes to, so long as the internal war was ended and a common front against external enemies took its place.
In the first meeting, Ferdinand accepted Friedrich's positions on the most important issues. Imperial institutions could no longer be competent adjudicators of religious disputes; the capacity of individual princes within the Empire to accept the Augsburg Confession would have to be respected; the borders of the territorial princes would henceforth be as they stood at the last truce, before Henri II made common cause with Philip, Moritz, Albert and their confederates; all hostages would have to be returned, by which was meant one hostage in particular. Moreover, Friedrich's qualms about Ferdinand's capacity to strike a deal found its answer in the willingness of the Palatinate, and also Brandenburg, which was lured out of its participation in the League of Chambord by Friedrich's unexpected fit of loyalty, to subscribe to these terms.
Among them, these four princes controlled a majority of votes in the subsequent imperial election. Though a living emperor had never been removed, the message was clear. Whatever ambiguity Charles or his more intransigent advisors may have wanted to find in the resulting document was extinguished by its clear language: "The grave threat to the empire made by the French king and his allies necessitates the immediate cessation of the war that has burned its houses, raped its women, maimed its children, reduced its towns to beggary and its countryside to famine. There is no piety to be found in the ashes of our home, no justice in its unburied bodies. Thus we call upon all the princes of the empire to act in brotherhood, forgive all past sins, recognize all property as it was held before the present crisis, release all prisoners, make war only against the common foes of the realm, and cease from any interference from those matters, including those of the correct observance of the Christian faith, best left to the magistrates of each land of the empire."
These were strong words, dictated by one prince who had made a whole career out of surprise attacks against his sovereign, and another who had intended to crush and overthrow princes of the empire with tax moneys they had gladly paid to furnish armies to defend against the same external foe being warned of now. But, of course, the whole point of the arrangement that was fast coming into focus at Schandau was that every ruling head of the empire was being invited into an act of collective amnesia, all trespasses forgiven and forgotten.
Once Bavaria signed on, which it did only a week after the Palatinate and Brandenburg, the momentum behind the peace seemed unstoppable. Even the ecclesiastical electors, the Archbishops of Cologne, Trier and Mainz, whose ambassadors to the court of Ferdinand may as well have been dragged to Schandau in chains for their reluctance to share the same air as the heretics, relented. In the end they were princes too, and princes of realms especially vulnerable to the French. Thus, while the ecclesiastical princes did not sign the declaration, they did not, once its terms became generally known, undertake to frustrate or sabotage it, fearing the consequences of further war as much as anyone.
Moreover, these ecclesiastical princes were as eager as the Lutherans to rid themselves of the noxious terms of the Augsburg Interim, which the Declaration called for in an imperial diet to not be held after the summer of 1554. They were even only too glad for the withdrawal of all German cooperation with the Council of Trent, which was another term, given that, like the Interim, this would force upon them the acceptance of reforms they variously saw as unnecessary or the first step down the road to becoming Lutherans themselves.
By a certain point in the proceedings, a giddy jubilation took over. Friedrich sent lavish gifts to the Archbishop of Mainz, Cologne and Trier. There was the sense among the assembled that the cooler heads had at last found their way to each other and were settling matters with sobriety and honor.
This newfound spirit of reconciliation exerted such a powerful hold on the assembled at Schandau that it almost came as a surprise that armies were still in the field. On June 11, the seemingly interminable maneuvering between the Army of the League of Chambord and that of the Emperor Charles V ended, when the smaller force of the emperor was caught trying to cross the Danube at Vilshofen. Friedrich wrote a letter to Philip, which arrived only after the battle, begging him to forebear the disgraceful slaughter of so honorable a prince as Charles, when they were so close to a negotiated peace that would win the Protestants their freedom. Better, Friedrich advised, for Philip to abstain, and use his force as the additional leverage necessary to ensure Charles assented to the terms reached at Schandau.
For his part, Philip was well past this talk. As far as he was concerned, the wheel of truces and half-peaces and conciliations with the Habsburgs had gone as many turns as they ever could, and the only way to a lasting peace lay over the corpse of the Emperor.
In the end, Vilshofen was decided not by maneuvers or geographic advantages or even numbers. The Emperor's 14,000, facing the 35,000 of the League, with Philip's and Moritz's armies swelled by mercenaries in the pay of the French, simply absorbed the force of the larger army, withstood its worst, killed and kept killing, using all its experience, tactics and superior discipline.
At the end, it was Philip of Hesse who was dead, cut down as he tried to retreat. It was with his bloody end that the evangelical princes' defeat became a rout.
Philip had begun the campaign confident of victory, but over the months of the chase several factors had intervened. First, the presence of Saxon veterans in his army, so desirable at the start of the year, made more and more trouble for him as the flow of desertions home increased with the growing awareness the elector was not merely sitting out the preliminaries of the fighting, but was truly adverse to his former friends in this matter. Second, Duke Albert of Bavaria, succeeding his father William, was outraged by the offenses of the army of the League of Chambord on his territory in the army's long pursuit of the emperor. Even if he were not a rigid Catholic by inclination, and even if he were not an even more rigid adherent to a pro-Habsburg policy as another son-in-law of Ferdinand, he would have likely gone out of his way to provide sufficient assistance to the emperor to evict the evangelical princes.
It was the supremest of inconveniences for Friedrich then, that word first arrived of Charles's improbable victory at Vilshofen, and second of his absolute rejection of the terms of Schandau. Of course his elimination of the army of the German princes supported by the French throne did not eliminate the threat offered either by the French invasion west of the Rhine or by the Ottomans in the east. He still faced enemies that he could not defeat on his own. Yet at the same time he acted as if the Declaration of Schandau could no more be accepted than the Lutheran heresy itself.
In the face of this intransigence, the parties of Schandau held firm. None of the adherents of the Declaration were going to facilitate or contribute towards the reduction of any other power of the empire subscribing to these terms, including the vast and powerful Bohemian kingdom. One can only wonder what the more private correspondence passing back and forth between the two brothers said, though Charles by now probably had good reason to regret his gambit of a few years before trying to arrange for the eventual succession of his son Philip to Ferdinand as king of the Romans and then emperor, to the exclusion of Ferdinand's sons.
Nonetheless, the most Charles was willing to concede was that no violence should offered against any prince of the empire offering assistance against external foes or internal rebels, that an imperial diet should be held in 1554, and that all sitting princes of the empire not allied with foreign princes could attend in peace. But beneath this flinty acquiescence lay the awareness that there was a new unity in the princes against Charles, and that whether he accepted the terms of their agreement or not he could not move against them without provoking a countermeasure that, whether it meant Emperor Ferdinand or the long-sought accession of the Bavarian Wittelsbachs to the imperial throne, would most likely mean his removal as Emperor. So, Charles accepted what he could, such as by calling the diet for 1554, and was silent as to what he could not, such as the end of the Augsburg Interim. And he hoped that perhaps once again the wheel of fortune would turn before the princes met to codify their new brotherhood as the law of the empire.
For Friedrich though, one pressing matter remained. Duke Moritz fled from Vilshofen with all the speed and wiles of one who had made a career of timely departures, with hostile armies and potential jailers on his heels. He could have conceivably returned to Hesse, where Philips' sons would have most likely welcomed him, or to one of the other small evangelical states that had sided with the French king against the emperor in their quarrel. Or he could have fled to points further afield, there to begin a new life as a soldier of fortune as so many dispossessed princes had before him. Instead, Moritz appeared in his old lands in August and September 1552, trying to recruit a fresh army in the lands he had held as the Albertine duke.
By this point, Friedrich had held the country of Albertine Saxony longer than Moritz had been its duke. Moreover, the Saxon printing presses and the Lutheran ministers sent from Wittenberg had had years to do their work. Only a few hundred were willing to follow the Last Albertine. Having assembled an enormous army to what was fast becoming little practical purpose, Friedrich raced to confront him. They met near Freiburg, with Moritz's forces slipping away until there was only 60 or 70 men to surrender before the 8,000 Friedrich had brought.
Offering his cousin his sword, Moritz expected the polite confinement Friedrich had been given by the Emperor, perhaps even a return to the hunting schloss that still bore his name to while away his days chasing harts before the winds of politics changed again and he was deemed useful. Instead, Friedrich tried him, found him guilty, and executed him, then and there. For, as the official announcement of the act, committed to the printers of all Saxony, explained, Moritz "was but a low traitor to the emperor, the crime of treason against one's prince being the one which God must surely detest above all others."
Thus in 1552, the Albertine line of the House of Wettin entered into memory.