Peace of Westphalia

The Peace of Westphalia is the collective name for two treaties, the Treaty of Münster and the Treaty of Osnabrück, both signed in October 1648 in the Westphalian cities that give them their names, ending the devastating Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648 and, in the Treaty of Münster's case, also the separate Eighty Years' War between Spain and the Dutch Republic. Negotiated over several years among the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III, France, Sweden, the Dutch Republic, Spain, and 109 delegations representing the Empire's constituent territories, the settlement redrew the political map of the Holy Roman Empire, granted its member states substantial sovereignty in their own affairs including the right to make foreign alliances, and confirmed the principle that each territory's ruler would determine its established religion among Catholicism, Lutheranism or Calvinism. Because it formalized a system of legally equal, mutually recognized sovereign states rather than a single overarching Christian authority, the settlement is widely, if not uncontroversially, treated by historians of international relations as the founding moment of the modern state-based international order, giving rise to the term "Westphalian sovereignty."