The treaty signed by the western European nations that ended the Thirty Years War, the last major war fought for religious reasons.
The War so exhausted everybody that all the nations were eager for peace, the terms of which were spelled out in the Treaty. The Treaty marked the beginning of a new age for Europe. Henceforth, Europe would never go to war again for religious reasons. The princes on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide "forswore propaganda by the sword, and henceforth doctrinal disputes were settled within states, not between them." Despite the objections of Pope Innocent X (he called the Treaty "accursed and without any influence or result for the past, the present, or the future") the principalities ignored him, and the Catholic Church would never again hold sway over the affairs of the European nations as it once used to. European politics would proceed from then as if the Pope did not exist. Life in Europe became increasingly 'secular' from this point onwards—an individual's religious convictions were held as private matters which needed neither the state's care nor involvement—and reaching its acme in the Enlightenment which Voltaire claims freed men from "prone submission to the heavenly will."
©ALBERITH
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