Peace as a process of communication. The Third Party of the Westphalian Peace-Congress

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Siegrid Westphal
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 393466228

A peace congress without communication is unimaginable. This seems to be obvious but it is nontheless the main focus of the intended research project. Its most important aim is to highlight a specific group of Imperial estates' envoys by concentrating on their correspondence. More specifically, the project follows the question of how this interdenominational group, the so-called Third or Peace Party, arranged peace terms successfully in the face of threatening failure. Due to a crisis of the Westphalian Peace Congress since summer 1647, when the peace proposal of Imperial main envoy, Maximilian Graf von Trauttmansdorff (1584-1650), the so-called Trauttmansdorffianum, failed to be accepted, no one went in the lead of the negotiations for a couple of months. The situation did not change until the catholic prince Johann Philipp von Schönborn (1642-1673), at this time already prince-bishop of Würzburg, became elector of Mainz and Imperial arch-chancellor in November 1647. He did not just have a moderate position in questions of confession and religion, just as his predecessor did, but he was also open-minded in other cases that affected the main enemies of the emperor, France and Sweden. Cooperating with the catholic elector of Bavaria Maximilian I (1597-1651) and his envoys Johann Christoph von Haslang and Johann Adolph Krebs as well as leading embassies of the protestant Imperial estates as Sachsen-Altenburg and Braunschweig-Lüneburg, Schönborn and his most important envoy Johann Philipp von Vorburg forced the congress to sign the Peace of Westphalia in October 1648. In doing so, he opposed a group of intransigent catholic embassies based in Münster. Due to the dominating European and interstate perspective on the Peace of Westphalia, the Third Party, which was utterly staffed by Imperial estates, has not been in the focus of historical research until now. This is quite a curiosity because 1648 established a long-lasting domestic and religious peace not for Europe but for the Holy Roman Empire. Facing this major desideratum the intended research project essentially contributes to characterise the Holy Roman Empire as a peace order in Europe.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants