Arguing the Peace of Prague (1635) - a failed peace or a reference peace to the Westphalian peace congress?

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Siegrid Westphal
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 514219145

Early modern history peace research so far has primarily dealt with the Westphalian Peace and generally has seen this central peace agreement as independent and „self-contained“ event. Rarely references to other peace agreements were made. Lately research has emphasized its meaning as reference peace for later peace agreements, yet still without placing the Westphalian Peace in a line of continuity with older agreements. This is where this project starts, trying to link knowledge of peace, peace references, and the practice of peace-building processes, which leads to the following insightful questions: Which role do these stocks of knowledge play for the practices of negotiation? To which definitions and knowledge of peace refer the protagonists? How could this be translated into reasonable action options? How can this knowledge of peace be peace-building, or even peace-hindering? How important is the inhereted, traditional knowledge of peace, i.e. experience and empirical knowledge and the actors´ collective memory? The Prague peace agreement of 1635, the previous event in the line of peace-building during the Thirty Years War, is in the focus. Today research still considers the Prague peace agreement as failed whereas the Westphalian Peace itself is seen as a success model. Our project raises the question which role the actors´ knowledge about the Prague peace agreement and its specific regulations played during the negoations of the Westphalian Peace Treaty in Munster and Osnabruck between 1643 and 1648. Was the Prague peace agreement even an important pre-condition for the Westphalian Peace´s success? This seriously questions the attribution of the Prague peace agreement as „failed“. The actors´ communication and their line of argumentation play an important role. Thus, using the Prague peace agreement as an argument during the Westphalian Peace congress is in the very focus of this project. Especially, electoral Saxony and the Imperial delegation will be analyzed in depth. On the one hand side, as main contractors of the Prague peace agreement they certainly had to stick to the Peace of Prague as long as possible – yet on the other hand side, they hardly could use it as reference during the Westphalian peace congress given Prague counted as failure. Given this constellation, the analysis of their negotiation strategies and lines of argumentation will be useful to find out which meaning the Prague peace agreement had as an argument after 1635, especially during the Westphalian peace congress. The project contributes not only to Early modern history peace research but also to the topic „Failure“ by focussing on the knowledge of peace and by challenging today´s ascription of failure by taking a coeval perspective.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants