War & conflict

An archbishop married his mistress and burned the Rhineland for it

In the 1580s the Electorate of Cologne, a prince-archbishopric that was also one of the seven votes in choosing the Holy Roman Emperor, was torn apart by a war that began as a dispute over one man's love life. Its ruler, Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg, converted to Protestantism and, rather than resign as the Peace of Augsburg's rules on church territories required, married a canoness named Agnes von Mansfeld-Eisleben and tried to turn the archbishopric into an ordinary hereditary duchy he could pass on to an heir. The cathedral chapter responded by electing a rival archbishop, Ernst of Bavaria, a member of the powerful Wittelsbach family, and the pope excommunicated Gebhard. What might have stayed a local succession quarrel instead became a test case for whether a Catholic church-state could simply be converted into a Protestant one, with huge implications for the empire's religious balance of power.

The fighting escalated in stages as each side pulled in outside help. Dutch, English, and Scottish mercenaries and money backed Gebhard, while Bavarian, papal, and eventually Spanish forces under Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, backed Ernst, turning a provincial feud into an extension of the Dutch Revolt. Towns and farmland were burned and plundered by both armies, sieges dragged on in the methodical, fortress-by-fortress style then typical of the Netherlands wars, and freebooting captains like Martin Schenck caused as much chaos as help. The war's worst atrocity came at Neuss in 1586, when Parma's artillery battered the town's walls for days before his Spanish and Italian troops stormed it, massacred the garrison and much of the population, and burned the city to the ground, leaving only a handful of buildings standing. By 1587–88 Ernst's Spanish-backed forces had retaken Bonn and the rest of the southern territory, and an exhausted, ailing Gebhard gave up his claim and retreated to Strassburg while his remaining allies were killed or defeated.

Ernst's victory secured Cologne for the Wittelsbach dynasty, which went on holding the electorate for well over a century, and it allowed Jesuit-led Counter-Reformation efforts to roll back Protestantism across the lower Rhine bishoprics. For Spain the war also delivered a valuable new land corridor along the Rhine toward the rebellious Dutch provinces, prolonging that separate conflict. More lastingly, the episode showed how easily an internal German succession dispute could draw in Spanish, French, English, and papal intervention, a pattern that would recur on a far larger scale in the Thirty Years' War and that was not finally addressed until the Peace of Westphalia decades later.

The conflict is sometimes known in German as the Sewer War, a slur derived from Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg's family title of Truchsess, or seneschal.

Read the whole of Cologne War on Wikipedia

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