On May 23 1618, three men could be seen hurtling the seventy feet from the third floor of the Bohemian Chancery tower to the ground below. They were all representatives of the Catholic Habsburg Emperor. Despite all of them surviving the fall, either because they fell in manure (as claimed by Protestants) or because of the divine intervention of angels (as claimed by Catholics), this “Defenestration of Prague” became the precipitating event of the great European conflagration known as the Thirty Years' War. It marked the breakdown in the political modus vivendi that, since 1555 and the Peace of Augsburg, had allowed Protestants and Catholics to avoid war. This equilibrium, described in the Latin as cuius regio, eius religio, or “whose realm, his religion” allowed for peace by permitting the princes of Germany with conflicting religious beliefs, literally, to live in separate realms. This is one of the more salient examples of the identity rules that characterized early modern Europe. The Peace of Augsburg did not enforce religious freedom but rather avoided conflict by allowing intolerance to be legislated at the local level – this was conditional toleration par excellence.

The conditional toleration equilibrium that was shattered in Prague in 1618 was also uniquely suited for the highly fragmented political system of the Holy Roman Empire. As we have seen in earlier chapters this loose political agglomeration had lacked strong centralized government since the eleventh century controversy over investiture of priests that pitted the secular authority against the Church and had ended up weakening both.

This chapter studies the failure to reconstitute the conditional toleration equilibrium in Europe after the crisis brought about by the Reformation. In the aftermath of religious conflict, attempts to impose conditional toleration on their populations resulted in a fragile political-religious equilibrium. This equilibrium eventually undermined itself. And the intensification of interstate competition and state building saw the rise of mercantilist states like France and Prussia.

On the one hand, these states, like their predecessors, sought religious legitimacy as a key pillar of their authority. On the other hand, they also came to see economic development as crucial to political success. Pragmatic and mercantilist considerations led Cardinal Richelieu to offer de facto toleration to Portuguese Jews who could finance war against Spain and encouraged Jean Baptiste Colbert to tolerate Huguenots – a policy that was reversed after his death.