European wars of religion new political order that is now known as Westphalian sovereignty. The conflicts began with the Knights' Revolt (1522), a minor war in the Holy Roman Empire. Warfare intensified after the Catholic Church began the Counter-Reformation in 1545 against the growth of Protestantism. The conflicts culminated in the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), which devastated Germany and killed one-third of its population. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) put an end to the war by recognising three separate Christian traditions in the Holy Roman Empire: Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism. Although many European leaders were 'sickened' by the religious bloodshed by 1648, religious
Duchy of Limburg Eighty Years' War, ended by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. An area known as Limburg of the States, consisting of parts of Overmaas (but no part of the Duchy of Limburg itself), was ceded to the Dutch Republic. In 1661, the Dutch and the Spanish agreed on a re-partition of the county of Dalhem. The duchy of Limburg itself remained undivided under Spanish Habsburg rule as part of the Southern Netherlands, passing to the Austrian Habsburgs under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. When the region was occupied by the French in 1794, the Austrian duchy of Limburg proper was