Franco-Dutch War of the Dutch Republic by surprise, is often referred to as "het Rampjaar" ("the Disaster Year") in Dutch. In order to weaken its Hapsburg rivals in Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, largely Catholic France supported the Dutch Republic during the 1568-1648 Eighty Years War and in 1635, it entered the Thirty Years' War as part of the anti-Imperial Protestant alliance. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia ended the wider war but the subsidiary Franco-Spanish War continued until the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees; the net effect was that Spain was no longer the dominant power in Europe, while France emerged
Christendom established the religious, political and geographic divisions of Christianity, and this was established with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which legally ended the concept of a single Christian hegemony in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire, despite the Catholic Church's doctrine that it alone is the one true Church founded by Christ. Subsequently, each government determined the religion of their own state. Christians living in states where their denomination was "not" the established one were guaranteed the right to practice their faith in public during allotted hours and in private at their will. The European wars of religion