Thirty Years' War
Thirdly, the Holy Roman Empire was a broken group of nations inside a large empire, which had nations like the Austrian House of Habsburg, Bavaria, the Electorate of Saxony, the Margravate of Brandenburg, the Electorate of the Palatinate, Hesse, the Archbishopric of Trier and Württemberg and other small nations and towns. Only Austria was capable of operating on its own. Countries often made alliances with other places ruled by relatives. Because there were so many nations inside the empire, they often disagreed with one another, and the empire could not control the whole territory very well. That meant that the empire could not fix the problems in the whole country.