The Greater Rhineland regional economy, which flourished against the backdrop of a Hundred Years War opposing the dynastic monarchs of France and England, fell victim, in the seventeenth century, to a hundred years war of its own. War erupted in 1619 and persisted with little respite until 1714, leaving the region in ruins and its economy durably depressed. Although the towns of Switzerland, at the source of the Rhine, and the towns of the Netherlands, at the mouth of the Rhine, negotiated their transition from urban league to sovereign state, the violence marginalized Flanders and the towns of the middle Rhineland, from Freiburg to Liège, and Antwerp to Frankfurt. Religious conflict subverted the ontopology of empire. Christianitas, as a geographical term, awakened suspicion. “Europe” was redefined as a territorial home to sovereign princes. Rhineland frontier mythology reemerged, relegating Europe's core regional economy to the edges of a “nation-state” system that we still inhabit, and that European Union seeks to reform or transcend.

The Greater Rhineland and the Reformation

The Hansa, in fact if not by law, disaggregated in the fifteenth century, a victim of class struggle, conflict with the dukes of Burgundy, Dutch competition, and new trade patterns arising from European maritime expansion. The wars with Burgundy left Cologne deeply in debt. The expansion (through dynastic inheritance and marriage) of the duchy of Cleves threatened Trier's autonomy. Mainz anxiously observed the growing power of the Elector Count Palatine who ruled from Heidelberg.