Ulm, Free Imperial City of

The Swabian League of Cities is formed on November 20, 1331, when twenty-two Imperial Cities of the former Duchy of Swabia band together in support of the Emperor Louis IV, who in return promises not to mortgage any of them to any imperial vassal.

Among the founding cities are Augsburg, Heilbronn, Reutlingen and Ulm.

Hans Multscher is active from 1427 in Ulm, where he executes the realistic stone statues of kings and pages on the outside of the Rathaus (Town Hall), completed in 1430.

In 1429, he sculpts the powerful stone statue of Christ on the west portal of Ulm Cathedral.

His wooden sculptures, equally numerous as his works in stone, include several gracious statues of the Virgin and Child.

The Protestant Reformation, sparked by Martin Luther’s publication of The Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, has divided Western Christendom; the reformers continue to argue among themselves over dogma.

Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig, a German theologian, writer, and preacher who is one of the earliest promoters of the Protestant Reformation in Silesia, has his own views on the sacraments—the Heavenly Flesh doctrine–developed in close association with his humanist colleague, Valentin Crautwald.

Schwenckfeld’s highly personal religious teachings, already alienated from those of Luther over the eucharistic controversy of 1524, have also alienated Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer.

Finally settling in Ulm, Schwenkfeld in 1541 defends his beliefs in the Great Confession on the Glory of Christ, emphasizing the differences between the positions of Luther and the late Huldreich Zwingli, especially with regard to the Eucharist, and arguing that since the nature of man is sinful, Christ's human nature must of itself be divine.

Orthodox theologians regard this latter belief as a Christological heresy.

Schwenkfeld's books are banned, and his followers, the Schwenkfeldians, or Confessors of the Glory of Christ, are persecuted.

A coalition of Protestant German states from the Protestant Union or League of Evangelical Union (also known as the Evangelical Union or Union of Auhausen), to defend the rights, lands and person of each member following the establishment, by the Holy Roman Emperor and Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria, of Roman Catholicism in Donauwörth in 1607 and after a majority of the Reichstag have decided in 1608 that the renewal of the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 should be conditional upon the restoration of all church land appropriated since 1552.

Meeting on May 14, 1608, in Auhausen, near Nördlingen, the Protestant princes of the Palatinate, Anhalt, Neuburg, Württemberg, Baden, Ansbach, Bayreuth, Hesse-Kassel (or Hesse-Cassel), Brandenburg, Ulm, Strasbourg and Nürnberg form a military league under the leadership of Frederick IV of the Palatinate.

The Protestant Union is weakened from the start by the non-participation of several powerful Protestant rulers, such as the Elector of Saxony.

The Union is also beset by internal strife between its Lutheran and Calvinist members.

The union of Protestant princes, formed at the beginning of the dispute over the duchies of the late and childless duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg, still lacks several powerful Protestant rulers, such as the Elector of Saxony.

The conduct of the Union in the Jülich dispute and the warlike operations of the Union army in Alsace appear to make inevitable a battle between the Union and ...

...the military league of important Catholic states formed in response.

When Austria and Salzburg finally join in 1613, at Ratisbon, the assembly now appoints no less than three war-directors: Duke Maximilian, and Archdukes Albert and Maximilian of Austria.

The object of the League is now declared "a Christian legal defense."

The Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg have sought to expand their power base from their relatively meager possessions, although this brought them into conflict with neighboring states.

After John William, Duke of Julich-Cleves-Berg, died childless in 1609. his eldest niece, Anna, Duchess of Prussia, the wife of John Sigismund, Elector of Brandenburg, had promptly claimed the inheritance; Brandenburg had sent troops to take hold of some of John William's holdings in the Rhineland.

Unfortunately for John Sigismund, this effort will become tied up with the Thirty Years' War and the disputed succession of Julich.

The cities of Cleves, Mark, Jülich, Berg, and Ravensburg, after the month-long War of the Jülich Succession, had rejected the Dortmund Recess since the accord had been developed without the consent of all five cities.

Overall, the five cities prefer to be represented by one prince rather than two.

The Dortmund Recess is ultimately replaced by the Treaty of Xanten, signed on November 14, 1614, and ending the Julich-Cleves War, today recognized as a precursor to the Thirty Years' War.

Palatinate-Neuburg takes the duchies of ...

...Jülich and ...