During the early reformation, around the Augsburg peace 1555, was the option of citizens choosing their worship by themselves on the table? If it was, what kind of argumentation was presented against it?
Initially, the famous phrase
cvivs regio, eivs religio was not actually included in the treaty. There are in fact no references to it until
Reichskammergericht cases in the 1580s. The actual Augsburg document did not enshrine the right of princes to alter religious confessions in an area, and didn't even really define Lutheranism or Catholicism at all. So the confessional line was deliberately blurry. The
ivs reformandi, the "right of reformation", was not a unilateral power given to princes, but rather was supposed to be a way to recognize the way things were on the ground, among the actual inhabitants of an area. And with the
ivs emigrandi, the right of emigration, subjects who dissented with the way religious affairs were structured in the state were free to leave - an acknowledgement of a sort of religious freedom that had little precedent at the time.
But for papist objections, some of these rights would've been considerably more expansive. The
ivs emigrandi was in fact watered down from the original protestant proposal of freedom of conscience, intended to protect reformant congregations living in Catholic territories. (In a separate document dated the same day as the Augsburg peace, 24 September 1555, the Emperor conceded limited freedom of conscience for burghers of certain cities and the ecclesiastical territories, and for much of the nobility in the crown lands of Bohemia - a concession clearly linked with the
ivs emigrandi negotiations.) In addition, the Emperor inserted the so-called "ecclesiastical reservation" into the treaty, preventing any protestant prince from assuming rulership of a Catholic ecclesiastical territory, effectively sabotaging the
ivs reformandi effort to keep the political leadership and the local population of a given area confessionally coherent.
The notion of a totally secular monarchy disconnected from any religious institutions would not be first suggested until Jean Bodin, the French lawyer, brought up the idea of the
pax civilis in response to the civil wars in his home country in the 1570s. And even then, it was not a particularly popular suggestion; church and state had been closely intertwined for twelve hundred years and that arrangement was not exactly easy to abandon. So when the Augsburg peace was crafted, it was not a serious suggestion. But the treaty
did allow for more freedom of conscience than had been contemplated in Christian Europe up to that point, and would've allowed for more if not for the objections of Catholic interests.
