Countess Amalie Elisabeth of Hanau-Münzenberg

William V's will stipulated that Amalie Elisabeth should rule at the head of a regency council composed of the former members of his royal council. However, the Landgravine quickly enforced her own authority and diminished the influence of the other regency council members. She accomplished this by frequently flattering the councilors and shaming them when they did not eagerly obey her. She also physically separated them by sending them on frequent diplomatic missions across Europe.[1] Another tactic she used to great effect was delaying decisions when the councilors pushed her to do things she did not wish to do. She even delayed the official establishment of the regency government, thus leaving the councilors’ authority in question.[1]

Amalie Elisabeth also moved quickly to secure control over her late husband’s army. In 17th century Europe, it was considered highly unusual for a female ruler to hold authority over military matters. As a result, after her ascension both Charles Louis, Prince Palatine, and William V’s half-brother Landgrave Frederick of Hesse-Eschwege asked to be given command of Hesse-Kassel’s armies. Amalie Elisabeth rebuffed both advances, telling the Prince Palatine that he should not approach her while he had no lands, funds, or allies, and forcing Landgrave Frederick to accept her authority.[4] Although she was determined to retain control over the army, she did allow its command to remain in the hands of her late husband’s top general, Peter Melander, Count of Holzappel.[1] Retaining Melander was not without risk, as he was notoriously greedy and self-interested, so his defection was always a possibility. Amalie Elisabeth managed to retain Melander’s loyalty with the help of the French Court, which, fearing Melander’s defection to the Imperialists, offered him generous amounts of money and new titles.[4] One of the Landgravine’s first actions as regent was to order the army and the inhabitants of the territories still under her control to swear an oath of loyalty to her young son William VI, further solidifying her power.[1]

Amalie Elisabeth faced unique threats to her legitimacy because she was a woman. Many in 17th century Europe considered government by women to be unjustifiable under any circumstances, but there were some exceptions. For example, in 1559 John Calvin wrote that “there were occasionally women so endowed, that the singular good qualities which shown forth in them, made it evident that they were raised up by divine authority."[5] Throughout her reign, Amalie Elisabeth asserted that she was one such woman, repeatedly claiming that God had placed her in this position and it was her responsibility to carry out his will.[1] She also stressed her role as a widow and mother to reinforce her legitimacy, refusing any course of action which would violate her late husband’s intent or compromise her son’s inheritance.

Amalie Elisabeth also continued her husband’s efforts to limit the power of the Hessian estates. Because she retained the territories occupied by her husband and eventually renegotiated subsidies from the French, she maintained sources of revenue independent of the estates. As a result, she was able to overlook the estates’ hostility towards her government and rebuff their repeated calls for peace. She was also able to dismiss the grievances of the estates when they were presented to her upon her return to Hesse-Kassel.[1]

Amalie Elisabeth inherited a desperate situation from her husband. Although she held East Frisia and other territories in Westphalia, the countryside of Hesse-Kassel was under Imperial occupation and its fortresses were under siege. The situation deteriorated further in late October 1637, when Landgrave George II of Hesse-Darmstadt, son of Landgrave Louis V, announced that the Emperor had declared the late William V an enemy of the Empire, annulled his will, and appointed George II as imperial administrator of Hesse-Kassel.[1] The situation within Hesse-Kassel was so desperate that Amalie Elisabeth’s councilors and the Hessian estates opened negotiations with George II at Marburg and urged the Landgravine to accept whatever terms were necessary to achieve peace. However, George II refused to offer any concessions and demanded Hesse-Kassel’s unconditional submission to the Emperor. He also demanded very harsh terms for his own benefit, such as further territorial concessions to Hesse-Darmstadt, control over her regency government, and that the Hesse-Darmstadt line supplant Hesse-Kassel’s as the senior Hessian house. Amalie Elisabeth concluded that the terms were intolerable and unjust and repeatedly refused to ratify the agreement, against the advice of her councilors.[1]

Events soon vindicated her repeated refusals to make peace, as in 1638 the French and Swedish armies, along with Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, defeated and captured an Imperial army at the Battle of Rheinfelden.[3] This victory allowed Hessian General Peter Melander to successfully negotiate a cease-fire with the Imperial forces in the region.[1] With her position quickly improving, Amalie Elisabeth sought a better settlement than the terms offered by Landgrave George II. To this end she and her councilors appealed to the other German princes, arguing that George II’s stubbornness and unreasonable demands were preventing a settlement from being reached. As more princes were convinced by this argument, and as the French and Swedish continued to gain momentum, the Emperor decided to revoke George II’s authority over the negotiations and appointed the Elector of Mainz to conclude the treaty.[1] The Elector of Mainz was one of the princes whose lands in Westphalia were occupied by Amalie Elisabeth’s forces, so he sought to make peace as quickly as possible. The Elector offered more generous terms, including no further territorial or political concessions to Hesse-Darmstadt and official recognition of the right of all Calvinist princes to practice their religion.[1] Amalie Elisabeth was delighted by these terms and agreed to ratify the treaty. The Emperor, however, refused to ratify it, as the legalization of Calvinism was not a concession he was willing to accept.[3]

While she was negotiating with the Emperor for a separate peace, Amalie Elisabeth also negotiated with France. After the death of William V, the French feared that Amalie Elisabeth’s regency was unstable and could collapse, so they halted all subsidy payments to Hesse-Kassel. Although French agents had since reported that the Landgravine had a firm grip on power, by early 1639 the subsidy payments had still not resumed.[4] She thus requested that the subsidies be renewed and increased and that the alliance between France and Hesse-Kassel be restored. In the ensuing negotiations, Amalie Elisabeth used her gender to her advantage by portraying herself as an unfortunate widow faced with a desperate situation and in dire need of help from the French court. She also stressed Hesse-Kassel’s importance to the allied cause, claiming that if she were to fall France and Sweden would not be able to defeat the Emperor.[1] In addition to these tactics, she strengthened her negotiating position by making her negotiations for peace with the Emperor public, signaling to the French that she would make a separate peace if they did not agree to her terms. The French eventually agreed to her demands, and in August 1639 they signed the Treaty of Dorsten, renewing the alliance and granting her a greater subsidy than her husband had received.[4] Over the next decade of war, the alliance between France and Hesse-Kassel would remain firm, and Amalie Elisabeth would maintain amicable ties with the French court. Her efforts also earned her the admiration of the First Minister of France, Cardinal Richelieu, who wrote in 1637 that the Landgravine “defended herself with courage, not least by the force, as by the justice of her cause."[6]

After renewing Hesse-Kassel’s alliance with France, Amalie Elisabeth rejoined the war on the allied side. She soon agreed to support a joint allied offensive and in 1640 ordered General Peter Melander to link up with the armies of France and Sweden. Melander, however, did not support rejoining the war against the Emperor and strongly objected to serving under the Swedish Field Marshal Johan Banér, who had been given overall command of the allied army. In July 1640 Melander returned to Kassel and offered his resignation. Amalie Elisabeth, having had enough of Melander’s criticisms of her leadership, accepted the resignation.[1] Peter Melander would later become a general in the Imperial army and fight against Hesse-Kassel. Over the remaining course of the war, the Landgravine chose several other men to command her armies, including Count Kaspar von Eberstein and Johann von Geyso.[1]

Amalie Elisabeth remained allied with France and Sweden and committed the army of Hesse-Kassel to their cause until the end of the war. In 1641 Hessian troops fought alongside the French and Swedish armies. winning a pyrrhic victory in the Battle of Wolfenbüttel.[1] In January 1642, Hessian forces assisted the French army under the Comte de Guébriant in winning a decisive victory at the Battle of Kempen, strengthening the allied position along the Rhine.[3] Later that year, the Swedish attempted to relieve a Hessian force under siege in Dorsten, where Amalie Elisabeth had once held court, but they were too late, and Dorsten fell to Imperial forces in September.[1] Two Hessian cavalry regiments fought alongside Swedish Field Marshal Lennart Torstensson’s forces at the Second Battle of Breitenfeld in October 1642.[1] The battle was a major victory for the allies, leaving the Habsburg Hereditary lands vulnerable and further turning the tide of the war.[3] Hessian forces were also present at the last battle of the Thirty Years’ War, which took place at Wevelinghoven in 1648. In this battle, Hessian, French, and Swedish forces under Johann von Geyso defeated an Imperial army under Guillaume de Lamboy.[1]

In addition to committing troops to the major campaigns of the war, Amalie Elisabeth also launched initiatives to increase the size of her children’s inheritance. For example, in 1641 the last count of Hanau-Münzenberg died without a male heir and a succession struggle ensued between many different claimants. Amalie Elisabeth had a great deal of influence in Hanau-Münzenberg because it was the county of her birth, her husband had liberated it from Imperial siege in 1636, and its government owed money to Hesse-Kassel. One claimant, Count Friedrich Casimir of Hanau-Lichtenberg, offered to allow the territory to revert to Hesse-Kassel if his line ever lacked a male heir in exchange for Amalie Elisabeth supporting his claim. She accepted the deal and in 1643 Count Friedrich Casimir won the succession struggle with her help. Thereafter if the Count of Hanau-Lichtenberg ever died without a male heir, Hanau-Münzenberg would belong to Hesse-Kassel, which eventually took place in 1736.[1]

Amalie Elisabeth’s most significant initiative was her campaign to reclaim the Marburg inheritance lost to Hesse-Darmstadt by her late father-in-law. In October 1643, she re-asserted Hesse-Kassel’s claim to the territory, using the opinions of legal experts to show that the 1627 treaty conceding it was both illegal and forced.[1] In 1645, she went a step further by launching an invasion and occupying Marburg and the rest of the disputed territory.[3] This was the start of the Hessenkrieg, or "Hessian War," which would be waged throughout the later stages of the Thirty Years’ War. Initially, the experienced army of Hesse-Kassel was easily able to defeat the meager forces Landgrave George II was able to muster. However, George II requested aid from the Imperialists, and the Emperor and the Elector of Bavaria sent a force under Peter Melander to assist him. Amalie Elisabeth called upon her French and Swedish allies to support her, and the main focus of the war shifted to the conflict in Hesse.[3] In 1647 Melander managed to retake the city of Marburg, but the city’s fortress held out and Melander’s army began to run out of supplies. In December of that year a cannonball from the fortress seriously injured Melander, and in January 1648 his army retreated from the territory.[1] Amalie Elisabeth’s forces re-occupied Marburg, and George II was forced to come to terms. In April of that year, both Hessian houses signed an agreement in which Amalie Elisabeth received most of the disputed territory, including the valuable city of Marburg.[1]

In 1642, diplomats laid plans to host a general peace conference between the Emperor, the French and the Swedish in the Westphalian cities of Münster and Osnabrück, although the negotiations would not begin for several more years.[3] Once they began all the princes of the Empire were invited to attend the congress, with Catholic princes joining the French at Münster and Protestant princes going to Osnabrück with the Swedes.[7] Because Amalie Elisabeth was one of the few German princes remaining at war with the Emperor, she sent diplomatic delegations to both Münster and Osnabrück.[1] Throughout the negotiations the Landgravine instructed her diplomats to pursue an uncompromising strategy to achieve her demands. This strategy did not endear her to any of the other princes, as her demands were far more ambitious than they had expected and many thought she was being unreasonable.[1] In addition to negotiating with the princes of the Empire, Amalie Elisabeth also had to repeatedly ensure that her French and Swedish allies would not abandon her demands in favor of their own.

One of Amalie Elisabeth’s most ambitious demands was a formal change in the structure of the Holy Roman Empire. Her husband, the late Landgrave William V, had been a staunch opponent of the Habsburg emperors’ attempts at centralization and believed that every Imperial prince should enjoy the same rights.[1] Amalie Elisabeth thus sought to achieve her husband’s goal of stripping the Emperor and the Electors of their power over the Empire by formalizing an aristocratic interpretation of the Imperial constitution.[3] This goal was also supported by the French, the Swedes, and a few German princes, the most prominent of which was the Elector of Brandenburg. However, these allies were prevented from working together by other disputes. Sweden and Brandenburg both claimed the territory of Pomerania, so the Imperial negotiator mediated the dispute, awarding Sweden half of Pomerania and compensating Brandenburg with lands elsewhere. As a result of this mediation, both parties agreed to drop their demands for changes to the constitution of the Empire. Without their support, Amalie Elisabeth was unable to achieve all of her constitutional goals.[1] Although a complete re-interpretation of the Imperial constitution did not occur, Amalie Elisabeth and her allies did achieve important concessions on this issue. The Peace of Westphalia confirmed that every Imperial Prince had the right to make alliances and take up arms independently.[3]

The most important issue for Amalie Elisabeth was the question of religion. Throughout the conference she repeatedly demanded that Calvinism be given the same legal status within the Empire as Catholicism and Lutheranism.[7] She faced strong opposition on this issue, both from the Emperor’s delegates and from those of the Lutheran princes, who were not inclined to make common cause with their fellow protestants. However, this was not an issue she was willing to compromise on, as she had repeatedly refused to make peace in the past without explicit protections for her religion.[1] Eventually her hardline stance won out, and the delegates agreed to grant Calvinists the same rights enjoyed by Catholics and Lutherans since the Peace of Augsburg.

Amalie Elisabeth also advanced the interests of Hesse-Kassel throughout the conference. She initially demanded territorial concessions from the princes whose lands in Westphalia she occupied. These demands were strongly opposed by many other princes, so she eventually agreed to drop them in exchange for 600,000 Reichsthalers in reparations payments.[1] Although she did not achieve these territorial demands, she did gain recognition of her acquisition of the Marburg inheritance and several smaller territories such as Hersfeld Abbey and parts of the County of Schaumburg. In addition, the Landgravine successfully negotiated an amnesty going back to 1618 for herself and all other princes outside the Habsburg hereditary lands.[1] With the help of Sweden and France, she also secured a compensation payment to demobilize her army, the only German territory to do so.[3] In total Amalie Elisabeth achieved many of her objectives and wielded significant influence on the Peace of Westphalia, despite being the ruler of a minor German state. In the Treaties of Münster and Osnabrück, there are a full 15 paragraphs specifically addressing the affairs of Hesse-Kassel and Amalie Elisabeth.[8][9]