Changes

===Conclusion===

The Peace of Augsburg was intended to give Germany a lasting peace and to give it a religious settlement that would prevent future religious wars. The settlement was successful in the sense that it did prevent a general religious war in Germany and Central Europe until 1618. However, the settlement reached at Augsburg in 1555 was fundamentally unstable and its failure was almost guaranteed. Those who drafted the treaty failed to recognize that the growth of Calvinism would destabilize it and increase sectarian tensions in the Empire. Because they were not covered by the terms of the treaty they often worked against it and this was to lead to conflict in Bohemia that triggered the Thirty Years War. Then the settlement did not resolve the status of episcopal principalities whose bishop had converted to Lutheranism and this was to poison relations between both sides for decades. Perhaps the most significant failure of the settlement was that it created two mutually hostile blocs, and there was no mechanism designed by the settlement to defuse tensions or to resolve conflicts. This led to the collapse of the Peace of Augsburg and the Thirty Years War, one of the greatest tragedies in Europe’s long history.