For the empire as a whole, the half century following the Peace of Westphalia was almost entirely shaped by the dominant political figure of the time, King Louis XIV of France. The response of the empire and its members to the aggressive undertakings of this monarch, whose aim from his assumption of power in 1661 to his death in 1715 it was to make France the mightiest state in Europe, was largely reactive (for a different interpretation, see France: The age of Louis XIV: Foreign affairs). Only in its struggles against Louis’s ally in the east, the Ottoman Turks, did the empire show some initiative. After a Polish relief army had helped imperial, Bavarian, and Saxon troops to lift a three months’ Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 in the Battle of Kahlenberg, imperial armies took the offensive, winning battles at Ofen (1686), Mohács (1687), and, most notably, Zenta (1697). In the Treaty of Carlowitz (1699), Austria gained parts of Hungary, Transylvania (now in Romania), Slavonia (now in Croatia), and Croatia, all formerly occupied by the Turks. The eastern wars resumed in the early and mid-18th century, but the Turks were never again a threat to Europe, since Russia became the chief bulwark against Ottoman expansionism.

Matters were different on the empire’s western and southern fronts. The overriding political question in Europe in the second half of the 17th century was the future of Spain and its vast holdings in the southern Netherlands, Italy, and the Americas, because it was expected that the Spanish Habsburg line would die out with the feeble Charles II. Contenders for the Spanish inheritance were the Habsburg emperor, Leopold I, husband of a younger Spanish princess, and Louis XIV. The French monarch, son of the eldest daughter of Philip III, had further strengthened his claim to the Spanish throne in 1659 when, in accordance with the Peace of the Pyrenees, which had ended the long conflict between Spain and France, he had married Marie-Thérèse, daughter of Philip IV of Spain.

While waiting for the Spanish throne to become vacant, Louis pursued an aggressive expansionist policy. He pushed his forces toward Germany to make the Rhine River France’s new eastern border. In 1667 he occupied Flanders and in 1670 Lorraine; in 1672 he attacked Cleves and invaded the United Provinces of the Netherlands, his main antagonist in the wars that followed. In 1679 he began to penetrate Alsace, occupying the imperial city of Strassburg (now Strasbourg) in 1681. Lacking the military power to bring the whole empire to its knees, Louis resorted to the lure of money; at one time or another almost every German state was in his pocket, either serving as ally or remaining neutral. Though not incapable of acting on national impulses, German princes—the Great Elector being a case in point—always served territorial interests first. This prevented the emperor, himself at times allied with Louis, from forging a solid front against France.

Leadership of the anti-France coalition passed to the Dutch Republic. William of Orange, as stadtholder of Holland and captain general of the United Provinces, emerged as the most determined opponent of French aggression. Upon becoming king of England in 1689, he changed the direction of English politics, which had been pro-French under the last Stuart king. The threat of a French universal monarchy arose dramatically as the death of the last Habsburg in Spain approached and Louis’s plans for a French claim on the entire Spanish inheritance swung into place. When the Spanish king died in 1700, he left all of his realm, including his American colonies, to Louis’s grandson, Philip, duc d’Anjou, thus dramatically shifting the balance of European power in France’s favour. Against this a Grand Alliance took shape (it was formally concluded in 1701), consisting of the empire (except Bavaria and the electorate of Cologne), the Netherlands, England, Sweden, Brandenburg-Prussia, and Savoy (Portugal also eventually joined the alliance). Its aim was to restore the European balance to the status of 1648 and 1659 by ejecting Louis from his conquests and by splitting the Spanish empire. From 1701 to 1714, France, with a few minor allies, fought the Grand Alliance in the War of the Spanish Succession. Despite a number of major battles, including Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706), Oudenarde (1708), and Malplaquet (1709), neither side was able to win a decisive victory (though the Alliance did seem to be prevailing). The death of the emperor Joseph I in 1711 placed his brother Charles, who had been proclaimed the Spanish king, on the imperial throne as Charles VI (1711–40). This raised the spectre of a Habsburg reunion of the Holy Roman and Spanish empires—a situation no more agreeable to European powers than the prospect of French hegemony. Thus, the alliance was severed and the war began to wind down.

Peace negotiations began in 1712, resulting in a number of treaties, signed at Utrecht and Rastatt in 1713–14. The Spanish empire was partitioned, with the Spanish Netherlands, Milan, Naples, and Sicily going to Austria and Spain itself coming under the rule of Philip V of Bourbon, a grandson of Louis XIV. The alliance’s original aim, to prevent French hegemony, had been achieved, though in the follow-up War of the Polish Succession (1733–35) France acquired control of Lorraine. Austria profited substantially in territorial terms, and a few other German rulers profited as well, albeit less so. As for the empire itself, it had gained no real benefit from more than half a century of intermittent warfare.

German society, however, was deeply affected. Economic stagnation and slow demographic recovery after the Thirty Years’ War made Germany dependent on governmental intervention as a means of stimulating recovery. As centers of economic vitality, the princely courts, attended by an international nobility, exposed Germany to a variety of cultural innovations that originated in other, more prosperous European countries.

Baroque art—the preeminent expression of monarchical power and of Roman Catholic resurgence after the Reformation—came from Spain and Italy, opera from Italy, and polite language and manners from France. The style of this period took French patterns as its model, from elaborately coded court ceremonials to dress, social conventions, food, and conversation. French absolutism not only became the political model, however scaled down, for the governance of all states in the empire, but every German prince and princeling imitated the lavish display with which Louis XIV created his aura of majesty and outshone his rivals. This started up a lively domestic market in luxuries, not to mention splendid works of architecture and decoration. But the cost of these luxuries was prohibitive (in 1719 the Palatine court consumed 50 percent of the territory’s revenues) and represented an enormous burden on the people, especially when added to the cost of large armies and proliferating bureaucracies. Not only did this conspicuous consumption widen the social division between the court-oriented elite and the bulk of the urban and rural population, but the preference for foreign cultural products also inhibited creative impulses at home.

In the second half of the 17th century, German energies were to a large extent still focused on religion. The confessional pluralism legitimized by the settlement of 1648 encouraged emphasis on theological distinctions, exacerbating the move toward religious orthodoxy under way in each denomination since the 16th century. The one genuinely German product of this religious preoccupation was Pietism, a movement within Lutheranism that opposed rigid dogmatism and promoted instead a subjective, mystical devoutness and an emphasis on a pious life guided by love of one’s neighbor as well as of God. Influenced by English Puritanism, Pietism was shaped in its theology by Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705) and in its organization by his disciple August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), who established a center for its promulgation in Halle. There he founded schools, orphanages, medical facilities, and a printing house for publishing cheap Bibles and devotional works, which made Pietism a widely influential program of Evangelical activism. The intensely emotional and mystical flavour of Pietist poetry is preserved in the cantata texts set to music by Johann Sebastian Bach, in whose deeply spiritual church music Protestant chorale singing, another indigenous German product, reached its apogee.