ABSTRACT
A fundamental purpose of this chapter is to question the view of a secularisation of international relations after 1648. Indeed, the last war of religion had been concluded 40 years earlier and a new era had begun. The war was waged by an interconfessional alliance, comprising Catholic Spain and Austria as well as Protestant England and the Dutch Republic, which makes it difficult to see how the ensuing conflict could have anything to do with religion. Louis XIV's claim that the war was indeed a war of religion was understandably ridiculed by the Spanish for this particular reason. The Nine Years War commenced as several conflicts merged in the autumn of 1688. It has seldom captured the imagination of historians. The cause of the Nine Years War can be related to a destabilisation of the Nijmegen settlement. It is established that religion played a disproportionately important role between 1685 and 1688, climaxing in the start of the Nine Years War.
