POLITICAL AND CONFESSIONAL COMPLEXITY OF THE NORTH-WEST

The Moravians traversed the North-West of the Empire between their bases in the Wetterau, in Denmark and in the Netherlands, as busily as the South-West. Everywhere they went they created new interconfessional connexions – the way they passed Wesley from hand to hand all the way from Rotterdam to Herrnhut and back is especially instructive – and also new disputes; but in this area, unlike the South-West, their history is not an organising principle for that of revival as a whole. For the crux of the religious geography of the North-West was that both revival and Pietist renewal suffered great setbacks, and that Lutheran Orthodoxy staged a notable, if brittle, comeback in the great Imperial cities and in some other important territories. There were good reasons (as we have seen) why religious revival set in first in the little Reformed principalities in the Wetterau, and more importantly, though much more slowly, in the larger Reformed communities. To these developments Zinzendorf's aspirations to create a Reformed Tropus based on Herrnhaag were entirely marginal.

In the North-West political fragmentation had proceeded further than anywhere else in the Empire; nowhere were the religious faiths tolerated in the Empire more confusingly mixed together, and mingled with other faiths not tolerated (in Frankfurt the Jewish ghetto already made up 25 per cent of the population).