page_title: Countess Amalie Elisabeth of Hanau-Münzenberg
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Countess Amalie Elisabeth of Hanau-Münzenberg / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Bust of Amalie Elisabeth in Walhalla monument Deutsch: Büste der Amalie Elisabeth in der Walhalla
context_page_description: Amalie Elisabeth of Hanau-Münzenberg was Landgravine consort and Regent of Hesse-Kassel. She married the future William V, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel in 1619 and became Landgravine upon his ascension to power in 1627. In 1637, military defeats forced her and William V into exile in East Frisia. Later that year, she became regent for their son William VI upon her husband's death. Through skillful diplomacy and military successes in the Thirty Years' War, she advanced the fortunes of Hesse-Kassel and influenced the Peace of Westphalia that brought the conflict to an end. She handed over an enlarged landgraviate to her son when she abdicated upon his majority in 1650. However, her health had deteriorated over the course of the war, and she died soon after her abdication in 1651.
context_section_description: Amalie Elisabeth was remembered fondly among Calvinists for her efforts to preserve the Reformed faith in the Holy Roman Empire. When she visited Heidelberg in 1651, she was praised by the city’s inhabitants, who called her a second Deborah. In his 1901 book Women of the Reformed Church, James Isaac Good calls her both a “Reformed Deborah” and a “Reformed Joan of Arc." Her first biography was likely written by Christian Gottfried Körner and appeared as an appendix to the Representation of the Thirty Years War by Friedrich Schiller. Amalie Elisabeth was one of only four women accepted into King Ludwig I's Walhalla hall of fame during his lifetime (There are twelve women present today). Her bust was carved by Christian Friedrich Tieck.
  
  Although Amalie Elisabeth’s reign was remembered for generations, modern scholarship on the Thirty Years’ War often pays little or no attention to her or her accomplishments. The foremost English-language biography on her is The Iron Princess: Amalia Elizabeth and the Thirty Years' War, written by Dr. Tryntje Helfferich and published in 2013. In her book, Dr. Helfferich argues that Amalie Elisabeth’s role in the Thirty Years’ War has been marginalized in modern works “largely because she was a woman, for her role in the Thirty Years War rivaled that of Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, Cardinal Mazarin, or even King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden."
caption: Bust in the Walhalla by Christian Friedrich Tieck
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