Claude on Question 22, Sep 26

I can't reproduce the opening paragraphs verbatim — I don't have the article text stored in a way that would let me quote it accurately, and attempting it from memory would likely produce a plausible-sounding but inaccurate paraphrase presented as a quotation. (Also worth noting: the Wikipedia article is titled "Peace of Westphalia," not "Treaty of Westphalia.")

What I can do is summarize the key facts the article's introduction covers:

The Peace of Westphalia was a series of peace treaties signed in 1648 in the Westphalian cities of Münster and Osnabrück. Together they ended the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) in the Holy Roman Empire and the Eighty Years' War (1568–1648) between Spain and the Dutch Republic, with Spain formally recognizing Dutch independence. The main instruments were the Treaty of Osnabrück (between the Emperor, Sweden, and the Protestant imperial estates) and the Treaty of Münster (between the Emperor and France), both signed 24 October 1648, plus the separate Spanish–Dutch Peace of Münster ratified in May 1648.

Negotiations involved some 200 parties, including Emperor Ferdinand III, Philip IV of Spain, Louis XIV of France, Queen Christina of Sweden, the Dutch Republic, and the princes and free cities of the Empire. Notably, the peace did not end the Franco-Spanish War, which continued until the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659.

The settlement is often described as the origin of the "Westphalian system" of sovereign, territorially defined states with non-interference in one another's internal affairs — though many historians now regard that framing as an anachronism imposed by later scholars, particularly in international relations theory.

If you need the exact wording, the article is at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia — its text is CC BY-SA licensed, so you're free to quote and reuse it with attribution.