The Strasbourg Bishops' War (1592–1604) was a conflict between Catholics and Protestants for control of the Bishopric of Strasbourg. It was one of only two sectarian or confessional conflicts, both highly localised, that occurred within the Holy Roman Empire between the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War (1618). It was less bloody than the Cologne War (1583–88). It coincided with the Counter-Reformation and the Spanish Winter (1598–99), and the Catholic victory caused Protestants in Germany great worry that the tide had turned decidedly against them.

Charles of Lorraine was the Roman Catholic Bishop of Metz and Strasbourg. Pope Sixtus V made him a cardinal-deacon in 1589, and in 1591 gave him the titular church of Sant'Agata dei Goti. He regularly served as stadtholder (regent) for his father in the duchies of Lorraine and Bar.