Thirty Years' War Begins — Defenestration of Prague
The Thirty Years' War began as a Bohemian revolt in 1618 and ended in 1648 having killed perhaps a third of the German population. It went through four phases, each drawing in a larger power. The Bohemian phase ended at the White Mountain in 1620 with the Protestant estates crushed and their nobility dispossessed. The Danish phase from 1625 brought in Christian IV as a Protestant champion and a north German prince, and produced Wallenstein, a Bohemian entrepreneur who raised an army on credit and paid it by taxing the territory it occupied — a system that made the war self-sustaining and therefore endless. The Swedish phase from 1630 was the most dramatic. Gustavus Adolphus landed with a professional army using lighter guns and shallower formations, won at Breitenfeld and Lützen, and was killed in the second. The French phase from 1635 removed any remaining pretence that religion was the organising principle: Catholic France financed Protestant Sweden and then fought openly against Catholic Habsburgs. The destruction was done mainly by armies living off the land. Magdeburg was sacked in 1631 with some 20,000 dead, and whole regions of Germany lost half their population to soldiers, famine and typhus. The Peace of Westphalia settled the religious question by fixing the confession of each territory as of 1624 and recognised the practical sovereignty of the German states. Germany did not recover for a century. The reference point stood for three hundred years. Until 1914 the Thirty Years' War was the European measure of what a general war could do to a civilian population, and German writers of the nineteenth century used it the way later ones use the twentieth.
- Year: 1618 CE
- Category: Military
