Beginning in 1618, the Thirty Years’ War was, at heart, a struggle for constitutional and religious power within the Holy Roman Empire – Europe’s largest and most populous state.

The violence was, in many ways, a product of the large numbers of actors involved in the conflict.

Through a combination of plague, famine and violence, the conflict brought misery to people living across vast swathes of central Europe. In fact, the population of the Holy Roman Empire, the conflict’s main theatre, did not recover its prewar levels until around 60 years after the war ended.

The Thirty Years’ War claimed the lives of at least 5 million people – so, yes, its grim reputation is well deserved. As late as the 1960s, Germans placed it ahead of both world wars and the Black Death as their country's greatest disaster.Most modern histories of the Thirty Years' War portray it as an almost uniquely brutal conflict. In a major reassessment, Wilson argues that religion was not the catalyst, but one element in a lethal stew of political, social, and dynastic forces that fed the conflict.īy war's end a recognizably modern Europe had been created, but at what price? The Thirty Years War condemned the Germans to two centuries of internal division and international impotence and became a benchmark of brutality for centuries. The sweeping narrative encompasses dramatic events and unforgettable individuals-the sack of Magdeburg the Dutch revolt the Swedish militant king Gustavus Adolphus the imperial generals, Wallenstein and Tilly and diplomat Cardinal Richelieu. Bohemia was ravaged by mercenary troops in the first battle of a conflagration that would engulf Europe from Spain to Sweden. When defiant Bohemians tossed the Habsburg emperor's envoys from the castle windows in Prague in 1618, the Holy Roman Empire struck back with a vengeance. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world. The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike.

Peter wilson the thirty years war