Thirty Years' War (1630): Sweden lands
[256] [desk-thirty-years-1] Thirty Years' War is the record of 1630 under “Sweden lands.” The figure to read with it is 1618. Do not arrange states in a league. Fix who moved what, and where, to that year. Do not add a later war into the same total. Another general European war that mixed ideology, alliance and a peace that became a theory -- comparison, not equation.
A 1618-1648 Central European catastrophe of religion, dynasty and famine, ended by the Peace of Westphalia. The Thirty Years' War opened with the Defenestration of Prague on 23 May 1618, when Bohemian Protestant estates threw Habsburg officials from a window. What began as a Bohemian revolt inside the Holy Roman Empire became a European war as the Palatinate, Denmark, Sweden and France entered against the Habsburgs and the Catholic League.
About 4-8 million people died in the Empire, scholarly range -- a demographic disaster in parts of Germany from battle, typhus, famine and marauding armies that lived off the land. Magdeburg's 1631 sack became the emblem of civilian horror. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden won at Breitenfeld (1631) and died at Lutzen (1632).
The Peace of Westphalia (Munster and Osnabruck, 24 October 1648) resettled religion in the Empire, recognised Dutch and Swiss facts, and became a later textbook label for "sovereignty." English memory is thinner than for Waterloo or 1914; German local memory of emptied villages is thicker.
Say Thirty Years' War with 1630, “Sweden lands,” and 1618. The figure is not a national score.1630
Figures to keep
- Year of the action
- 1630
- Figure in the record
- 1618
- Action
- Thirty Years' War
- Line of the front
- Sweden lands
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