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).
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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.
The 1618 revolt and Frederick V's brief winter kingship ended at White Mountain (8 November 1620). Habsburg reconquest brought forced re-Catholicisation and exile -- a Bohemian tragedy that later Czech memory never treated as a German footnote.
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