A 1618-1648 Central European catastrophe of religion, dynasty and famine, ended by the Peace of Westphalia.
Educational history. Casualty figures are documented ranges. This is not operational advice, a ranking of nations, or a how-to for weapons or coups.
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.
Deep introduction
1618-1648 was several wars stacked: Bohemian, Palatine, Danish, Swedish and French-Habsburg -- paid for by German civilians.
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.
The war then spilled to the Palatinate and the Rhine.
Christian IV's Danish war (1625-29) failed. Gustavus Adolphus landed in 1630, won Breitenfeld, and made Sweden a great power before dying at Lutzen. His chancellor Oxenstierna kept Sweden in the war.
Albrecht von Wallenstein's imperial armies -- raised as a private-public enterprise -- showed how the war was financed by plunder as much as by tax.
Richelieu's France, a Catholic monarchy, funded Protestants and then entered openly in 1635 against the Habsburgs. The last decade was a great-power war with a German address.
Rocroi (1643) marked Spanish tercios' decline; the Empire was already a graveyard of villages.
Two treaties in 1648: Osnabruck (with Sweden) and Munster (with France). Cuius regio eius religio was adjusted; Calvinism gained recognition; the Emperor's power inside the Empire shrank.
Later IR theory turned "Westphalia" into a myth of the sovereign state. The documents were messier: a German constitutional peace plus French and Swedish guarantees.
1618-1648: Prague, Breitenfeld, Magdeburg, Westphalia -- a dated Central European history.
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02League, Swedish, imperial enterprise armies -- historical, not a manual.
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03Bohemian to French phases as historical sequence.
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04About 4-8 million dead in the Empire, scholarly range -- famine and disease first.
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05Ferdinand II, Gustavus, Wallenstein, Richelieu, Oxenstierna.
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06Imperial constitution, sovereignty myth, and German demographic memory.
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07Thin English canon, thick German local memory, Brecht and IR textbooks.
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