Imperial / League armies
Habsburg and Bavarian Catholic forces, later Wallenstein's enterprise.
Armies were small by 1914 standards and catastrophic by 1618 village standards. They extracted "contributions" as a system.
Swedish conscripts, German mercenaries, Croatian light horse -- paymasters named the side.
Systems
Swedish army
A Baltic great-power tool after 1630, paid partly by German contributions and French subsidies.
French intervention
Open from 1635; raison d'etat as a force structure.
Contribution system
Quartering and extraction -- the war's real logistics.
Private military enterprise
Colonels as contractors; the state as a client.
Peace congresses
Years of talks (1643-48) as an institution of ending.
Meters
Demographic damage
92
English-language memory
28
Religious structuring
70
Great-power overlay
75
Tech shift
25
Theory afterlife (IR)
80
Hotspots
Bohemia
1618-20: the fuse and the first crushing.
Saxony / Breitenfeld
1631: Swedish arrival as a military fact.
Magdeburg
1631: the civilian name.
Rhine and Palatinate
An early internationalisation zone.
Westphalian towns
Munster and Osnabruck as the end-map.
Materials
Grain and forage
Armies ate districts; famine followed the calendar of quarters.
Silver and subsidies
French gold in Swedish and German pockets.
Powder and pike
Ordinary tools -- named, not instructed.
Parish registers
The surviving "material" of the death toll.
This is not a study of pike-and-shot drill. It is a historical force picture of enterprise armies.
Winter quarters were a political event: who hosted the army died of it.