Before the First World War, it was known as the most destructive conflict in European history – responsible for the loss of as much as 40 per cent of the German population, which according to some estimates may have fallen in the years between 1618 and 1648 from around 20 million to 12 million. This immense human toll as a result of battle, famine, and disease would scar the continent for centuries – so that some historians describe it as the greatest trauma in German history.
But as well as being horrific in terms of the sheer numbers of casualties inflicted and lives destroyed, the Thirty Years’ War was also horrific for the manner in which it was conducted. As the large number of surviving eyewitness accounts attest, this was a war of attrition, in which civilians often found themselves on the front line. Massacres such as that during the Sack of Magdeburg – the conflict’s worst atrocity, which left up to 20,000 of the city’s 25,000 Protestant inhabitants dead – were conducted without mercy. Huge numbers of refugees were also created, as neighbours were pitched against each other, and entire areas of the country were laid waste.
It began as a local dispute – over the zealous anti-Protestant policies introduced by Ferdinand of Styria (the future Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II), who in 1617 was elected as the new king of Bohemia (the modern-day Czech Republic). Protest sparked into war following the momentous event known as the Defenestration of Prague, on 23 May 1618, when a group of local noblemen threw two of Ferdinand’s newly appointed Catholic governors from a high window at Prague’s Hradcany Castle. Over the next three decades, the conflict escalated to become Europe’s apocalypse – fought out over four distinct phases that can on one level be seen as part of the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants, but on another as part of a more complex international struggle that would eventually pull in most of Europe’s great powers.
