Two imperial regents and a secretary thrown from a castle window in Prague, and surviving (23 May 1618)
Catholics said angels caught them; Protestants said they landed in a dung heap
History · Early modern
The Thirty Years' War
1618–1648
The Holy Roman Empire's religious and dynastic catastrophe
Begun as a Protestant revolt in Bohemia against Habsburg rule, it drew in Denmark, Sweden and finally France, and turned central Europe into a battlefield fought over by unpaid mercenary armies that lived off the country. By the time the treaties were signed in 1648 large parts of Germany had lost a third or more of their people.
How to spot them
- ▸1618–48: a war in the Holy Roman Empire that began over religion and ended over the balance of power
- ▸Quiz clue: 'defenestration', 'White Mountain', 'Lion of the North', 'Wallenstein', 'Magdeburg'
- ▸Catholic France funding the Protestant side against fellow Catholics
- ▸The single most destructive event in German history before the twentieth century
What happened
The 'Winter King' who reigned in Bohemia for a single season (1619–20)
Frederick V of the Palatinate, son-in-law of James I of England
The Bohemian revolt crushed in an hour outside Prague, 1620
The sack of a great Elbe city in 1631, in which some 20,000 died
So notorious that 'magdeburgisieren' entered German as a word for total destruction
The 'Lion of the North' shot down in the fog at Lützen, 1632
Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, killed at the moment of his side's victory
An overmighty mercenary generalissimo murdered by his own officers at Eger, 1634
Albrecht von Wallenstein, later the subject of Schiller's dramatic trilogy
A Catholic cardinal in Paris bankrolling, then joining, the Protestant side
Richelieu, for whom Habsburg encirclement mattered more than confession
Quick-fire facts
- •It is conventionally divided into Bohemian, Danish, Swedish and French phases
- •The trigger was the Defenestration of Prague on 23 May 1618, after Ferdinand of Styria curtailed Protestant rights granted by the Letter of Majesty
- •Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden won a crushing victory at Breitenfeld in 1631 and was killed at Lützen in 1632
- •Albrecht von Wallenstein raised armies on credit against future plunder, and was assassinated at Eger in 1634
- •The Peace of Prague (1635) failed to end it; France then entered openly against Spain and Austria
- •The Peace of Westphalia — the treaties of Osnabrück and Münster, signed 24 October 1648 — ended it
- •Estimates of the death toll run from four to eight million; some German territories lost a third to a half of their population
- •Grimmelshausen's novel Simplicius Simplicissimus (1668) is the great literary record of the soldier's war
- •Schiller wrote both a history of the war and the Wallenstein trilogy of plays
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Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Thirty Years' War
- Peter H. Wilson — Europe's Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War