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Thirty Years' War: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''War is our homeland, our hauberk is our house''.|Soldiers' saying from the Thirty Years' War}}
{{quote|''First came the Greycoats to eat all my swine,
''Next came the Bluecoats to make my sons fight,
''Next came the Greencoats to make my wife whore,
''Next came the Browncoats to burn down my home.
''I have not but my life, now come the Blackcoats to rob me of that.''|Anonymous Poem from the Thirty Years' War}}
Massive European war raging from 1618 to 1648 (although the French continued fighting the Spanish for a bit longer) involving, directly or indirectly, just about every European power in some fashion. It is usually considered to be the longest recorded continuous war (The [[Hundred Years' War]] had a couple of interruptions), and was, until the Taiping Rebellion, the bloodiest war in recorded human history. It was mainly (though not exclusively) fought in the [[Holy Roman Empire]]. It famously started with the [[Inherently Funny Words|Defenestration of Prague]], the throwing out of two imperial officials from a window (they were unharmed; depending on which side's propaganda you believed, this was either due to divine intervention or their landing in a pile of a substance polite historians call "equine stool", childish ones "horsie poo", and brutally honest ones "horse manure" or "horseshit"). [[It Got Worse]].
The origins of the war are complex, and considering the [[Loads and Loads of Characters|numerous participants]] arguably unique to each one of them. The basic conflict involved tensions between Protestants and Catholics inside the [[Holy Roman Empire]], tensions between the emperor and his princes (Protestant ''and'' Catholic), tensions between the Czechs and the Germans within [[The Empire]], the old French-Habsburg rivalry, Danish-Swedish rivalry, the Spanish conflict with the Dutch, and Swedish designs on the Baltic. All of these things flowed together to create a 30-year long [[Gambit Pileup|clusterfuck]]. The three decades of war are considered to be very important because of the military, social and economic development that it accelerated: Armies in this period became much larger than they had been during the Middle Ages, and new tactics were tried out that would eventually become important.
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{{tropelist|Real Life tropes of the Thirty Years' War Include:}}
* [[The Alliance]]: The Protestants aspired to be this.
* [[Back From the Brink]]: Happened quite often due to internal power struggles and shifting alliances breaking up the victor of the hour's momentum.
* [[Balkanize Me]]:[[The Other Wiki]] terms [[wikipedia:File:Europe map 1648.PNG|this]] a ''simplified'' map of Europe at the end. That marble-cake checkerboard in the middle was there ''before'', mind you, but the Peace of Westphalia ending the war cemented it for a long time to come.
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* [[The Empire]]: How the Habsburg Empire was viewed by its enemies. Not totally deserved nor undeserved.
* [[Enemy Mine]]: The Catholic French teaming up with the Protestant Swedes. The Danes and the Imperials (who had been fighting each other earlier in the war!) ended up as allies after the Swedes attacked Denmark.
* [[Evil Versus Evil]]: The mercenary armies of any side. Standard procedure was the pillaging of villages, the raping of women and girls, and the torture and/or murder of peasant men and boys. Note that this applied to villages of friend or foe if the army in question grew hungry or restless enough, or was led by bloodthirsty or apathetic commanders.
* [[Foe Yay]]: It used to be asserted that [[The Pope]], Urban VIII, when he heard of the death of Gustavus Adolphus, offered a Requiem Mass for the Swedish king. <ref>The Mass was in reality a Mass of thanksgiving, and the Pope himself wrote,"We give eternal thanks to the Lord of vengeance because he rendered retribution to the proud and shook from the neck of the Catholics their most bitter enemy."</ref>
* [[Forever War]]: Not literally, but in the consciousness of its contemporaries, it came close.
* [[Gambit Pileup]]: This is what you get when four or five generation-spanning conflicts decide to intermingle with each other.
* [[Genre Savvy]]: The Estate of Peasants of the Swedish Riksdag. They realized that going to war would mean rape, arson, and pillage, and supported Sweden's going to war in Germany on the grounds of "It's better if said activities happen on someone else's turf".
* [[Gondor Calls for Aid]]: The Swedish intervention was depicted by its supporters as a mission to save Protestantism from evil Catholic tyranny. It was also traditionally depicted like this in Swedish history books until fairly recently, when the study of history was supposed to imbue the students with a sense of patriotism.
* [[Grey and Gray Morality]]: With a ''very'' strong hint of [[Evil Versus Evil]].
* [[Hired Guns]]: Made up the majority of armies, the most (in)famous would probably be (eventually Duke) Bernard of Saxe-Weimar.
* [[Hope Spot]]: The war is infamous for ''not ending''. Time and time again one side seems to be within inches of being able to grasp victory, only for some outside force to tip the balance, forcing another few years of fighting.
* [[The Horde]]: One army's marching song was, "We are a horde of ten thousand swine."
* [[Incredibly Lame Pun]]: The scribe Philip Fabricius who was thrown out from the Prague Castle window along with his two bosses was ennobled as "''von Hochenfall"'' ("of Highfall") *groan*
* [[Join the Army They Said]]: This war was fought before law-enforced compulsory military service was standard, so in theory most (not all) soldiers were volunteers. In reality, new recruits were not only made by luring them with (often vain) promises, but also by bullying, threats, or brute force. And once the war left multitudes of people impoverished, starving, or homeless, many joined the armies simply because (even) soldiers were better off than a great part of the populace.
* [[Knight Templar]]: A ''lot'' of these.
* [[La Résistance]]: In several instances, peasants would band together to fight off plundering soldiers - including those of their own "side".
* [[Moral Event Horizon]]: Massacres of villages and towns occurred almost from the beginning of the war. The largest and most remembered, however, is the [[wikipedia:Sack of Magdeburg|Sack of Magdeburg]], committed by the Imperial troops.
* [[Penal Colony]]: Germany, effectively. One gets the impression that Europe's monarchs were using this place as a garbage dump to send all their convicts to and let them kill each other in a manner convenient to all honest folk except the civilians who had to have them as guests.
* [[Persecution Flip]]: After every campaign there was one. According to the custom of the time a given Prince had a right to decide his subjects' religion. In other words, everyone knew that if their region fell into the hands of a prince from a rival sect, they were likely to be subjected to persecution. Naturally this knowledge was not conducive to peace.
* [[The Plague]]: As in most great wars, it did not take long until epidemic diseases began to strike, taking their toll on armies and populace alike.
* [[Pyrrhic Victory]]: In the Battle of Lützen in 1632, the Swedes defeated the Imperial army, but lost their King Gustavus Adolphus.
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== Folklore ==
* Impossible-to-count amount of folk tales (from fairy-tales to legends), songs, art forms (again from paintings to fashion) either refer to this conflict or have roots in it. Surprisingly, it seemed to leave larger impression in these fields than any other conflict later - including both world wars, though this would need some hard data to prove right or wrong.
== Literature ==
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