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Thirty Years' War: Difference between revisions
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[[File:Thirty_Years_War_7284.jpg|frame|Wallenstein's order to Pappenheim to intervene in the battle of Lützen, where both he and Gustav Adolf were killed. The order is stained with Pappenheim's blood.]]
{{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,
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''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]].
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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.
The war itself was one of the bloodiest and most destructive in human history, killing around 1/3 of the population of the Holy Roman Empire. The unprecedented level of destruction stemmed from the fact that it was the first major gunpowder war, the first war that involved all of Europe, and that the war was fought entirely by mercenary armies. Mercenaries were used so exclusively because gunpowder had made the old knight-based model of warfare obsolete, and nobody had figured out the modern model of professional armies yet. Missing a payment would mean your armies switched over to your enemy. The solders themselves were conscripted. An army would come to town and say, "every man here joins us or we hang you". The ones who joined had to loot farms and towns in order to survive since armies march on their stomachs. Often an entire town had to pool their gold, and bribe the invading army to go away (of course sometimes they'd just take to money and loot anyway). It didn't matter whose side the army was on, to the common peasant, they
Infamously, the latter half of the war largely degraded into the various participants continuing to fight because they could not afford to stop: It was simply cheaper to keep paying your armies by looting the enemy's lands than paying the severance package. This was eventually solved by having [[The Emperor]] pay.
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The war itself had ''extremely'' long-lasting effects, the most notable of which was the [[wikipedia:Westphalian sovereignty|Westphalian theory of sovereignty]], which is to say the idea that a state has territory, population, a government, and that foreigners do not (directly) interfere in its affairs, leading directly to the modern concept of the nation-state. Indeed, this last point is the real meaning of ''cuius regio, eius religio'': while religious affairs were in themselves important, they also served as a stand-in for the more general displeasure of the German princes at the constant interference of the Emperor and of rulers across Europe at the constant interference of [[The Pope]] (it's no coincidence that the Pope tends to drop out of European history textbooks sometime in the 17th century). The Westphalian system continued unchallenged among Western powers until the 20th century, when a few theoreticians attempted to make modifications in response to the atrocities of [[World War II]] and the nasty business after [[The Great Politics Mess-Up]] (particularly [[The Yugoslav Wars]]). Nevertheless, the modern system of states is more or less Westphalian, and several states (particularly [[Red China|China]] and to a lesser extent [[The New Russia|Russia]]) still insist on it.
One of the things that makes the war so maddeningly complicated is that participants
The back end of the war is largely concurrent with the beginning of the [[English Civil War]], which had similarly wide-ranging long-term effects (for entirely unrelated reasons).
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* ''Välskärin kertomukset'' (The Chirurgeon's Tale) by [[Zacharias Topelius]]
* ''The War Hound and the World's Pain'' by [[Michael Moorcock]]
* German 1910 historical novel ''Der Wehrwolf'' (''The Warwolf'') by Hermann Löns, a revenge-fantasy about North-German peasants who, after having been plundered and brutalized repeatedly by occupying troops, form a
{{quote|"The name was chosen after the title of Hermann Löns' novel, ''Der Wehrwolf'' (1910). Set in the Celle region, Lower Saxony, during the Thirty Years' War (1618–48), the novel concerns a peasant, Harm Wulf, who after his family is killed by marauding soldiers, organises his neighbours into a militia who pursue the soldiers mercilessly and execute any they capture, referring to themselves as ''Wehrwölfe'' ("Defense-wolves"). Löns said that the title was a dual reference to the fact that the peasants put up a fight (''sich '''wehr'''en'') and to the protagonist's surname of Wulf, but it also had obvious connotations with the word ''Werwölfe'' in that Wulf's men came to enjoy killing. While not himself a Nazi (he died in 1914) Löns' work was popular with the German far right, and the Nazis celebrated his work. Indeed, Celle's local newspaper began serialising ''Der Wehrwolf'' in January 1945."}}
* ''Wallenstein'' (1971), a non-fiction biography of Albrecht von Waldstein by historian Golo Mann, son of novelist Thomas Mann.
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