It pitted the Austrian Habsburg family and their predominately Catholic supporters against a number of Protestant states in an increasingly bitter conflagration that would pull in foreign powers such as Denmark, Sweden and France. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. Beginning in 1618, the Thirty Years’ War was, at heart, a struggle for constitutional and religious power within the Holy Roman Empire – Europe’s largest and most populous state. Wilson.The Thirty Years’ War: Europe’s Tragedy. The violence was, in many ways, a product of the large numbers of actors involved in the conflict. Through a combination of plague, famine and violence, the conflict brought misery to people living across vast swathes of central Europe. His books include The Thirty Years War: Europes Tragedy and The Holy Roman. In fact, the population of the Holy Roman Empire, the conflict’s main theatre, did not recover its prewar levels until around 60 years after the war ended. Wilson is Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford. The Thirty Years’ War claimed the lives of at least 5 million people – so, yes, its grim reputation is well deserved. Most modern histories of the Thirty Years' War portray it as an almost uniquely brutal conflict.
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