Thirty Years' War 2021

The Thirty Years War is one of the bloodiest conflicts in all of human history. Depending on which historian you're consulting, the death toll ranges from 4.5 to 8 million. The next conflict that would claim more lives would be WW1, several hundred years later. And civilians died at an astounding rate, nearly 7 to 1. While there is a lot of focus on the military aspect of this conflict, we want to try something different. We'll be examining the effects of the war as a humanitarian crisis. To those living at the time, such conflict must have felt like the end of the world. And so, we start with the first herald of apocalypse: Conquest.

The Thirty Years War started as a localized conflict but quickly ballooned out into a multinational conflict that tore across the countryside. But the ones who bore the brunt of the damage were not the countries or even the soldiers, but the citizenry as armies from other countries poured across the land, pillaging and looting as they went.

Many things added up to create the famine that swept through the Holy Roman Empire. The 1600s were naturally lean years, as the environment dropped 2 degrees. But things got much, much worse. Let's unpack the economics of the 1600s, how debasement worked, and how while people were eating their neighbors, noble families just got richer.

The rider of the pale horse, Death itself, comes through and with it, plague. The plague itself was no stranger to the average medieval town. But the difference, as with most things, was scale. Having armies march for so long and in the poor sanitation conditions of war caused outbreaks of plague everywhere. And the international conflict turned the Holy Roman Empire into a mixing pot of disease.

As the war continued onwards draining the land of blood and coin, enough was finally enough. While the conflict started over religious grounds, by this time it had changed to a conflict about political power. Oddly, that made it much easier to find compromise and terms to finally bring the conflict to an end. We see its effect on the maps as the Hapsburg empire began to splinter but the Thirty Years War left a lasting legacy on Europe and the way we think about global conflict forever.