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Those territories by themselves included more than eight million people. Although the Habsburg emperor had only limited power over the empire as a whole, the emperor was usually also the king or direct ruler of a large part of the Imperial territory, including the lands of Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary. The origins of this war are difficult to pinpoint as there were many different nations and alliances involved, and there had been widespread political and religious tensions throughout Europe for centuries leading up to the war.Īt the time of the outbreak of the war in the early seventeenth century, the Holy Roman Empire was made up of mostly independent states covering much of Central Europe. While the Thirty Years’ War is no exception to that, it is notable as one of the most destructive conflicts not only in European history but indeed in the history of humanity. Some of history’s most contentious conflicts have their roots in religious disagreements. “The devil is very near at hand to those who, like monarchs, are accountable to none but God for their actions.” Some of those sentiments persist to this day. Furthermore, some of the first witch hunts began in Europe during this time, as the war fostered a fear of the “other” throughout European communities. The result was a war that devastated entire regions and killed millions. That caused each side to begin gathering allies, and before long, Spain came into the conflict on the side of the Catholics and France entered the coalition on the side of the Protestants. The Bohemian Revolt was soon crushed by the Habsburgs of the Holy Ro man Empire, and the leaders of the revolt were executed along with leading Bohemian aristocrats. Ferdinand II’s attempts to spread Catholicism caused widespread fear throughout Europe, and that prompted the Protestant Bohemians living within Austria to revolt. As a result, the Protestants banded together and formed what was known as the Protestant Union. His religious intolerance angered the northern Protestant states where the people had previously been granted the right to religious liberty with the signing of the Peace of Augsburg in 1555.
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The war began after the election of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, who attempted to make Catholicism the only religion in the Empire. The French and the Habsburgs had been rivals for many years, and the Thirty Years’ War would prove to be just one in a long line of wars caused by their rivalry. While the war began as a religious war, it evolved into a power struggle between the Kingdom of France and the House of Habsburg of the Holy Roman Empire. The war began as a conflict between certain Protestant and Catholic states in the Roman Empire, but it slowly came to involve more European powers until it eventually included almost all of Europe.
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In fact, in terms of the German losses, only the time frame of January to May 1945 during World War II surpasses the Thirty Years’ War. The casualties from this European war included eight million fatalities, which resulted from violence, famine, and plague. The Thirty Years’ War was fought between 16, and while it is not a well-known war, it was one of the most destructive conflicts in human history. The Defenestration of Prague: The War Begins