Thirty Years' War: The Defenestration of Prague to the Peace of Westphalia

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In May 1618 Protestant nobles at Prague Castle threw two Catholic imperial representatives and their secretary out of a window about 70 feet up, and all three survived. The Holy Roman Empire was a patchwork of roughly 300 states, and the 1555 Peace of Augsburg let each ruler choose his territory's religion but left Calvinism without legal protection, while converting rulers used the faith to seize church property. When the strict Catholic Habsburg Ferdinand II took the Bohemian throne in 1617, Bohemia's largely Protestant nobles deposed him and offered the crown to Frederick V. That threatened to flip the seven imperial electors from a four to three Catholic majority to a Protestant one. The financially exhausted Austrian Habsburgs, also watching the Ottomans, turned to their Spanish cousins, who needed the Spanish Road through Frederick's Palatinate to move silver and troops to the war against the Dutch.

Denmark under Christian IV and Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus entered the war, and Catholic France under Cardinal Richelieu funded Protestant Sweden on the principle of reason of state. Gustavus thinned infantry to six ranks, added more muskets and mobile field guns, and shattered imperial forces at Breitenfeld in 1631. Armies passed 100,000 men, and commanders such as Albrecht von Wallenstein raised them on credit and extracted payment from towns. Between 4.5 and 8 million people died, and some German regions lost over half their population. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, negotiated at Münster and Osnabrück, gave German states their own foreign policy, granted Sweden and France territory, and laid the basis of modern state sovereignty.

• Under the contribution system, armies demanded payments from towns in exchange for not burning them, then stripped the countryside once the silver ran out.
• Most deaths came from famine and from plague, typhus and dysentery spread by armies and refugees.
• Wallenstein grew so powerful that the emperor had him assassinated by his own officers.
• Catholic and Protestant delegations at the peace talks largely refused to sit in the same room.
• Westphalia ended Europe's continent-wide religious wars and tied each subject's primary allegiance to the sovereign state.