The sweeping narrative encompasses dramatic events and unforgettable individuals-the sack of Magdeburg the Dutch revolt the Swedish militant king Gustavus Adolphus the imperial generals, opportunistic Wallenstein and pious Tilly and crafty diplomat Cardinal Richelieu. Bohemia was ravaged by mercenary troops in the first battle of a conflagration that would engulf Europe from Spain to Sweden. When defiant Bohemians tossed the Habsburg emperor’s envoys from the castle windows in Prague in 1618, the Holy Roman Empire struck back with a vengeance. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world. A deadly continental struggle, the Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike.
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