Thirty Years' War discussion thread

[Eddie Riggs]

This is the place to discuss everything surrounding the most destructive European conflict prior to WW1 and 2

 

[Breadbassket]

The Swedish did pretty well for themselves in the war.

 

[Althalus]

>Catholic Germans MATI that Protestants exist and won't kowtow to them
>Start war to force all the German principalities to kowtow to Pope
>War kills a larger percentage of German population than WW2
>30 years later, after little progress and many casualties, a peace agreement is reached that says the ruler of each German principality can decide on his own whether their principality would be Catholic or Protestant
>Which was the status quo they had in the first place before the war.....

30 years war was the original "nothing ever happens".

 

[Chuckwagon]

Basically everyone involved was a raging nigger, which is the case for most wars (especially in the 17th century, where pretty much the entirety of Eurasia was engulfed in at least one mass-casualty clusterfuck of some sort ranging from the Wars of the Three Kingdoms across Britain to Russia's Time of Troubles and the fall of the Ming dynasty in China) but seems more pronounced than most in the 30YW. The Catholics' worst and most infamous atrocity rightly remains the 1631 sack of Magdeburg (which crippled that city, formerly one of the biggest & richest in Germany, for the next century, and was IIRC the single largest massacre of civilians in one go throughout the entire war) while the Protestants did shit like inventing the 'Swedish Drink', a method of torture wherein they made their captive literally eat shit. And apparently that wasn't even done to Catholic POWs most of the time, but random unfortunate civilians who were suspected of having something worth looting or were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I will say that it's not really accurate to characterize the conflict as a Catholic-Protestant one past the earliest stage, since even before the (Catholic, and they even crushed a huge Protestant rebellion on their own territory in this timeframe) French officially joined the Protestant alliance, they were already a very generous financial sponsor of Gustav Adolf of Sweden (no doubt that's in large part how he was able to afford such a kickass army, these French gibs ended up forming 25% of the Swedish budget). And they had to join towards the end because not even the ascendant Swedes, despite their string of victories under the aforementioned Gustav Adolf, were able to actually decisively beat the Habsburg juggernaut, who had nearly undone G.A.'s triumphs with their own big one at Nordlingen in 1634. The 30YW was more of a Habsburg vs. Anti-Habsburg conflict over whether their legendary inbred chin was going to replace the gigachad one as the symbol of manly superiority for all time, and it was a remarkably close-run thing until the Frogs started jumping all over Team Family Tumbleweed's backs.

 

[TEA 3HF]

The Hapsburgs and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

 

[User names must be unique]

I don't know nuthin bout no 30 years war but I do like the soldiers drip from this time period


And the tactics, heavily armoured dudes on horseback charging around cappin' niggas point blank

 

[Local Farmer]

The Habsburg did literally nothing wrong

 

[Lobster Cult High Priest]

The only winners were the Scottish and Irish mercenaries who got to pillage Germany for a generation.

#GaelicChadsStayWinning

 

[Eddie Riggs]

We wuz landzknechtz n shieeeet