Thanks for your support on Patreon, Ian Perkins.

Ian contracted the plague while in service to Bernard of Saxeimar, but he recovered.

However, Bernard of Saxeimar caught the plague from Ian, and Bernard was less fortunate.

Great job, Ian.

This, of course, is a whole lie, but if you would like me to lie about you, you know where to go.

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Hello and welcome history friends patrons old, to episode 67 of the Thirty Years' War.

So in the last episode we saw the creeping disasters of Spain pile up. Her naval armada was destroyed

in the Battle of the Downs and King Charles' regime struggled to make the whole incident

look less like an act of Dutch disrespect.

Of course, the reality was the Dutch were playing for keeps, and they were not about to

allow away trouble the British King to restrict their freedom of action. As the Dutch laid in

the hammer blows, we learned that affairs closer to home in Spain were also not looking good.

The Catalonian situation in particular had deteriorated over 1639 to 40, aggravated by Olivares' insistence on raising and quartering an army

in the problematic province. Since it was on the southwest border of France, Catalonia was too

strategically important

to ignore, but Olivares' policy towards it gave a new meaning to the term heavy-handed

to the serious detriment of Spanish security. The eruption of revolution in Catalonia in July

1640, and in Portugal, in December of that year, would dramatically alter Spain's remaining years

of the Thirty Years' War, as well as its conflict against the French.

In this episode, though, we're going to put a pin in the Spanish story.

We're going to focus again on Germany, remember Germany?

...