The

The Welcome to a history of Europe, key battles.

The Thirty Years' War Part 1 of 7

The Background to the Conflict

The Home Oaks Guard and Blasted by the Wind's Chill Breath

Break its own branches off condemns itself to death.

When brother fights with brother, civil war will start.

Bring pain and grief to all and tear the land apart.

This text comes from a hugely popular adventure level of the 1600s, Simplicius Simplicimus,

whose author Hans von Grimelhausen experienced at first hand the horrors of the Thirty Years' War,

which ran from 1618 to 1648 and is the subject of this set of episodes.

The novel depicts the story of a man called Simplicius, who is conscripted at a young age into

military service, and was not only very widely read in its own time in the 1660s, but hugely

intrancial for popular imagination of warfare in the pre-modern era.

As well as works of fiction, historians have discovered more than 70 contemporary eyewitness accounts of the 30-year's war,

which have helped together build a detailed picture of the effects of warfare on the everyday life of those who live through it, soldiers and civilians alike.

The Thirty Years' War still burns in German memory as the most devastating and bloody period in their history before the 20th century.

Writes Peter Wilson in his book,

Europe's tragedy, A New History of the Thirty Years' War,

The Conflict, quote,

occupies a place in German and Czech history similar to that of the civil wars in Britain,

Spain and the United States,

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