Throughout the country, the accounts of famine and deprivations create horrifying images.

A soldier recounts seeing a woman gnawing on the same raw meat from a dead horse that a raven and wild dog were also picking at.

The bodies of criminals were torn from the gallows and eaten.

Guards were posted at graveyards to prevent the newly buried becoming food for the living.

Mass graves of bodies stripped of flesh and sucked to the marrow were found.

An English traveler at the time describes the unsettling feeling of traveling through a town completely devoid of life, though with one house still on fire.

In another town, his party found the streets littered with dead.

Their starved mouths filled with the grass they had been chewing on when they finally died of famine.

Finally, they encountered a town with some life.

People splaid on Dunghills so weak they could barely crawl to his caravans to receive his alms.

The plague persisted everywhere, particularly among armies in besieged cities.

Plague would ravage cities during a siege and when the siege was lifted giving the beleaguered citizens hope for escape,

centuries were posted at city gates with orders to shoot those who might venture out looking for food, at least they spread their disease.

Soldiers would be abandoned, pushed out of wagon trains and trampled into the mud as the army evacuated pestilent camps.

Death, bodies, emptiness everywhere.

From Wedgwood, the Swedes alone were accused of destroying nearly 2000 castles, 18,000 villages, and over 1500 towns.

Bavaria claimed to have lost 80,000 families and 900 villages, Bohemia, 5-6 of its villages and 3-4 of its population.

In Vertenburg, the number of inhabitants was said to have fallen to a 6th, in Nassau, to a 5th, in Henenburg, to a 3rd, and in the wasted palatinate to a 50th.

Of its original size.

So I feel we should take a stock now after this litany of horrors that we see.

It's striking to me how much, you know, hearing that image of a woman knowing at a horse,

a heronimous Bosch's visions of hell came literally to life a few centuries later in his own countryside.

...