Welcome to five minutes in church history hosted by Dr Stephen Nichols, where we take a little

break from the present to go exploring the past. Travel back in time as we look at the people,

events, and even the places that have shaped the story of Christianity.

This is our story, our family history.

Let's get started.

One of the dimensions of the Protestant Reformation is the upheaval that came in both the

16th and the 17th century across the face of Europe.

And perhaps nowhere is that felt more acutely

than what we have come to call the 30 years war.

The 30 years war runs from 1618 to 1648, but it was many decades in the making before it happened.

The war itself was incredibly long, 30 years of conflict, we can scarcely imagine that, and it was severely

destructive, not only the loss of life and the disruption of civic order, but it was financially devastating for many of the

lands and many of the peoples whose lives this war impacted. Different

estimates are put out there by historians, but in many of the German lands, for instance, across

those particular lands anywhere from a quarter to 40 percent of the population would have

died either as a direct result of the warfare or as a consequence

of pestilence or of starvation or of other things that would have come about in the wake of the 30 years war.

This was a very destructive thing across the face of Europe.

It started actually way back in the 1520s as the Lutheran reformation there in Germany and the

conflicts between the Lutherans and the Catholics lands.

There was a brokered peace, if you will, at Augsburg in 1555.

We also have the factor of the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire

...