THE WORLD ATLAS

War · 23 May 1618 – 24 October 1648

Thirty Years' War

The war began as a revolt by Protestant nobles in Bohemia against their Habsburg king, Ferdinand, who was elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1619. It grew into a struggle over religion and power across the Holy Roman Empire, as Denmark, Sweden and finally France intervened against the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs and the Catholic League led by Bavaria.

Imperial armies crushed Bohemia in 1620 and Denmark in 1626, and the Edict of Restitution of 1629 alarmed Protestant rulers. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden then won at Breitenfeld in 1631 but was killed at Lützen in 1632. After the Swedish defeat at Nördlingen in 1634, most German princes made peace with the emperor in 1635, but Catholic France joined Sweden in open war on the Habsburgs. Exhausting campaigns followed until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which recognised Calvinism alongside Catholicism and Lutheranism, gave Sweden and France territory, confirmed Dutch independence from Spain and recognised the Swiss Confederation as independent of the Empire.

Watch the war on the map

Dates
23 May 1618 – 24 October 1648
Casualties
An estimated 4.5 to 8 million soldiers and civilians died, most from famine and disease, and the population of Germany is thought to have fallen from about 18–20 million to 11–13 million.

The sides

Habsburgs and Catholic League

Protestant states, Sweden and France

Timeline of the Thirty Years' War

  1. Defenestration of Prague: Bohemian Protestants revolt

    Bohemia's Protestant nobles feared that their new Habsburg king, the devout Catholic Ferdinand, would roll back the religious freedoms they had won. At Prague Castle a group of them threw two of the king's regents and their secretary out of a high window; all three survived. The act was an open challenge to Habsburg rule, and the rebels set up their own government and raised an army. The local revolt became the opening of a thirty-year European war.

  2. Bohemia deposes Ferdinand and chooses Frederick V of the Palatinate

    In August 1619 the Bohemian Estates rescinded Ferdinand's election as their king and offered the crown to Frederick V, the Calvinist Elector Palatine; in the same month Ferdinand was elected Holy Roman Emperor. Frederick entered Prague in October. By accepting, he turned a Bohemian dispute into a quarrel among the Empire's princes. Ferdinand secured help from Maximilian of Bavaria and the Catholic League, and from Spain, while Gabriel Bethlen of Transylvania attacked Habsburg Hungary in support of the rebels.

  3. Battle of White Mountain: the Bohemian revolt is crushed

    An imperial and Catholic League army under Tilly and Bucquoy, with Spanish troops, met the Bohemian army under Christian of Anhalt on a low plateau outside Prague. The rebels were routed in about an hour and Tilly entered Prague the next day. Frederick fled, mocked as the 'Winter King'. Twenty-seven rebel leaders were later executed in the Old Town Square, and much of the Protestant nobility went into exile as their lands were confiscated and Bohemia was forcibly re-Catholicised.

  4. Catholic armies win at Wimpfen and overrun the Palatinate

    With Bohemia lost, the war moved to Frederick's own lands on the Rhine. Spanish troops had already occupied part of the Palatinate, and in May and June 1622 Tilly defeated Protestant armies at Wimpfen and Höchst; Frankenthal surrendered in March 1623. The emperor rewarded Maximilian of Bavaria with Frederick's title of elector, confirmed in February 1623. Transferring an electoral vote from a Protestant to a Catholic prince alarmed Protestant rulers inside and outside the Empire.

  5. Battle of Lutter: Tilly defeats Christian IV of Denmark

    King Christian IV of Denmark, also a prince of the Empire as Duke of Holstein, had entered the war in 1625 as champion of the Protestant cause in northern Germany. At Lutter am Barenberge Tilly's Catholic League army beat him comprehensively: he lost at least a third of his army, all his artillery and most of his baggage, and many German allies deserted him. Imperial troops under Wallenstein then pushed into Denmark's Jutland peninsula.

  6. Emperor Ferdinand II issues the Edict of Restitution

    At the height of his power, Ferdinand II ordered that church lands taken over by Protestant rulers since the Peace of Passau of 1552 be returned to the Catholic Church. Enforcing it would have stripped Lutheran princes of bishoprics and abbeys across northern Germany, and imperial commissioners began confiscations with army backing. The edict turned even moderate, previously loyal Lutheran states such as Saxony and Brandenburg against the emperor and helped open the way for Swedish intervention.

  7. Treaty of Lübeck takes Denmark out of the war

    Defeated on land and with Jutland occupied, Christian IV made peace with the emperor at Lübeck in June 1629. He kept Schleswig and Holstein and recovered his Danish lands, but gave up his claims to the north German bishoprics of Bremen and Verden and promised not to interfere in the Empire again. The Danish phase of the war ended with Habsburg power reaching the Baltic coast, which worried Sweden.

  8. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden lands in Pomerania

    Concerned by imperial power on the Baltic and presenting himself as protector of German Protestants, King Gustavus Adolphus landed in Pomerania with nearly 18,000 troops. By the Treaty of Bärwalde in 1631, Cardinal Richelieu's Catholic France agreed to subsidise the Swedish army, putting rivalry with the Habsburgs ahead of religion. Sweden's well-drilled army, with mobile field artillery, was to change the course of the war.

  9. Sack of Magdeburg: some 20,000 people killed

    The Protestant city of Magdeburg had allied with Sweden and was besieged by Catholic League forces. On 20 May troops under Pappenheim, part of Tilly's army, stormed the walls; the city burned and was plundered for days. Around 20,000 defenders and civilians are estimated to have died, and of roughly 25,000 inhabitants only about 5,000 survived. The massacre shocked Protestant Europe and helped persuade many rulers to stand against the emperor.

  10. Battle of Breitenfeld: first great Swedish victory

    Saxony, threatened by Tilly's army, finally allied with Sweden. Near Leipzig the combined Swedish-Saxon army met Tilly; the Saxons were routed early, but the Swedes held and broke the imperial army, which lost about two-thirds of its men. It was the Catholic side's first major defeat of the war. Gustavus marched into southern and western Germany, and several Protestant states joined him.

  11. Battle of Lützen: Sweden wins but Gustavus Adolphus is killed

    The emperor had recalled Wallenstein to raise a new army. At Lützen, southwest of Leipzig, the Swedes narrowly defeated him in a confused, foggy battle, and Wallenstein's cavalry general Pappenheim was mortally wounded. But Gustavus Adolphus, riding to rally his infantry, ran into enemy cavalry and was shot dead. Sweden's chancellor Axel Oxenstierna kept the war going, but without its king the Protestant coalition lost much of its drive.

  12. Wallenstein is assassinated at Eger (Cheb)

    Albrecht von Wallenstein, the emperor's most powerful general, had grown wealthy and independent and was suspected at court of secret talks with the enemy. Ferdinand II dismissed him, and on 25 February 1634 officers of his own army murdered him at Eger (Cheb) in Bohemia. Command of the imperial army passed to the emperor's son, the future Ferdinand III, tightening Habsburg control of the war effort.

  13. Battle of Nördlingen: crushing defeat for Sweden

    An imperial army under the future Ferdinand III, joined by a Spanish army marching north from Italy, met the Swedes and their German allies at Nördlingen in Swabia. The Protestant army was destroyed. Sweden's position in southern Germany collapsed, and its German allies began to look for terms with the emperor, while France, fearing a Habsburg triumph, prepared to enter the war openly.

  14. France declares war on Spain

    Until now Richelieu had fought the Habsburgs by paying others. After Nördlingen, France declared war on Spain in May 1635 and in March 1636 formally allied with Sweden by the Treaty of Wismar. From this point the conflict was less a German religious war than a contest between Bourbon France and the Habsburgs, fought in the Low Countries, along the Rhine and in Italy as well as Germany.

  15. Peace of Prague: Saxony and most German princes make peace with the emperor

    Days after France's declaration, the emperor and Saxony agreed the Peace of Prague, and most Lutheran princes, including Brandenburg, soon accepted it. In return the emperor effectively set aside the Edict of Restitution, and the princes merged their forces into an imperial army. The treaty might have ended the German war, but Sweden, now backed by France, fought on, and Saxony found itself at war with its former Swedish ally.

  16. Battle of Wittstock: Sweden recovers in the north

    In October 1636 a Swedish army under Johan Banér defeated an imperial and Saxon army at Wittstock in Brandenburg. The victory restored Sweden's position in northern Germany after the disaster of Nördlingen. Campaigning across Brandenburg, Saxony and Pomerania devastated the region, as armies of all sides lived off the land, spreading hunger and disease among civilians. Wittstock also showed that Sweden, now paid by France, could fight on without its German allies.

  17. Breisach falls to Bernard of Saxe-Weimar

    Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, a German Protestant general now paid by France, besieged the Rhine fortress of Breisach, which surrendered in December 1638. Breisach guarded the route by which Spain moved troops from Italy to the Netherlands along the Rhine, and its loss made Spanish reinforcement of Flanders much harder. After Bernard's death in 1639 France took over his army and his conquests in Alsace.

  18. Second Battle of Breitenfeld: Swedish victory near Leipzig

    On almost the same ground as Gustavus Adolphus's victory of 1631, a Swedish army under Lennart Torstensson defeated an imperial army in October 1642. The win let Sweden occupy Leipzig and much of Saxony and keep up pressure on the Habsburg lands. Peace talks were by now being arranged, but each side fought on to improve its bargaining position. Torstensson, Sweden's ablest general after Gustavus, would lead its armies to their greatest successes over the next three years.

  19. Battle of Rocroi: France defeats Spain's army of Flanders

    Spain's army in the Netherlands invaded northern France and besieged the fortress of Rocroi. A French army under the young Duke of Enghien, later the Great Condé, attacked and destroyed it, including its famed infantry regiments. Rocroi became a symbol of the end of Spain's military dominance in Europe, though the Franco-Spanish war went on until 1659. The battle was fought just days after the death of King Louis XIII, and it secured the start of the young Louis XIV's reign.

  20. Battle of Jankau: Swedes rout the imperial army in Bohemia

    Torstensson's Swedish army invaded Bohemia and in March 1645 destroyed an imperial army at Jankau (Jankov), southeast of Prague. Swedish troops then advanced towards Vienna. The defeat left the emperor with few soldiers, and in the same year Saxony made a truce with Sweden. Ferdinand III's negotiators at Münster and Osnabrück now had to accept far more concessions. Imperial losses were so heavy that the Habsburg lands lay open to Swedish raids.

  21. Truce of Ulm: Bavaria pauses its war with France and Sweden

    With Franco-Swedish armies ravaging his lands, Maximilian of Bavaria, the emperor's most important German ally, agreed a truce with France and Sweden at Ulm. The emperor was left almost alone in Germany. Maximilian broke the truce later that year and rejoined the emperor, but the episode showed how close the Habsburg side was to exhaustion. Bavaria had fought for the Catholic side since 1619, and its wavering showed that even the most loyal allies wanted peace on almost any terms.

  22. Peace of Münster: Spain recognises Dutch independence

    At Münster, Spain and the Dutch Republic signed a separate peace ending the Eighty Years' War, which had resumed alongside the German war in 1621. Spain recognised the United Provinces as a sovereign state. Freed of its Dutch war, Spain kept fighting France, but the treaty removed one strand of the wider conflict months before the main settlement. The Dutch, who had fought Spain on and off for eighty years, emerged as a leading trading and naval power.

  23. Battle of Zusmarshausen: last imperial field army defeated

    A combined French and Swedish army under Turenne and Wrangel caught the retreating imperial and Bavarian army at Zusmarshausen, west of Augsburg, in May 1648 and defeated it. Bavaria lay open to plunder, and the emperor had no army left capable of resisting in southern Germany. The defeat pushed Ferdinand III to settle quickly on the terms being negotiated in Westphalia.

  24. Swedes storm Prague Castle and the Lesser Town

    In the war's last months a Swedish force surprised Prague, seizing the castle and the Malá Strana (Lesser Town) on the left bank in July 1648 and carrying off rich booty, including treasures from the imperial collections. The Old Town across the river held out until news of peace arrived. The war thus ended in the city where it had begun thirty years earlier.

  25. Peace of Westphalia signed at Münster and Osnabrück

    Two treaties concluded with France (at Münster) and Sweden (at Osnabrück) ended the war. Calvinism was recognised alongside Catholicism and Lutheranism, with 1624 as the reference year for each territory's religion. Sweden gained Western Pomerania, Bremen-Verden and an indemnity; France gained Metz, Toul, Verdun and lands in Alsace; Brandenburg gained Farther Pomerania; Bavaria kept an electorate and the Palatine heir received a new one; and the Swiss Confederation was recognised as independent of the Empire.

Related

Other wars of the time

Sources