Thirty Years' War

The Thirty Years' War was fought primarily in Central Europe between 1618 and 1648 and ranks among the most destructive conflicts in European history, with an estimated 4.5 to 8 million soldiers and civilians killed by battle, famine or disease, and some German regions losing more than half their population. Its origins lay in religious tension within the Holy Roman Empire left over from the Reformation: the 1555 Peace of Augsburg had tried to fix boundaries between Catholic and Lutheran territory, but that settlement broke down as Protestantism kept spreading, and the war that followed combined this internal religious dispute with the wider geopolitical rivalry between France and the Habsburgs. An anti-Habsburg alliance including Bohemia, Sweden, the Palatinate, the Dutch Republic, Denmark-Norway, Brandenburg-Prussia and Saxony fought a pro-Habsburg alliance of the Holy Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire, Bavaria and the Catholic League. The war ended with the Peace of Westphalia, which reorganized territory in favor of France, Sweden and Brandenburg-Prussia and recognized Dutch independence.