Thirty Years' War

Thirty Years' War, series of European wars (1618–48). Partly a Catholic-Protestant religious conflict, they were also a political and territorial struggle by different European powers, particularly France, against its greatest rivals, the Habsburgs, rulers of the Holy Roman Empire. War began when Bohemian Protestants accused 2 government ministrers of wrongdoing and threw them out a window (a customary Bohemian punishment for offending officials). This event became known as the Defenestration of Prague (from Latin fenestra, “window”) and triggered a civil war in Bohemia that rapidly spread to all of western Europe. The Bohemians were defeated by General Tilly (1620), who went on to subjugate the Palatinate (1623). In 1625 Denmark, fearing Habsburg power, invaded North Germany but was defeated in 1629. The emperor Ferdinand II issued the Edict of Restitution, restoring lands to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1630 the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus led the Protestant German princes against Ferdinand. He was killed at Lützen (1632). By 1635 the Swedes had lost support in Germany, and the German states concluded the Peace of Prague. But now France, under Cardinal Richelieu, intervened. Further wars ensued, with France, Sweden, and the German Protestant states fighting in the Low Countries, Scandinavia, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy against the Holy Roman Empire, Spain (another Habsburg power), and Denmark. Peace negotiations, begun in 1640, were completed with the Peace of Westphalia (1648).