Thirty Years' War
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The thirty years war devastated central Europe between 1618 and 1648, killing perhaps a third of the population of Germany and ending with the Peace of Westphalia. It began in Bohemia, where Protestant nobles threw the emperor's governors from the windows of Prague castle in the defenestration of 1618 and chose a Protestant king. The revolt was crushed at the White Mountain in 1620, and the emperor Ferdinand II and his general Wallenstein built a powerful army; the edict of restitution of 1629 demanded the return of all church property secularised since 1527. Intervention by Denmark, then by Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus, turned the war into a European struggle for the Baltic, and the Swedish victory at Breitenfeld in 1631 showed that a disciplined infantry with guns could break the tercios. After Gustavus Adolphus died in 1632 the war became a war of attrition, and France, though Catholic, entered on the Protestant side to break Habsburg power. Soldiers lived off the country, villages were burned, plagues followed the armies, and whole districts were depopulated. The peace of Westphalia in 1648 settled religion, borders and the balance of power, and the war became Europe's warning about ideology. Germany lost perhaps a third of its people, and some regions never recovered.