![]() People have long been fascinated by the Thirty Years’ War. The war shook up contemporary thinking, prompting an intellectual upheaval that would ultimately bring about the Enlightenment. We can easily imagine the confusion these events caused in people’s minds, and how they overturned the established religious and moral order. The 17th century was just as unpredictable, changeable and complex as the time we live in now. It sparked the Bohemian Revolt, which engulfed vast swathes of Europe, brought Spanish forces across the Alps to wage a campaign in the Netherlands and, rather improbably, led to the Swedish occupation of Alsace. This episode was the unlikely flash point that set off the Thirty Years’ War. On, a group of Bohemian Protestants led by Count Jindřich Matyáš Thurn-Valsassina threw two Catholic governors and their secretary out of a top-floor window of Prague Castle. Libera nos, Domine, a bello, a fame, a peste! By Pascal Daudin, ICRC Senior Policy Advisor. Almost four centuries on, the Thirty Years’ War teaches us how protracted conflict can bring about famine and spell disaster for civilians. And it was this upheaval – not military conflict per se – that took the heaviest human toll. ![]() The Thirty Years’ War profoundly altered Europe’s political landscape and social fabric. And there are many parallels between this early protracted conflict and its present-day equivalents – in Yemen, South Sudan, Nigeria and Somalia, for example – where lasting political solutions have been difficult to achieve. St Vincent de Paul’s charitable endeavours marked the birth of humanitarian work as we know it today. ![]() But the episode has resonated down the centuries in other, less well-known ways. The ensuing intellectual upheaval ushered in the beginnings of a new global order and laid the foundations of the law of war. What we now know as the Thirty Years’ War lasted until 1648. In 1618, the first in a series of conflicts broke out in Northern Europe, sparking three decades of violence, famine and disease that swept across the continent and decimated its population. ![]()
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