‘If you make the people run away, you will starve’: the military significance of refugees during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648)

Abstract

The Thirty Years’ War of 1618–1648 was the most devastating conflict in European history prior to the twentieth century and the greatest demographic crisis since the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Accordingly, many scholars have examined the ‘human cost’ of the Thirty Years’ War both in broader studies of the military and civilian experience of the conflict and with an increased focus on the multiple types of localised civil-military interactions which characterised the ‘small war’ or Kleinkrieg. This article takes these studies further, by examining how refugees – a neglected manifestation of the ‘human cost’ of the Thirty Years’ War – could in turn have a significant impact on how warfare was conducted locally and on the course of the conflict itself.