The socio-economic relations of warfare and the military mortality crises of the Thirty Years' War

Abstract

Michael Flinn wrote that the Thirty Years' War, fought in central Europe between 1618 and 1648, remains the classic study of the military causation of mortality crises.' Despite these words, the Thirty Years' War has rarely been studied from this perspective. In what follows, I seek to explain the enormous demographic loss experienced during the War. In doing so, I find that the socio-economic relations of warfare and, in particular, the nature of civil-military relations during the War form a key element of the explanation. The wider import of this paper is therefore that the new approach to the history of mortality, in which the contributions of social action and personal behaviour to mortality changes have been investigated and highlighted, is one which promises a significantly deeper and more successful account of the military mortality crises which punctuated the past and continue to afflict the present.