What about late-medieval/early modern warfare led to the wars having such comically high death tolls?
The Thirty Years isn't even unique; the French Wars of religion before were like 28%.
What about late-medieval/early modern warfare led to the wars having such comically high death tolls?
1. Diseases, weather and food. Northern Europe is harsh compared with the mediterranean (roman times), more so with epidemics.
2. A lot of those "lost population" were migrations and genocides, not exactly battle related.
I guess it's like this. Imagine a German soldier in WWII:
>Invades Poland, fights there.
>Invades France, fights there.
>Invades the USSR, fights there.
>Makes it to the suburbs of Moscow.
>Brutal fighting retreat back to Berlin.
>Civilians fucked the whole way.
>Ends up surrendering in Berlin.
But, then imagine that the US won't let the Soviets keep half of Europe because they are driven on by extreme religious autism. So now the US, France, and UK invade the Soviet Union and reactivate the Wermacht veterans and make them fight.
So our 18 year old kid who invaded Poland in 1939 probably reaches the suburbs of Moscow a second time around 1948, provided there are no nukes.
But imagine then that there are deep religious tensions in Western Europe in the 1940s and by the time the US led armies take Moscow half of France and Germany and Italy, recovered a bit from the war, have rebelled and are fighting again.
So now our guy would have to march back from Moscow to retake Berlin. But after he helps retake it... now Moscow has declared war again and he has to go back a third time...
Vienna was besieged three times in just the first years of the war. Some cities had like 8 sieged and I believe one was sieged for like 20+ years in the Netherlands.
The religious factor had people going hard, to the absolute exhaustion of all fighting capabilities.
This is true of WWII as well though. More soldiers in the Eastern Front died after capture than during combat. Part of the reason German fatalities were so much higher in the East was because captured prisoners were slaughtered or starved. And lots of genocides. The Thirty Years War involved forces going full genocide mode on the population right from the start, where as the Germans at least didn't do this in France in WWII.
Funny that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not participate in the war, but some of the nobility created a unit of light cavalryman that employed terror tactics so vile and cruel that the international community demanded they be arrested once they returned to the Commonwealth.
I've never heard a story about the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that didn't make me want to reestablish the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
>Elected monarchy.
>Religious tolerance baked into their law.
>Land army consisting mostly of mercenaries.
>Fleet consisting solely of pirates and privateers - won almost every single naval battle.
Yep, they were a unique beast.
By the by, the depiction of Wallace in Braveheart is based heavily on the description of Scottish mercenaries in the late 16th century Polish army - they wore woad battle paint; kilts; and were armed with massive two-handed swords. I wish I was joking.
Who that sounds too kino
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisowczyks
By the by, if Kojima ever wanted to make a not!Metal Gear set within a different time period, those guys would be perfect.
Yeah, you had a few different Cossack bands in both sides that were renowned for their brutality even by the standards of the time. They also got caught in Germany like the Czechoslovak Legion in Russia during World War I for years.
Are you talking about Lisowczycy? Werent they employed solely against russia (and Poland when they were bored)? But yeah they were basically larping as mongols, both in attitude and tactics.
No, they were also employed by the Habsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire.
Okay, youre right but they werent formed during 30 years war but rather dimitriads
Jesus fucking kino
>Faces Albrecht von Wallenstein in battle
>Ack!
Based. Adolphus fanboys have no rebuttal to Wallenchad.
Actually, Based Adolphus had Saint George, Saint Peter, Saint Simon, the Archangel Gabriel, and the Blessed Virgin all show up to offer support to him in battle.
Unfortunately, he called them disgusting heretics and accused them of blasphemy for coming to his aid...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Torstensson
It also don't help much that the emperor fired the Walenstein so soon after.
religius wars that go on for decades have a lot more depopulation potential than a 3 year autism fit especially when plagues are rampant
back then 80 to 95% of population was employed in agriculture
an extended war meant the following:
1. farmers were recruited in the army and therefore not available to sow and harvest
2. armies lived off the land, pillaging the villages they moved through
3. there were no companies and worldwide logistics for manufacturing and distributing seeds. one failed harvest meant you didnt have enough grain to fully see in the next year
combine these things and keep them going for an extended period of time and you have a massive risk of widespread starvation which in turn leads to disease outbreaks and a death spiral where ever fewer people are available to farm each year
it also is a very good example of why we do not have to worry the least about decreasing birth numbers. countries can come back from losing 60-80% of their population easily
>Soldiers come into town to fight
>They eat all the food there because supply lines are still primitive
>All 10,000 people in the town starve to death
>They move on to the next battlefield and do it again
>
Surely lighting the towns on fire and raping all the women didn't help. First person accounts tend to pin the blame fairly explicitly on armies actively terrorizing the population either out of religious autism or sheer Free Booster malice.
Mercenaries also have zero fucks about the actual lands they fought for or against
Modern government appeared around these times.
Its because there were only like 5 people alive back then, so 1 guy dying would be 20% of the global population
The populations were way lower but the Thirty Years War still killed 12 million people...
Overall the Wars of Religion killed some 26 million or so. France had a population 33% smaller than Syria's in 2011 and had a war that killed 4 million people. By contrast, think about how ruined Syria is and it's war has killed maybe 600,000.
The same question can be asked for practically any conflict in China ever.
>1851
>some chinese peasant claims to be Jesus' younger brother
>starts a peasant rebellion
>conquers the most important parts of China in the name of God
>holds it for 13 years
>eventually repelled by the Qing (ruling dynasty he couldn't oust)
>20-40 million dead
I had never heard of this until literally today. By some accounts it is the 3rd deadliest war in history
I should mention the transition from the Ming to Qing dynasties in the 1600's killed 25 million
A muslim revolt in China in the 1860s called the Dungan revolt killed 10 million.
The Second Sino-Japanese war in the 1930s (of rape of Nanking and unit 731 fame) killed 18-22 million
The Chinese civil war followed right after/simultaneously and killed a further 8-12 million
It is staggering that there still are people in China at all to be honest. From roughly 1850 to 1950 at least 100 million people died in wars in China.
China's civil war is artificially broken up into like 30 different wars. In reality they basically had a continuous war from 1911-1950, with Korea sort of being an extension of the civil war. Insurgencies in East Turkestan, Tibet, and Mongolia continued into the 1960s and involved skirmishes with India.
The scale of the Chinese Civil War is truly enormous. It had a much higher death toll than the Eastern Front in total. Most people simplify it into KMT vs CCP but there was actually many nationalist minority movements and different commie groups early on, and several warlord factions.
The Russian Civil War spilled into China too, and you had major cross over fighting. You also had Nazis advisors and forced supporting the KMT in the 30s, while the Reds had Soviet support. You had multiple "bandit" wars even after the Japs left as both parties tried to assert control over warlord led areas.
I don't know if I'm being memed or just daft and missing some point, but the picture on the right is about deaths in WW2, civilian or general, don't remember.
>That strip of 30-60+% death
>Eastern Front was 12-20%
Damn. They really want ham huh?