![]() Whole swaths of central Europe were depopulated, abandoned to wild pigs and wolves. This amount to three times Europe's death rate during World War II. ![]() During those years the Holy Roman Empire-which governed most of the European continent east of the Rhine-lost as many as eight million subjects, or a staggering 20% of its population. The war fought between 16 remains, by many measures, the most destructive in Europe's history. The city's destruction would go down as the most notorious atrocity of the Thirty Years War. A year later, the ruins of Magdeburg sheltered less than 500 souls. Of 2,000 city buildings, only 200 survived. In the most recent work examined here, Peter Wilson seems to ignore the. ![]() Twenty-thousand corpses were eventually heaved into the Elbe River. That was the environment in which Gustavus Adolphus and his contemporaries lived. The thousand citizens who huddled in the cathedral were saved but outside the flames lit hellish scenes of murder and rapine. Plague had weakened the populace, and ammunition was low. The Protestant city was in rebellion against its Catholic overlord but had only 7,000 defenders, almost half of whom were armed children. At seven in the morning on May 20, 1631, 18,000 soldiers loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II stormed the ancient German city of Magdeburg. ![]()
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