THE BEGINNING OF THE END?

By the 1640s Europe had been tearing itself apart for three tumultuous decades in a series of wars of supreme destruction and bloodshed that had left millions dead and enveloped a myriad of countries and states. What had erupted as a religious conflict between the Catholics and Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire soon embroiled all of the continent's superpowers: France, Sweden, Spain, Denmark, Poland, Russia, England, Scotland and the independence-seeking Netherlands and Switzerland.

Each had their own cause for entering the fray, so the Thirty Years’ War soon concerned not only religion but shifting alliances, bitter rivalries, commercial interests and political aspirations. The war was a conflict of such complexity and scope that in her seminal 1938 work, the 20th-century English historian Dame Veronica Wedgwood described the period as “the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict”. To reach any kind of lasting peace would be, to put it mildly, no small