Born Then1618–1648
Life during the Thirty Years' War
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
A Protestant revolt in Bohemia in 1618 grew into a European war fought mostly in the Holy Roman Empire. Armies lived off the land, and plague, typhus and hunger followed them. Some regions lost half their people before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
Deaths: about 4.5 to 8 million; parts of Germany lost a third or more of their people.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.
Around the same time
- Indian Ocean slave trade 700–1799
- Atlantic slave trade (West Africa) 1501–1799
- Atlantic slave trade (Kongo and Angola) 1514–1799
- Plantation slavery in Brazil 1550–1799
- Russian conquest of Siberia 1580–1700
- Moroccan invasion of the Songhai Empire 1591–1599
- Imjin War 1592–1598
- Tokugawa peace 1603–1780
- Epidemic in coastal New England 1616–1619
- Thirty Years' War 1618–1648
- Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands 1621
- Late Ming famines and rebellions 1627–1644
- Italian plague of 1629–1631 1629–1631
- Deccan famine of 1630–1632 1630–1632
- Sugar slavery in the Caribbean 1640–1799
- Ming–Qing transition 1644–1683
- Slavery in the British North American colonies 1660–1799
- Great Plague of London 1665–1666