The Thirty Years War, Europe’s Bloodiest Conflict A Collection of 5 Coins,Boxed

Description

The Thirty Years War, Europe’s Bloodiest Conflict A Collection of 5 Coins,in Beautiful Wood Presentation Box.
The five coins in this collection circulated during the years 1618-1648: the time of the Thirty Years’ War, the most destructive conflict in the long history of Europe. The most destructive war in the long history of Europe was not the First World War, nor the Napoleonic Wars, nor even World War II, but rather the three decades of combat between 1618 and 1648 known today as the Thirty Years’ War. The interval between the Defenestration of Prague, which began the hostilities, and the Peace of Westphalia, which ended them, wrought astonishing carnage. Some twenty percent of the population died from battle, plague, or starvation—a staggering three times the death rate of the Second World War. Central Europe was depopulated, with vast swaths of territory literally gone to the dogs. The stage was set for war in the 1590s. The militant Catholic rulers Ferdinand II and Maximilian stamped out Protestantism in Austria and Bavaria, respectively. The fighting began in 1618, when Protestant leaders threw two Catholic emissaries out of a Prague window. The emissaries landed in a dung heap, which saved their lives. Many of their brethren were not as fortunate. The incident enraged the Habsburg ruler Ferdinand, now the Holy Roman Emperor, who sought to establish a universal church in his disparate and diverse dominions—with disastrous results. After exacting revenge on the Prague rebels at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, Ferdinand clamped down harder on religious freedom, and the war wore on. With support from Michael I of Russia and Sigismund III of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, armies from Germany, Spain, England, Holland, Denmark, and especially Sweden, under King Gustavus Adolphus and then Queen Christina, and France, led by King Louis XIII’s chief minister Cardinal Richelieu, prolonged the seemingly-interminable conflict. What began as a religious war ended as something else entirely, with Catholic France joining forces with Protestant Sweden to defeat its Habsburg rivals. As months turned into years, and years to decades, the economies collapsed. Inflation was rampant. Armies could not be paid, and unpaid armies refused to disband. Instead, soldiers ran roughshod across the continent, pillaging and raping and destroying anything they could not immediately use. The Peace of Westphalia, the series of compacts that ended the war, was the product not of victory but of exhaustion. It is unclear who won the war—with the exception of the Lithuanian grand duke Jan Casimir II, who was imprisoned by Richelieu during the war but wound up on the Polish throne immediately after—but millions of people lost
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All coins in each set are protected in an archival capsule and beautifully displayed in a mahogany-like box.
The box set is accompanied with a story card, certificate of authenticity, and a black gift box.
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ANA Platinum Member.
NGC Member
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