Thirty Years’ War | Summary, Causes, Combatants, Map, & Significance | Britannica
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Thirty Years’ War | Summary, Causes, Combatants, Map, & Significance | Britannica
Europe was almost always a loose-knit ‘confederation’ of culturally similar states in whose mutual relations economic strength was only one of several important variables. Religious affiliation, dynastic allegiance, ideology and ethnic cohesion interacted unpredictably with economic forces to ensure the survival of some political and cultural units
... See moreThus much of the intellectual and political energy of sixteenth-century Europe was consumed by the religious and dynastic warfare that racked the continent until the peace of exhaustion at the end of the century. Set against this background, it is easy to see why European expansion was a meagre threat to the Islamic empires or the great states in E
... See moreFor all its drama, the Occidental ‘breakout’ of the long sixteenth century (1480–1620) had for long a limited impact. It depended heavily upon local circumstance and the gradual evolution of specialized subcultures of contact and conquest. It was not the working-out of an inescapable economic destiny (as some historians have argued), or the inevita
... See moreBut the crucial fact of the equilibrium age was that no power in Europe was strong enough to dominate the others completely, or to embark upon a career of overseas conquest safe from the challenge of its European rivals.
The repeated cycle of mass military invasion, large-scale destruction, transient unity and imperial breakup gave the Islamic world a ‘medieval’ history starkly different from that of Europe or China.