Thirty Years’ War | Summary, Causes, Combatants, Map, & Significance | Britannica

Big Peace/War Cycle

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

The Peace of Westphalia ended the 30 Years War between Protestants and Catholics that had been kicked off by the Reformation, and ushered in the concept of states with bounded territorial sovereignty as opposed to the unbounded authority of the Catholic Church.

The Thirty Years’ War, a conflict that involved much of Europe and that had both political and religious dimensions, ended in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia, a peace agreement that is widely viewed as heralding the rise of the modern international system, one with sovereign countries accepting one another’s independence and respecting the bound

back to the late eighteenth century. There was the long, slow decline of the Ottoman Empire, with its base for much of its existence in present-day Istanbul and which over some five centuries stretched over a good deal of what today constitutes the Middle East, North Africa, southeast Europe, and parts of Asia. The second trend was the emergence of