How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)

by David Goldman

The first half of the Thirty Years’ War saw armies of then-unprecedented size. The Imperial generalissimo Count Albrecht von Wallenstein raised fifty thousand men to fight the Danish invasion in 1625, and a hundred thousand troops to repel the Swedes under King Gustavus Adolphus in 1630. During the second stage of the war, though, the French sent an army of two hundred thousand against the Austrian Empire, and the Spanish responded with a force of comparable size. The two contenders for the dominant position on the European continent literally depopulated large parts of their territory in the war’s final, terrible phase. Most of the military as well as civilian deaths during the Thirty Years’ War occurred during its last eleven years, when the original source of contention along with the original combatants had long been buried. One might add that Athens knew it was losing to Sparta—and was depleted of military-age men and short of money—when it mounted its maximum effort in the disastrous Sicilian campaign of 415 B.C.E., sixteen years into the Peloponnesian War.