The Thirty Years War is one of the bloodiest conflicts in all of human history. Depending on which historian you're consulting, the death toll ranges from 4.5 to 8 million. The next conflict that would claim more lives would be WW1, several hundred years later. And civilians died at an astounding rate, nearly 7 to 1. While there is a lot of focus on the military aspect of this conflict, we want to try something different. We'll be examining the effects of the war as a humanitarian crisis. To those living at the time, such conflict must have felt like the end of the world. And so, we start with the first herald of apocalypse: Conquest.