Western Civilization I / Unit 18 WC1 1717 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Sample Question Ten: Where the Thirty Years' War Was Fought
The idea
The tenth sample question asks which region experienced most of the military conflict of the Thirty Years' War, offering Great Britain, Italy, France, Germany and Bohemia, and Spain and Portugal. The method is to follow the four phases and ask where each army marched.
In practice
The war began in Bohemia with the Defenestration of Prague in sixteen eighteen and the battle of White Mountain in sixteen twenty. The Danish, Swedish and French phases were fought across the Empire, Gustavus sweeping through Germany and armies crossing it for thirteen years after sixteen thirty-five. Britain stayed out. Italy was a sideshow. France entered as a power but was not the battlefield. Spain paid for the Catholic armies and fought France later, but the fighting was in Germany. The answer is Germany and Bohemia, and unit 17 counts the cost at 1617: the anchor's twenty to forty percent of the German lands' people lost, eight million dead.
Where people slip
The trap is the powers: Denmark, Sweden, France and Spain all fought, and none of their territories is the answer. The exam asks where, not who, and the answer is the Empire, whose weakness at Westphalia followed from being the battlefield.
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