Michael Flinn wrote that the Thirty Years' War, fought in central Europe between
1618 and 1648, "remains the classic study of the military causation of mortality
crises".' Despite these words, the Thirty Years' War has rarely been studied from
this perspective. In what follows, I seek to explain the enormous demographic loss
experienced during the War. In doing so, I find that the socio-economic relations of
warfare and, in particular, the nature of civil-military relations during the War form
a key element of the explanation. The wider import of this paper is therefore that
the new approach to the history of mortality, in which the contributions of social
action and personal behaviour to mortality changes have been investigated and
highlighted, is one which promises a significantly deeper and more successful account
of the military mortality crises which punctuated the past and continue to afflict the
present
