ABSTRACT
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". This chapter shows 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. It discusses the "socio-economic relations of warfare" model within recent contributions to demography and demographic history and indicates briefly how the "socio-economic relations" model can help us understand variations in wartime civilian mortality. The impact of military methods of supply on civilian food stocks during the Thirty Years' War thus became much more serious than a simple comparison of the number of troops and Germany's population and agricultural output would indicate.
