ABSTRACT
As they swept back and forth across Central Europe, the armies of the Thirty Years War (1618–48) had a devastating effect on civilian populations. While most scholarship still portrays ordinary peasants and townspeople as victims, the distinction between civilian and soldier was less well defined than in the modern age. Indeed, those we might ordinarily consider noncombatants were often thrust into the middle of the fighting. Most often, civilians resisted non-violently by running away or hiding their belongings, but they also engaged in banditry and revenge violence, they took part in haphazard or quickly thrown-together forms of defensive or offensive warfare, and they joined (or were pressed into) peasant rebellions or well-organized government-sanctioned militias. Furthermore, though one can trace some early developments towards the professionalism of military forces, seventeenth century armies were not as organized as those of the eighteenth, and even clear soldiers, sworn and paid, slipped easily into the role of civilians during down times or off season. Many civilian noncombatants were, therefore, combatants, which is not just an issue of nomenclature but a more fundamental problem with our continued use of these categories in a time when there was no unambiguous line between the two.
