Issues Involved in the Thirty Years' War

The term ‘Thirty Years’ War’ was not used by contemporaries, who, in retrospect, tended to refer to the different stages as separate wars (for example, the Bohemian War and the Swedish War). The term was first used nearly twenty years after the Treaty of Westphalia, and seems to be more appropriate than any other; the issues involved were so complex that to use any one of them to describe the entire war would merely obscure the others. The term ‘Seven Years’ War’ to describe the European, maritime and colonial hostilities between 1756 and 1763 was the result of a similar difficulty.