Germans III

1495-1648 CE

From 1495 to 1648 CE, the Germans discovered that shared language meant nothing without shared faith — Luther's theses splitting the Empire into armed camps, peasants rising and dying by the hundreds of thousands, and princes choosing creeds to match their politics. The Peace of Augsburg bought two generations of uneasy quiet before the Thirty Years' War turned German lands into Europe's slaughterhouse, leaving a third of the population dead.