Magdeburg Wedding: Siege, Fire, and the Birth of Total War, 1631

The Magdeburg Wedding: Siege, Fire, and the Birth of Total War, 1631 In four catastrophic days in May 1631, an army of forty thousand men descended on the Lutheran stronghold of Magdeburg and erased it from the map. Ninety percent of its buildings burned. Twenty thousand of its people died. The German language itself was forced to invent a new word, magdeburgisieren, because no existing term could...