Thirty years of war! The slaughters of Rome's worst Emperors, the persecution of the Christians under Nero and Diocletian, the invasions of the Huns and Magyars, the long struggle of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, left no such desolation behind them. At the beginning of the century, the population of the German Empire was about thirty millions: when the Peace of Westphalia was declared, it was scarcely more than twelve millions! Electoral Saxony, alone, lost 900,000 lives in two years. The population of Augsburg had diminished from 80,000 to 18,000, and out of 500,000 inhabitants, Würtemberg had but 48,000 left. The city of Berlin contained but three hundred citizens, the whole of the Palatinate of the Rhine but two hundred farmers. In Hesse-Cassel seventeen cities, forty-seven castles and three hundred villages were entirely destroyed by fire: thousands of villages, in all parts of the country, had but four or five families left out of hundreds, and landed property sank to about one-twentieth of its former value. Franconia was so depopulated that an Assembly held in Nuremberg ordered the Catholic priests to marry, and permitted all other men to have two wives. The horses, cattle and sheep were exterminated in many districts, the supplies of grain were at an end, even for sowing, and large cultivated tracts had relapsed into a wilderness. Even the orchards and vineyards had been wantonly destroyed wherever the armies had passed. So terrible was the ravage that in a great many localities, the same amount of population, cattle, acres of cultivated land and general prosperity, was not restored until the year 1848, two centuries afterwards! [Sidenote: 1648. DESOLATION OF GERMANY.]