King Christian died four years later, in 1648, past the three score and ten allotted to man. He was not a great leader like Gustav Adolf, and he was very human in some of his failings. But he was a strong man, a just king, and a father of his people who still cling to his memory with more than filial affection. GUSTAV ADOLF, THE SNOW-KING The city of Prague, the capital of Bohemia, went wild with excitement one spring morning in the year 1618. The Protestant Estates of Germany had met there to protest against the aggressions of the Catholic League and the bad faith of the Emperor, who had guaranteed freedom of worship in the land and had now sent two envoys to defy the meeting and declare it illegal. In the old castle they delivered their message and bade the convention disperse; and the delegates, when they had heard, seized them and their clerk and threw them out of the window “in good old Bohemian fashion.” They fell seventy feet and escaped almost without a scratch, which fact was accepted by the Catholics of that strenuous day as proof of their miraculous preservation; by the Protestants as evidence that the devil ever takes care of his own. It was the tiny spark that set Europe on fire. Out of it grew the Thirty Years’ War, the most terrible that ever scourged the civilized world. When Catholic League and Evangelical Union first mustered their armies, Bohemia had a prosperous population of four million souls; when the war was over there were less than eight hundred thousand alive in that unhappy land, and the wolves that roamed its forests were scarcely more ferocious than the human starvelings who skulked among the smoking ruins of burned towns and hamlets. Other states fared little better. Two centuries did not wipe out the blight of those awful years when rapine and murder, inspired by bigotry and hate, ran riot in the name of religion.