The struggle to suppress Lutheranism in Germany was postponed for twenty- five years--due to outside pressure, chiefly that of the Turks in southeastern Europe--from the time that the Diet of Worms decided against Luther (1521). Finally, in 1546, the German-Spanish Emperor Charles V felt at last free to proceed against the Lutheran heresy, and from the breaking-out in that year of the struggle between Charles and the German princes who sided with Luther, to the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, represents a century of almost continual religious warfare in the German States. The worst of the period was the last thirty years, when religious ferocity and hatred reached its climax in the period known as the _Thirty Years' War_ (1618-48). Though fought on German soil, France, Spain, and Sweden were deeply involved in the struggle. It left Germany a ruin. From the most prosperous State in Europe, in 1550, Germany was so reduced that it was not until the second third of the nineteenth century that central and southern Germany had fully recovered. More than half the population and two thirds of the movable property were swept away. The people were so reduced by starvation that cannibalism was openly practiced. But one tenth of the inhabitants of the Duchy of Würtemberg were left alive. Land tilled for centuries became a wilderness, thousands of towns were destroyed, whole trades were swept away, and the generation which survived the war came to manhood without knowing education, religion, law and order, or organized industry. Not until the end of the eighteenth century was Germany again able to make any significant contribution to education or civilization, and not until the middle of the nineteenth century did parts of Germany come to have as many people or cattle as before this devastating religious war broke out. [Illustration: FIG. 91. A FRENCH PROTESTANT (c. 1600) A restoration, Musée d'Artillerie, Paris] From 1560 to 1629 in France, also, a period of carnage and devastation prevailed, due to an attempt to exterminate the Calvinistic Huguenots. In the massacre of Saint Bartholomew's eve, in 1572, ten thousand Protestants are said to have perished in Paris alone, and forty-five thousand additional outside the city. Though the Edict of Nantes (1598) had granted religious toleration, this never was fully accomplished, and in 1685 the Edict was revoked. The Huguenots were now given fifteen days to become Catholics or leave France. The demands were enforced with great severity, and the sect, which embraced one tenth of the population of France, was stamped out and France became once more a Catholic country. In a short time four hundred thousand thrifty and highly intelligent Huguenots had left France for other lands. In Southern German lands, Holland, England, and America many found a new home.