As the 400th anniversary of the outbreak of the Thirty Years War approaches, Geoff Mortimer provides a timely re-assessment of its origins. These lie mainly neither in religious tensions in Germany nor in the conflicts between Spain, France and the Dutch, but in the revolt in Bohemia and the famous defenestration of Prague.

Geoff Mortimer was formerly Lecturer in German at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, UK, where he also studied history. His publications include Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War 1618-48 (2002), Early Modern Military History, 1450-1815 (2004), and Wallenstein: The Enigma of the Thirty Years War (2010), together with a number of academic articles on this period.