EURO ST 10 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Andreas Gryphius, Picaresque Novel, Antihero
Document Summary
Instead of page boys, lackeys, and stable boys, he had sheep, rams, and pigs . I was only in shape a man and in name a christian: for the rest i was but a beast . In a word, each had his own device to torture the peasants, and each peasant his several torture . The historian langer claims that sweden alone destroyed 2000 castles, 18,000 villages and 1500 towns in germany. If his figures are accurate, the number of towns destroyed represented one- third of all german towns. Certain cities were hit very hard by war. In 1618, it had a population of 25,000 with a further 35,000 in the surrounding rural area. In 1635, there were only 400 homes left standing in the city and by 1644, its population had fallen to 2,464. The accepted figures are that urban areas experienced a 33% population loss while rural areas experienced a 40% loss.
