WBrandenburg-Prussia is the historiographic denomination for the Early Modern realm of the Brandenburgian Hohenzollerns between 1618 and 1701. Based in the Electorate of Brandenburg, the main branch of the Hohenzollern intermarried with the branch ruling the Duchy of Prussia, and secured succession upon the latter's extinction in the male line in 1618. Another consequence of the intermarriage was the incorporation of the lower Rhenish principalities of Cleves, Mark and Ravensberg after the Treaty of Xanten in 1614.
WBremen-Verden, formally the Duchies of Bremen and Verden, were two territories and immediate fiefs of the Holy Roman Empire, which emerged and gained imperial immediacy in 1180. By their original constitution they were prince-bishoprics of the Archdiocese of Bremen and Bishopric of Verden.
WDrudenhaus was a famous special prison for people accused of witchcraft in Bamberg in Germany. The prison was constructed in 1627 on the order of Johann Georg Fuchs von Dornheim, Prince Bishop of Bamberg, and closed in 1632.
WThe Electorate of Bavaria was an independent hereditary electorate of the Holy Roman Empire from 1623 to 1806, when it was succeeded by the Kingdom of Bavaria.
WThe Krameramtsstuben are historic buildings on Krayenkamp, near St. Michaelis Church in the Neustadt district of Hamburg, Germany.
WThe naval war on Lake Constance was a series of conflicts that took place on Lake Constance, beginning in 1632, in the context of the Thirty Years' War. At that time various powers ruled different parts of the shoreline: in the north and east was Roman Catholic, Habsburg Anterior Austria; in the northwest and west the troops of the Protestant Duchy of Württemberg with their allies from Kingdom of Sweden and Kingdom of France. These various powers sought, for strategic reasons, to exercise their hegemony over the area of Lake Constance. Only the partly Catholic and partly Protestant southern shore which belonged to the Old Swiss Confederacy maintained an uneasy neutrality due to their divided loyalties.
WThe Thirty Years' War was a conflict primarily fought in Central Europe from 1618 to 1648; estimates of total military and civilian deaths range from 4.5 to 8 million, mostly from disease or starvation. In some areas of Germany, it has been suggested up to 60% of the population died.
WThe witch trials in the Holy Roman Empire, composed of the areas of present-day Germany, Switzerland and Austria, were the most extensive in Europe and in the world, both to the extent of the witch trials as such as well as to the number of executions.