History is composed of the stories, more or less legendary, of kings, emperors, and great commanders: figures whose extraordinary deeds allow us to reconstruct the pages of our past. However, these individuals represent only a minority, while almost nothing is known of the “common people,” condemned to remain in the oblivion of time.

From this perspective, the Thirty Years’ War offers a rare and exceptional testimony: that of Peter Hagendorf (1602–1679). Born in Nedlitz (in present-day Germany), Hagendorf, like many young men of his time, found himself thrust into the imperial army as a common soldier, seeking to make a living through military pay and the opportunities war provided to men of his condition. The anonymous diary he kept during his years of service (later recopied in his own hand) constitutes a unique account of the war as seen through the eyes of ordinary people, revealing what it truly meant to fight and survive within a seventeenth-century army.

The surviving pages cover the period from 1625 to shortly after the end of the conflict in 1649. During these twenty years, Peter travelled more than 22,000 kilometres across a Europe ravaged by famine, disease, and the very wars his army helped to wage. He took part in and vividly described the siege of Magdeburg and the Battle of Nördlingen (1634), after which he was captured by the Swedish Protestants and forced to join their ranks. His account highlights the condition of many of his fellow soldiers, ordinary men uninvolved in political or religious intrigues, who fight not out of conviction but to earn their livelihood.
Hagendorf also described life in the military camps, spaces inhabited not only by soldiers but also by their families, merchants in search of profit, women, and children, a mobile community that carried death and destruction throughout Europe.
Peter himself expressed ambivalent feelings at the end of the war, as peace effectively left him without employment. This sentiment, in retrospect, opens an interesting discussion on how wars are perceived by those directly affected by them. After the war’s conclusion, his trace disappears once more, and he returns to the anonymity from which he had emerged.