The Thirty Years War, which lasted from 1618 to 1648, was finally brought to an end by the peace Treaties of Munster and Osnabruck, which is commonly known as the Peace of Westphalia for the German state in which negotiations took place. The Congress of Westphalia that negotiated the treaties dragged on for almost six years while armies still fought and common people suffered. The parties involved in the negotiations were not only Germans, the French, Swedish, Dutch, Danes, Swiss, Spanish, and Poles all had representatives at the Congress with their own axes to grind. The reasons negotiations for an end to the Thirty Years War took almost six years is that the differing parties were invested so heavily in their own war aims that they were willing to continue the war rather than compromise.
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