Major comments:

I find the article “Weather and climate and their human impacts and responses during the Thirty Years’ War in Central Europe” by Rudolf Brázdil et al. highly interesting and generally well-written and of interest to a broad readership from several academic disciplines. However, the article is unfortunately not citing, or referring to, much of the newer key works in the climate change–human history nexus that I strongly would recommend the author to include during the revision phase of the article. Besides from that, I only have minor comments as listed below.

Minor comments:

Title: The title is a bit too long and complicated. Could the authors please consider to revise and shortened it?

Lines 15, 50: The expression “17^th century reformation” is not perfect as the reformation was mainly a 16^th century phenomena.

Lines 17–19, 676 and other places: I think it is wrong to talk about “deterioration” here as the late 16^th century seems to have been even colder and even more adverse for agriculture in Central Europe. This is extensively discussed in, among other works, Pfister and Wanner (2021) cited by the authors.

Line 31: Besides Tucker (2012), please also cite:

Lee, H. F., Zhang, D. D., Brecke, P., & Fei, J. (2013). Positive correlation between the North Atlantic Oscillation and violent conflicts in Europe. Climate Research, 56, 1–10.

Lee, H. F., Zhang, D. D., Brecke, P., & Pei, Q. (2015). Regional geographic factors mediate the climate–war relationship in Europe. British Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2, 1–28.

Lee, H. F., Zhang, D. D., Brecke, P., & Pei, Q. (2019). Climate change, population pressure, and wars in European history. Asian Geographer, 36, 29–45.

Tol, R. S., & Wagner, S. (2010). Climate change and violent conflict in Europe over the last millennium. Climatic Change, 99, 65–79.

Zhang, D. D., Lee, H. F., Wang, C., Li, B., Pei, Q., Zhang, J., & An, Y. (2011). The causality analysis of climate change and large-scale human crisis. Proceedings. National Academy of Sciences. United States of America, 108, 17296–17301.

Lines 32–33: Not sure how relevant this is here as it refers to weather events rather than climate.

Line 51: Maybe cite here:

Parker, G., 2006. The Thirty Years' War. Routledge, London.

Theibault, J., 1997. The demography of the Thirty Years War re-revisited: Günther Franz and his critics. Ger. Hist. 15, 1–21.

Line 55: This statement is not entirely true. Many studies have also considered decadal and inter-annual time-scales. See, for a review, Ljungqvist et al. (2021) listed below.

Lines 199–201: The low skill of the Pauling et al. (2006) precipitation reconstruction prior to c. 1750 needs to be critically discussed and acknowledged here.

Line 201: Wrongly written. Should be: Self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index (scPDSI).

Around line 205: Consider to also here include the EuroMed2k (Luterbacher et al., 2016) reconstruction discussed later in the article (lines 570ff.).

Lines 209–210: I would strongly recommend to use  the volcanic dataset of Toohey and Sigl ( 2017) instead of Crowley and Unterman (2013) as the later dataset is NOT state-of-the-art anymore and even includes dating errors. A revised article should use Toohey and Sigl ( 2017):

Toohey, M. and Sigl, M. (2017). Volcanic stratospheric sulfur injections and aerosol optical depth from 500 BCE to 1900 CE, Earth System Science Data 9: 809–831.

Lines 232 and other places: Ljungqvist et al. (2022) should be referred to, and discussed, concerning grain prices as it very extensively treats both the impacts from climate and from the Thirty Years’ War on European grain prices. Reference:

Ljungqvist, F. C., Thejll, P., Christiansen, B., Seim, A., Hartl, C., and Esper, J.: The significance of climate variability on early modern European grain prices, Cliometrica, 16, 29–77, 2022.

Line 344 Caption): Define “persistent frost” clearly.

Line 529: Describe method calculating breakdates here.

Lines 637–639: I think it is an overstatement to claim that the destructive forces of the war was the MAIN cause of famine. Climate and war interacted in a destructive synergy. See, among other works, Slavin (2016) listed below.

Missing references to important works (including overviews):

Adamson, G. C., Nash, D. J., and Grab, S. W.: Quantifying and reducing researcher subjectivity in the generation of climate indices from documentary sources, Clim. Past, 18, 1071–1081, 2022.

Degroot, D., Anchukaitis, K., Bauch, M., Burnham, J., Carnegy, F., Cui, J., de Luna, K., Guzowski, P., Hambrecht, G., Huhtamaa, H., Izdebski, A., Kleemann, K., Moesswilde, E., Neupane, N., Newfield, T., Pei, Q., Xoplaki, E., and Zappia, N.: Towards a rigorous understanding of societal responses to climate change, Nature, 591, 539–550, 2021.

Haldon, J., Mordechai, L., Newfield, T. P., Chase, A. F., Izdebski, A., Guzowski, P., Labuhn, I., and Roberts, N.: History meets palaeoscience: Consilience and collaboration in studying past societal responses to environmental change, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 115, 3210–3218, 2018.

Ljungqvist, F. C., Seim, A., and Huhtamaa, H.: Climate and society in European history, Wiley Interdiscip. Rev. Clim. Change, 12, e691, 2021.

Slavin, P. Climate and famines: A historical reassessment. Wiley Interdisciplin. Rev.: Clim. Change, 7, 433–447, 2016.

Wanner, H., Pfister, C., and Neukom, R.: The variable European Little Ice Age, Quat. Sci. Rev., 287, 107531, 2022.

White, S., Pei, Q., Kleemann, K., Dolák, L., Huhtamaa, H. and Camenisch, C. (2023) New perspectives on historical climatology. Wiley Interdisciplin. Rev.: Clim. Change, 14, e808.

This is a well written and detailed paper exploring the impact of weather and climate on societies during the Thirty Years War in Central Europe. The paper provides a detailed analysis, which is sound and robust, in places some additional detail is required to improve clarity or expression, with an annotated copy ofthe manuscript attached to help the authors undertaek these changes. I have also flagged in a couple of places sections where I felt the arguments presented warrented reflection. 

In reading the paper to disentangle the human from the environmental factors I felt it would be beneficial to have a records or data from outside the area impacted by the TYW, as such I have added some comments based on English datasets for the comparable period, which help to show this. I hope this is helpful, and was actually added before I had readthe final line of your conclusion which makes this exact point. 

I have also suggested some additional references that may be of interest.

Neil Macdonald

University of Liverpool