A team of Lutheran scholars working at Magdeburg from the 1550s produced the first systematic Protestant history of the church, organised century by century and generally known as the Magdeburg Centuries. Directed by Matthias Flacius Illyricus, it sent collectors into libraries and archives across Europe to copy manuscripts, and it argued from that evidence that the early church had not taught what Rome now taught, so that the Reformation was a restoration rather than an innovation. Rome answered with the Annales of Cardinal Baronius, and the two works between them turned church history into a scholarly discipline with source criticism at its centre, whatever the confessional purposes on either side.
In May 1631, during the Thirty Years War, an imperial army under Tilly stormed the Protestant city. Fire broke out, the cause of which was disputed then and has been ever since, and the town burned almost completely. Contemporary estimates put the dead at around twenty thousand out of a population of perhaps twenty five to thirty thousand, mostly civilians.
The sack became one of the most reported atrocities in early modern Europe, with pamphlets and engravings circulated across the continent within weeks, and it hardened Protestant opinion at exactly the moment Sweden entered the war. Two grim phrases entered German, one referring to the sack as a wedding and the other to Magdeburg justice, and the city took a century to recover.