sentences:  In more recent times, the burning of homes was used to devastating effect in the War of the Grand Alliance in the 17th century, during which Louis XIV of France ordered the systematic destruction of the German cities of Bingen, Heidelberg, Mannheim, Oppenheim, Spier and Worms (while sparing the cathedrals).Germany had suffered even more extensively in the earlier Thirty Years' War, in which as much as two-thirds of German real estate is estimated to have been destroyed and reconstruction took as long as fifty years.During the American Civil War, the burning of Atlanta, Georgia and Sherman's March to the Sea in 1864 provided large-scale examples of the use of house demolition as a means of wrecking the enemy's economy.