peter h wilson the thirty years war europe's tragedy

As opposed to Parker, Wilson focuses on events in Central Europe – the Thirty Years War is for him primarily a German war. Thus Wilson’s work is an impressive achievement by any standards. Geoffrey Parker’s Thirty Years War (2), in comparison, is really a book written by nine different authors although Parker himself wrote about two thirds himself. Not perhaps since the days of Moriz Ritter’s German History in the Age of the Counter Reformation and the Thirty Years War (1) – written in the late 19th century and still in many ways unsurpassed in its judicious assessment of the principal forces shaping the course of the war – has any historian written such a detailed scholarly book on the war and then, of course, Ritter never finished his study which ends in 1635.

peter h wilson the thirty years war europe

Wilson’s masterful book will stand as the definitive account of this epic conflict.Peter Wilson’s monumental history of the Thirty Years War is a work which impresses the reader both by the author’s unrivalled command of detail and by the balanced account he gives of the main events and episodes of the war. As late as the 1960s, Germans placed it ahead of both world wars and the Black Death as their country’s greatest disaster.Īn understanding of the Thirty Years War is essential to comprehending modern European history. In a major reassessment, Wilson argues that religion was not the catalyst, but one element in a lethal stew of political, social, and dynastic forces that fed the conflict.īy war’s end a recognizably modern Europe had been created, but at what price? The Thirty Years War condemned the Germans to two centuries of internal division and international impotence and became a benchmark of brutality for centuries. The sweeping narrative encompasses dramatic events and unforgettable individuals-the sack of Magdeburg the Dutch revolt the Swedish militant king Gustavus Adolphus the imperial generals, opportunistic Wallenstein and pious Tilly and crafty diplomat Cardinal Richelieu.

Bohemia was ravaged by mercenary troops in the first battle of a conflagration that would engulf Europe from Spain to Sweden. When defiant Bohemians tossed the Habsburg emperor’s envoys from the castle windows in Prague in 1618, the Holy Roman Empire struck back with a vengeance. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world.

A deadly continental struggle, the Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike.

Peter h wilson the thirty years war europe's tragedy