Book description
The horrific series of conflicts known as the Thirty Years War
(1618-48) tore the heart out of Europe, killing perhaps a quarter of
all Germans and laying waste to whole areas of Central Europe to such
a degree that many towns and regions never recovered. All the major
European powers apart from Russia were heavily involved and, while
each country started out with rational war aims, the fighting rapidly
spiralled out of control, with great battles giving way to marauding
bands of starving soldiers spreading plague and murder. The war was
both a religious and a political one and it was this tangle of motives
that made it impossible to stop. Whether motivated by idealism or
cynicism, everyone drawn into the conflict was destroyed by it. At its
end a recognizably modern Europe had been created but at a terrible price.
Peter Wilson's book is a major work, the first new history of the
war in a generation, and a fascinating, brilliantly written attempt to
explain a compelling series of events. Wilson's great strength is in
allowing the reader to understand the tragedy of mixed motives that
allowed rulers to gamble their countries' future with such horrifying
results. The principal actors in the drama (Wallenstein, Ferdinand II,
Gustavus Adolphus, Richelieu) are all here, but so is the experience
of the ordinary soldiers and civilians, desperately trying to stay
alive under impossible circumstances.
The extraordinary narrative of the war haunted Europe's leaders into
the twentieth century (comparisons with 1939-45 were entirely
appropriate) and modern Europe cannot be understood without reference
to this dreadful conflict.
Peter Wilson is the GF Grant Professor of History at the University
of Hull and the author of books on W rttemberg and on the Holy Roman
Empire.
