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 Like the war, a long, hard slog to a desultory conclusion., This review is from: The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy (Paperback) Peter H. Wilson's "The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy" is an apt mapping of historical event onto the pages of a book - it's a long, tough, dry slog through the minutia of events that encompass Europe, plus a bit of the rest of the world, a cast of characters running into the hundreds, and a coda that seems to amount to, "what the heck was that all about anyhow?"But for all that I found it interesting and I picked up things about this seminal but often-overlooked event because of - not despite - the massive details in a long book spanning 800 pages. Wilson's focus seems to have been more military than cultural or religious. He does a great job of putting the Thirty Years War into a context of the military situation of the Holy Roman Empire at the beginning of the 17th Century, which involves taking a step back and looking at the situation of the Empire and its neighbors, such as Transylvania and the Ottoman Empire. But for the Long Turkish War, and the truce that concluded it, the Thirty Years War would not have happened. Wilson's technique of broadening the scope of his examination pays dividends. I had never pieced together the other wars and events that were feeding into and upon the turmoil of the Empire. Books and classes I've taken have tended to handle the other events - Spain's war with the Netherlands, England's involvement in the Palatine, Sweden v. Poland, Spain v. Portugal, the Dutch incursion into Brazil, Spain v. Catalonia, Sweden v. Denmark, etc. - as things that can be handled as separable units of history. Wilson broad focus enables the reader to see the grand strategy at play. The bulk of Wilson's history approaches the subject as a kind of year by year chronicle. He broadly separates the different "phases" of the war - the Bohemian Revolt, the Danish phase, the Swedish intervention, the French intervention, etc. - in his chapters, but within the chapters we learn on a year by year basis which power was leading which army with how many soldiers of whom how many die of the plague into which parts of the Empire and lay siege to which cities in almost mind-numbing detail. Unfortunately, because of the absence of territorial maps in the book - I was promised a map of the Empire in the "end papers" but could never find it - the mind-numbing aspect proponderated until I downloaded a few maps showing the regions of medieval Germany. As a 21st Century American, I perhaps can be excused for not knowing that "Lower Saxony" is katty-corner from Saxony and encompasses Hanover and Hesse. Likewise, the Upper Palatinate is to the left of the Lower Palatinate and separated by a few territories in between. This book could have used many more regional maps showing troop movements and areas where the various annual sieges occurred. Wilson's efforts did result in my re-assessing the religious dimensions of the war. Although there was certainly a religious angle, it seems that the popular picture of the Thirty Years War as an example of "religion gone bad" is overstated. What I saw was national and dynastic motivations that exploited religious differences to leverage their respective goals. Thus, while the Palatine was a major "bomb-thrower" among the Protestants, it seemed obvious that the real goal was to undermine the Hapsburgs and, perhaps, supplant the Hapsburgs as the imperial dynasty. Similarly, Bavaria was Catholic, but was its motivation mostly religious or its desire to grab the Electorate title and a chunk of the Palatine? In a war where the Catholic Emperor's chief ally for most of the war was the leading Lutheran state of Saxony, or where the Protestant Swedes were funded by the Catholic French, it seems that religion provided a basis of dividing up the teams, but not necessarily the per se motivation for the war. Wilson, in fact, notes that contemporaries did not view the respective sides in religious terms, so much as "Swedes" or "French" or "Croats," etc. I was also surprised to find out how well the Imperial system worked prior to the war. Wilson certainly demonstrates the break-down of the system, but since I had assumed there was no effective system, I was surprised to find parliaments and courts that spanned the Empire and which were able to lessen the level of violence through arbitration and conciliation. I was also interested to see the Thirty Years War as a kind of partition action by Sweden and France. Although Gustavus Adolphus is popularly depicted as a force for enlightenment, in Wilson's understanding, his true goal was to carve off Northern Germany as part of his own empire. With France being more or less successful in the Imperial western territories of Alsace, Lorraine, and Burgundy, what the Thirty Years War looks like is the Partition of Poland one hundred years before that event, and for pretty much the same reason, i.e., a lack of strong central government, an anarchic constitutional structure, and the willingness to appeal to outsiders. Another surprise was the Peace of Westphalia. Wilson never uses the slogan "Cuius regio, eius religio" (whose territory, his religion), which was the formula of the Peace of Augsburg (1555). Westphalia seemed to repudiate that approach and "fix" the religious identity of the inhabitants, without regard to the religious identity of the ruler." Westphalia also established a three track rule of "tolerance," whereby the non-recognized religions were provided a modicum of toleration. This obviously doesn't accord with how modernity understands tolerance, but it seems to have been a start in the right direction. I was disappointed that Wilson did not explore the "qualia" or "experience" of the war. He devotes the last thirty or so pages to how those going through the experience of the war might have understood it. Wilson essentially throws in the towel on the grounds that it is a "difficult but interesting question." He does spend a few pages exploring the themes of fear, witchcraft, flight and the return to normality, but on the whole, we never get a sense of the lived experience of any of the people who lived through this event. Given the necessarily high altitude perspective that Wilson's broad view entails, the people seem to be nothing more than chess-pieces being moved around a large board. For example, it was interesting to note how often major players - like Tilly - were shuffled off the board with an offhand comment, concerning which point, it is interesting to note that while the life expectancy of the soldiers was not good, the generals were killed in battle with real regularity. I would not recommend this book as an introduction to the Thirty Years War. I think that it is well-worth reading, however, for anyone with a familiarity with and interest in Early Modern Europe. For readers with such a background, Wilson's encyclopedic approach and novel insights have the benefit of challenging the view such readers may have received in their college or university education. | ||||||||||||||||||
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