The Thirty Years War

So many exquisite passages. Wedgwood pulls our attention in close, then back to the heights with the skill of the littérateur; she sets a scene, builds tension, interrogates conflicting motivations and evaluates consequences with a wry impartiality. She gives us political intrigue and psychological machinations worthy of Aeschylus or Plutarch or Shakespeare—the trampling of moral passions by raison d'état, betrayals and portents of divine vengeance. Fate unexpectedly separating men from their ambitions. Rats in the corn. Dispossessed Palatine princes, and mutinous mercenary armies cracking open crypts to lop off the ringed fingers of dead abbots. The wandering soothsayers of Saxony, and Lord High Chancellor Oxenstierna passing a show more sleepless night before the battle of Nördlingen. Calculation and cunning and the desperate defense of dynastic dominions and bishoprics. Fragile alliances founded on offerings of sisters and daughters, sweetened with bullion from Peruvian mines. Richelieu’s ruthlessness and the seven-year-old daughter of the Duke of Orleans bouncing about the Louvre singing all the most vulgar songs she could learn against the Cardinal. Plague and plunder. Priests tied under wagons to crawl on all fours until they dropped. The bodies of criminals torn from the gallows and devoured by starving villagers.

Wedgwood, writing in the late 1930s, makes no extravagant claims for The Lessons of History or The Glory of War. In comments following her account of the battle of Breitenfeld, she notes that some events have a moral effect quite apart from their practical importance. To the Protestants of Europe, both then and later, the victory of Gustavus at Breitenfeld in September 1631 looked like the liberation of Europe from the fear of Catholic-Hapsburg tyranny. In light of fact, however, the most perilous time for the Protestant Cause was yet to come, following the Swedish defeat at Nördlingen three years later—

…Yet this cannot affect the position of Breitenfeld in the history of Europe. Almost at once it became a symbol. The giant personality of the King, and his belief in himself, endowed his every action with miraculous significance, most of all this great battle, the first Protestant victory. And therefore it must take its place in the simplified tradition which is customarily called history, not because of what it achieved but because of what men thought it had achieved.

Here Wedgwood makes her keenest point—that the historian’s art does not uncover the past so much as it reveals how we think of the past. show less

Excellent book by an excellent author. Wedgwood documents the motivations, machinations and maneuverings which led to one of Europe's most destructive wars. While documenting battles, she also steps outside to illustrate the shifting political and dynastic settings.

Many great wars have long ranging affects. Napoleon ended the Catholic church's secular authority. WW1 ended monarchy in Europe. WW2 ended imperialism. The Thirty Years War was also cataclymic for Europe, but especially in Germany. While Germany was utterly devastated, all the surrounding Euopean powers were affected in one way or another. Politically, one saw the rise of Bourbon France and the decline of the Hapsburgs. Greater Germany was broken into northern Protestant show more Germany and the southern Catholic Austria.

Most importantly, for better and worse, religion was divorced from State and communal functions. Prior to the TYW, religion was the common bond in a community. After the TYW, religion came to be a personal matter and turned inwards, so that a Protestant general could lead Catholic troops against another Protestant land. What replaced religion in this role was the beginnings of Nationalism. The common bonds that unite people became nationality, not religious outlook and expression. From this start, nationalism would roll outwards like a 400 year old tsunami to change the way people viewed themselves and related to those around them. show less

War is hell, just imagine it lasting for an entire generation with armies crisscrossing the same ground again and again producing famine, depopulation, and disease all in the name of religion, nationalism, and then finally simple greed. C.V. Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years War covers nearly a half century of history from the causes that led to the conflict through its deadly progression and finally it’s aftereffects.

From the outset Wedgwood sets the German domestic and the continental political situations in focus by stating that everyone was expecting war but between Spain and the Dutch while the German economy was on the decline due to the rise of new trading patterns over the course of the last century. It was only with the show more succession of the Bohemian throne and the ultra-Catholic policies of the Ferdinand II after his election that started the war everyone knew was coming, sooner and further east than expected. The war began as a purely religious conflict that saw the Catholic German princes led by Emperor Ferdinand crush the Protestant opposition because many of the Protestants decided not to help one another until it was too late due to political conservatism that Ferdinand used to his advantage. It wasn’t until Gustavus Adolphus and the Swedes entered the conflict a decade later that the conflict turn slowly from religious to international and an extension of the Bourbon-Habsburg in which the former used first allies then their own troops to prevent the encirclement of France by both branches of the Habsburgs. The negotiations for the end of the war took nearly five years and would change as events in the field would change strategies until finally allied members of the Bourbon and Habsburgs would cut deals with the other side to quickly break deadlocks and achieve peace but how it took almost six years to stand down the armies to prevent chaos.

Wedgwood’s narrative historical style keeps the book a very lively read and makes the war’s progress advancing even when she’s relating how the continuous fighting was affecting the German population. She is very upfront with the men, and a few women, who influenced the conflict throughout it’s course from the great kings of Ferdinand II, Christian IV of Denmark, and Gustavus to the great princes Maximillian I of Bavaria, John George of Saxony, and Frederick Henry of Orange to the mercenary generals that gained in importance as the conflict continued like Albrecht von Wallenstein to finally the political masterminds of Richelieu and Mazarin. With such a large historical cast, Wedgwood’s writing keeps things simple and straight for the read thus allowing the conflict’s long drawn out nature to fully impact the reader and how it affected those out of power. And in describing the aftereffects, Wedgwood disarms many myths about the effects of the war that over three hundred years became considered fact.

The Thirty Years War by C.V. Wedgwood is an excellent narrative history of a conflict that saw the end of one kind of conflict and the beginnings of another with interesting personalities that fought and conducted policy around it while also showing the effects on the whole population. If you’re interested in seventeenth-century history or military history, this book is for you. show less

Before I started this, the sum total of my knowledge on the Thirty Years War did not extend much further than being able to guess its duration. In my defence, it turns out that the causes and motivations of this conflict were rather baffling even at the time – indeed even to those involved. One of the most startling facts in here is the revelation that, when all sides met in 1645 to discuss terms for peace, it took them nearly twelve months of debate just to agree on what exactly the previous quarter-century of fighting had been all about. National integrity? Religious freedom? Self-aggrandisement? Dynastic feuding? Why, yes…to all of the above.

The very geography is confused. ‘Germany’ at the time meant the Holy Roman Empire – show more summed up most memorably by Voltaire as being neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire – which in 1618 comprised a patchwork of semi-independent Central European margraviates, duchies and principalities of varying religions and allegiances. Its boundaries were not clear. It claimed to include, for instance, the Swiss Confederation, which had actually been functionally independent for a long time – while the King of Bohemia, which was nominally a separate state, retained his voting privileges within the Empire. ‘The system,’ as Wedgwood puts it, ‘had long ceased to conform to any known definition of a state.’

Across this politically hazy landscape strides an assortment of politically weak figures – spies and diplomats, acquisitive landgravines, petty princelings and mercenary warlords, most of them not so much prosecuting the war as merely failing to stop it. The most obvious tension is the three-way religious split between Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics. But the underlying dynastic struggle cut across denominations: what was in fact being realised was the long-running power play between the Bourbons and the Habsburgs. Like a proto-Vietnam, Germany was used by the superpowers of France and Spain to further their war against each other. This is why, despite the religious motivations of many of the local leaders, Catholic France was happy to ally with Protestant Sweden if it meant taking the Habsburgs down a peg or two.

The super-armies that resulted from these opportunistic alliances were beyond the control of any state. The idea of a national standing army was then in its infancy – indeed it's one of the concepts that the Thirty Years War has been said to have brought about – and most soldiers were mercenaries, coming from a whole range of different countries and of dubious loyalty even at the best of times. They roamed around, switching sides now and again depending on who paid better, laying waste vast swathes of the country. The cumulative impact was tremendous: crops were trampled, villages were destroyed, all food and money was funnelled into driving the mass of soldiery, and German peasants were stuck with plague, famine and near-constant starvation.

At Calw the pastor saw a woman gnawing the raw flesh of a dead horse on which a hungry dog and some ravens were also feeding. In Alsace the bodies of criminals were torn from the gallows and devoured; in Zweibrücken a woman confessed to having eaten her child. Acorns, goats' skins, grass, were all cooked in Alsace; cats, dogs, and rats were sold in the market at Worms. In Fulda and Coburg and near Frankfort and the great refugee camp, men went in terror of being killed and eaten by those maddened by hunger. Near Worms hands and feet were found half cooked in a gipsies' cauldron. Not far from Wertheim human bones were discovered in a pit, fresh, fleshless, sucked to the marrow.

Out of the maelstrom, a new kind of Europe emerged – one dominated less by dynasties and religions than by the growing idea of the nation state. Not just borders, but motivations seemed to have shifted. Wedgwood warns that this idea can be overstated, but she states it well:

A new emotional urge had to be found to fill the place of spiritual conviction; national feeling welled up to fill the gap. […] The terms Protestant and Catholic gradually lose their vigour; the terms German, Frenchman, Swede, assume a gathering menace.

CV Wedgwood sounds like an interesting character and I rather love her old-school, no-nonsense, technically excellent prose style. If nothing else this book is a masterpiece of historical synthesis, drawing on and citing innumerable primary sources in English, French, German and others. Still, to me at least it's not so essential as a narrative that I wouldn't be prepared to give it up in favour of a more modern treatment that benefits from more recent research.

But lots to explore here, and plenty of astonishing anecdotes and characters to be uncovered. Personally, I liked Christian of Brunswick, who had to have an arm amputated after a nasty injury. He went through with the amputation publicly, to a fanfare of trumpets, and promptly had a medal struck with the inscription Altera restat ["I've still got the other one"]! show less

3.5 stars, but we round up in my family.

Just like the war itself, I began to flag around the 18 year mark and ended up limping along for awhile before I could properly rally.

One of the best parts of this book is the author's analyses, which were insightful and compelling.

One of the biggest hurdles was keeping track of all the names, but I discovered the X-ray feature on the Kindle lets you long-press a name and get a recap of who they are in the context of the book - extraordinarily helpful, and I used it constantly.

Overall, a very good read.

I'm not a hundred percent sure about reviewing this because I'm not a hundred percent sure even one percent ot if went in and stayed in. I could probably take a stab at some of the causes and one or two of the main players - ok, the King of Sweden is pretty unforgettable - but I'm not entirely sure how it actually ended - the Peace Of Westphalia, obviously, but how did they get there? Lots of battles, lots of characters, lots of burning peasants' houses and fields and generating plague and pestilence - syphilis is mentioned as one of the diseases that follows an army around, all of it a monumental waste. The author is not without sympathy for almost anyone involved, except for a few standout creeps. I don't know how anyone can look at show more this mess and come up with the Great Man theory of history. The Small Army Of Completely Rubbish Men And Some Rubbish Women theory, maybe. show less

This is the best single-volume account of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). The war was very complex but Wedgwood provides singular clarity. Other interpretations are possible, but her vision is strong and memorable. The Machiavellian machinations are head-spinning, one has to read carefully, the reward is a solid understanding of not only 17th C dynastic politics but how Medieval politics operated before the rise of the nation state.

Wedgwood is an old-fashioned historian like Gibbon, retelling the events in highly-readable prose, focused on the "great men". This can be problematic, the Thirty Years War was more than just the decisions made by a few elites - social, economic and other forces were at work. Her sources are almost all 19th show more century. There are no new insights on the war, it is a retelling of established views. As a political narrative it is not only a great work of history but also literature. show less