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Author : C. V. Wedgwood Publisher : New York Review of Books Page : 538 pages File Size : 22,49 MB Release : 2016-09-13 Category : History ISBN : 1681371235
Europe in 1618 was riven between Protestants and Catholics, Bourbon and Hapsburg--as well as empires, kingdoms, and countless principalities. After angry Protestants tossed three representatives of the Holy Roman Empire out the window of the royal castle in Prague, world war spread from Bohemia with relentless abandon, drawing powers from Spain to Sweden into a nightmarish world of famine, disease, and seemingly unstoppable destruction.
Argues that religion was not the catalyst to the Thirty Years War, but one element in a mix of political, social, and dynastic forces that fed the conflict that ultimately transformed the map of the modern world.
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 England 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.
The Thirty Years War: A Documentary History fills a gap in recent studies of the great pan-European conflict, providing fresh translations of thirty-eight primary documents for the student and general reader. The selections are drawn from the standard political documents, from the Apology of the Bohemian Estates for the Defenestration of Prague to the text of the Treaty of Westphalia, as well as from imperial edicts, trial records, letters, diary entries, and satirical broadsheets, all directly translated from the Early New High German, French, Swedish, and Latin. The volume contains some ten illustrations and one map . . . and on the whole is well organized and well presented with a judicious amount of footnotes and a slim For Further Reading section. A succinct introduction introduces the four sections, each with its own substantial introduction: (1) Outbreak of the Thirty Years War (1618-1623), (2) The Intervention of Denmark and Sweden (1623-1635), and (3) The Long War (1635-1648). The concluding section (4) Two Wartime Lives (1618-1648), interestingly juxtaposes the journals of a wandering mercenary and a settled townsman. The first is the diary of Peter Hagendorf, kept between the years 1624 and 1649 and only rediscovered in 1993. Hagendorf experienced the war as a common mercenary from the Baltic to Italy, from France to Pomerania. His counterpart is Hans Heberle, a shoemaker from a small town in the territory of the free imperial city of Ulm whose Zeytregister chronicled happenings both in the neighborhood and further afield. The engrossing accounts of their shifting fortunes over the three decades of the war really help to give this collection of texts, and the troublesome period itself, a human face. They are the stuff from which Grimmelshausen would craft his great novel of the war, The Adventuresome Simplicissimus (1668). Tryntje Helfferich is to be applauded for this consistently interesting and eminently useful volume. --Martin W. Walsh, University of Michigan, in Sixteenth Century Journal
The Thirty Years War - the first great pan-European war, and until the twentieth century the most terrible - ravaged Germany, but myth, propaganda and historical controversy have obscured its true nature. Another perspective is provided by the private diaries, memoirs and chronicles of soldiers and citizens who recorded their own experiences. War at the individual level is discussed and described using these sources, which are extensively quoted in their own words.
At its core, Coping with Life during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) explores how people tried to survive the Thirty Years’ War, on what resources they drew, and how they attempted to make sense of it. A rich tapestry of stories brings to light contemporaries’ trauma as well as women and men’s unrelenting initiatives to stem the war’s negative consequences. Through these close-ups, Sigrun Haude shows that experiences during the Thirty Years’ War were much more diverse and often more perplexing than a straightforward story line of violence and destruction can capture. Life during the Thirty Years’ War was not a homogenous vale of gloom and doom, but a multifaceted story that was often heartbreaking, yet, at times, also uplifting.
This volume deals with the entanglement of Scotland in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), discussing the diplomatic and military aspects of the conflict that were interwoven with the fate of the Scottish princess, Elizabeth of Bohemia, the famous Winter Queen.
The period 1618-1648 was one of the most complex in European history. Religion interacted with rebellion and dynastic rivalry in a series of conflicts in central Europe known collectively as the Thirty Years War. This book guides the reader through the period by surveying the narrative of events and establishing the essential chronological framework. In addition Stephen Lee looks at such key issues as the motives of the participants, their gains and losses, as well as at the religious, military, social and economic aspects of the War. Each section in the book incorporates the most recent research.
Author : Josef V. Polišenský Publisher : Univ of California Press Page : 324 pages File Size : 47,3 MB Release : 1971-01-01 Category : History ISBN : 9780520018686
What you are about to read is an attempt at a new and different account of the Thirty Years War, seen as an example of two civilizations and ideological conflict. The clash of one conception, deriving from the legacy of Humanism, tinged with Protestantism and taking as its model the United Netherlands, with another, Catholic-Humanist one which followed the example of Spain, becomes thus the point of departure for the development of political fronts and coalitions of power. It belongs to the central theme of this book to examine how during the War new and modern prototypes were evolved by France and England, models for experiment both in parliamentary government and absolutism, economic advance and manufactory production, colonial expansion and unbridled repression of minorities at home, scientific progress, religious toleration and witch-hunting. The traditional themes like the 'war for European hegemony', the fate of 'Europe divided', the relationship between Baroque and Classicism, will not be the center of attention here, but this author considers that the present interpretation of the Thirty Years War can throw light on those problems too. - page 9.