The war is usually divided into four phases:
The central strand linking them is that the staunchly Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II was fighting mainly Protestant opponents, and that he mostly won. It was in fact made up of a series or sequence of wars featuring different antagonists. The Thirty Years War lasted from 1618 to 1648. This is an enormous book (weighing in at 997 pages, including index and notes) which covers an enormous subject, in enormous depth. Appendix: Origin of the word ‘Protestant’.Video of a lecture by Wilson about the war.Wilson’s interest in the finances of the war.Writing about war requires special skills.Historical events happening alongside the Thirty Years War.Events leading up to the Thirty Years War.The role of religion in the Thirty Years War.Issues facing the Holy Roman Emperor in the early 17th century.The deep historical context of the Thirty Years War.Why was the Thirty Years War important?.
Introduction – the four main phases of the war.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.
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. 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. At its end a recognizably modern Europe had been created but at a terrible price. Whether motivated by idealism or cynicism, everyone drawn into the conflict was destroyed by it. The war was both a religious and a political one and it was this tangle of motives that made it impossible to stop. 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 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. Winner of the Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award 2011
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