The Thirty Years War

One of the most accessible yet comprehensive histories of the 30 Years War. Wedgwood's style is extremely digestible and flows more like a narrative than dry academic history.

Halfway through this splendid book and a third of the way through this dreadful war, the reader confronts Germany as a wasteland: its crops ravaged or burnt or trampled, its peasantry slaughtered or starved or dead of disease. One might well expect that the combatants, even if they had reached no closure, would fall back exhausted. But no: there was worse to come-another 18 years of pillage and devastation until at last the participants, by now nearly bled dry, at last reconciled themselves, if not to an understanding, then at least to go home. Oddly enough the Peace of Westphalia, which at last brought the conflict to a conclusion, came in time to serve as a template for the modern political world. This latter fact might be reason enough to read C. V. Wedgewood's classic account of the conflict. But there is a happier reason, and that is that her exposition is, from start to finish, a delight. In his introduction, Grafton calls her "the greatest narrative historian of [the 20th Century," and it is hard to quarrel with him: she is brisk precise, compassionate, mordant and energetic Having said this, it is no contradiction to say that her story doesn't really gain traction until the coming of Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, the man who, as it is said, secured the permanent establishment of Protestantism on the continent. Gustavus is the only character to get a chapter of his own and from Wedgewood, the fullest personal description. "Coarsely made and immensely strong, he was slow and rather clumsy in movement, but he could swing a spade or pick-axe with any sapper in his army. ..." Wedgewood goes on for several pages like this. It is all good reading, and in the end, it is not quite hero-worship: no matter how much she may seem to admire Gustavus (and perhaps, to a much lesser extent, some of the other protagonists), still in the end the primary focus of her attention is on the German peasants-the poor pawns, battered and abused, in this miserable contention. Nobody knows how much population Germany lost in the Thirty Years' War: some estimates say 40 percent. Whatever the number, it is hard to imagine any feats of heroism or achievements of policy than justify all the bloodshed and is fortune. Grafton says Wedgewood writes like Gibbon. In the end she writes like herself, but against Gibbon, a better comparison might be Tacitus: Ferdinand "was no a clever man but he had a certain unconscious ability for appropriating the ideas of clever men." John George of Saxony "had been known to sit at table gorging homely foods and swilling native beer for seven hours on end, his sole approach at conversation to box his dwarf's ears or to pour the dregs of a tankard over a servant's head as a signal for more. ... [H]e drank too much and too often. ... It made diplomacy difficult." Gustavus (again) "had, like many great leaders, an unlimited capacity for self-deception. In his own eyes the Protestant champion, in Richelieu's eyes a co

This is by far the best book ever written on the Thirty Years war and this judgement is unlikely to change very soon. Wedgewood is one of the 20th century's distiguished historians. This book was written and published during WWII and as such this gives the works a sense of dramatic urgency. Wedgewood saw clear parallels between what happened in the 17th century and what was happening to Europe in the 1940s. The Jesuits for example are referred to as "the storm troopers of the counter-Reformation. Wedgewood's sympathies are clearly with the Protestants and there is no doubt who the hero of the book is, Gustavus Adolphus, who is in nearly every way portrayed positively. That is not to say that this is a flaw with the book, rather it is a strength. In these days of sprin doctors, it sometimes seems difficult to realize that good press was sometimes earned and deserved. It would be too difficult to try and summarize the book in the space provided. In a nutshell, the Thirty Years war evolved into a general European conflict (with the English sitting this one out) due to many of the unresolved issues of the previous century. The Hapsburgs of Austria wanted to dominate the Holy Roman Empire, France wanted to contain the Spainish and Austrian branches, and Sweden was on its way to becoming a world power (for at least the next 100 years). The reason the war went on for so long was that no one really had the strength to land a decisive blow. Oddly enough whenever a power did come close some disaster would over take the army and the powers would have to start over again. Supplying, paying and feeding armies in the field was probably the most problematical undertaking of the entire conflict, along with finding the funds to continue the war for yet another year. Wedgewood masterfully is able to describe a number of personalities, political situations and religious conflicts to give a real sense of both the era and the people who made it.

This is quite simply one of the finest works of history produced by an English or American historian during the twentieth century. It occupies a place of honor on my bookshelf alongside the works of Steven Runciman, Peter Green, and C. Vann Woodward. Wedgwood's book has three great virtues: (1) the clarity and directness of her analysis; (2) her extensive research in a wide variety of incredibly obscure sources in many different languages; and (3) her remarkable gifts as a literary stylist. She writes beautiful, classic English prose and has a genius for portraiture. Moreover, she has visited many of the sites of the events in question and her feel for the physical background of the story is a particularly engaging part of the book. To most history lovers, the Thirty Years' War is an obscure and impenetrable thicket considered too much trouble to explore. But Wedgwood recognized that it was one of the decisive episodes in early modern European history. It delayed the unification of Germany by two centuries; began the slow relative decline of Austrian power; paved the way for France's superpower status under Louis XIV; and accelerated Spain's decay into the sick man of eighteenth-century Europe. One of the other reviewers suggested that Wedgwood's account was marked at times by debatable interpretations influenced by 1930's pacifism. I can see where that idea might come from, but I disagree with it. Certainly, one of Wedgwood's concerns is why the statesmen of the time were repeatedly unable to bring an end to this horribly destructive war, which took on a life of its own that defeated the original intentions of just about all of the participants (much like the Great War of Wedgwood's youth). But in contrast to a lot of other people in England in the mid-1930's, Wedgwood recognized the Nazi regime as the unmitigated evil that it was. Her book seems to have been written in part to explore how it was that Germany's past history had produced the country's monstrous new regime. I also have a slight disagreement with the suggestion by another reviewer that Wedgwood skimps on military history. The major battles -- particularly Breitenfeld, Nordlingen and Rocroi -- are discussed here in vivid and memorable terms. But Wedgwood doesn't make dramatic battle descriptions an end in themselves. To Wedgwood, the outcome of battles is important insofar as it affected the balance of political forces and thereby made it impossible at a series of critical points to bring the war to an end. Finally, I have to quote some representative passages to show Wedgwood's gift for language and deft portraits of the major participants. This is perhaps my favorite of the latter: "General and private opinion flattered the archduke [Ferdinand II]'s virtues, but not his ability. Kindly contemptuous, the greater number of his contemporaries wrote him off as a good-natured simpleton wholly under the control of his chief minister Ulrich von Eggenburg. Yet Ferdi

I finished this book on Dec. 21, 1968, and have never found a better book on the 30 Years War. I read 50 books in 1968 and this work won my "best book read this year" award. The book is full of little touches that make it more than a history, e.g.: concerning the monument to Gustavus Adophus' greatest victory, Breitenfeld: "The monument still stands, set back from a quiet country road in the shade of a line of trees. Three centuries have smoothed every scar from that placid landscape..." or these words on the death of Ferdinand II: "On February 15(1637)at 9 in the morning his body and soul parted one from the other, the one to moulder in the vaults of Graz, the other to receive the reward for which he had laboured so long..."