German History 2011 Riches 102 7

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German HistoryVol. 29, No. 1, pp. 102107

The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society.

All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghq150

DISCUSSION

A New Paradigm for Studying the Thirty Years War

Daniel Riches

Europes Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War. By Peter H. Wilson. London: Allen Lane. 2009.

xxii + 997 pp. 35 (hardback).

Peter H. Wilsons new book on the Thirty Years War is sure to make an impact on the

field commensurate with its prodigious size. Europes Tragedy is the first major generalhistory of the war in English since Geoffrey Parker led a group of prominent historians

in producing the now paradigmatic The Thirty Years Warin 1984.1 Along with Tryntje

Helfferichs recentand desperately neededcollection of translated primary-source

documents, Europes Tragedy promises to transform the way the war is taught at

Anglophone universities.2 Wilsons publishers reference to future editions of this book

(p. xi) lacks the air of unfounded optimism such presumption would carry in most works

of early modern history.

The meta-question that frames the book is methodological: howdoes one write an

accessible general history of a phenomenon of such immense scope and complexity,

with an impossibly unwieldy multilingual primary source base and an intimidating body

of specialist literature?3 How does one make the Thirty Years War comprehensible to

students without raising the ire of professionals? Parker and his co-authors adopted an

approach that can be characterized as compression: call together a team of experts and

have each boil down his complicated subject of focus to its concise essentials, with

the individual contributions melded together into an approachableif abbreviated

whole. Wilson diverges from this path sharply, choosing instead a strategy we can

describe as expansion. This argues that the war and its significance can only be

understood by slowly, carefully and patiently unpacking the various layers of its causes,

course and effects. Indeed, the portion ofEuropes Tragedy that deals with the backgroundto the war runs to 266 pages, longer than the combined body chapters of Parkers work.

Wilson pays lavish attention to imperial politics and the imperial constitution in

particular, stretching back well into the sixteenth century, giving this first section of the

book the flavour of a general history of the early modern Empire, while also delving in

less but still significant detail into the histories of Spain, France, the Netherlands, the

1 Parker wrote The Thirty Years Warin conjunction with Simon Adams, Gerhard Benecke, Richard J. Bonney, John H.

Elliot, R.J.W. Evans, Christopher R. Friedrichs, Bodo Nischan, E. Ladewig Petersen, and Michael Roberts. Routledge

issued a revised 2nd edn in 1997.

2 Tryntje Helfferich (ed.), The Thirty Years War: A Documentary History(Indianapolis and Cambridge, 2009). Wilsons

own The Thirty Years War: A Sourcebookwas published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010.

3 Wilson notes (p. xxi) that over 4000 titles have been written on the Peace of Westphalia alone.

atChulalongkornUniversityon

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Discussion 103

Balkans and the Baltic (especially Scandinavian) states. As the book progresses he is also

careful to give equal treatment to the latter stages of the war that often receive short shrift

in other works, arguing convincingly that the tortured path to peace, and the nature of

that peace, cannot be understood without considering the events that continued to

unfold after 1635.

A strength of Parkers approach is that his team of experts could draw upon their own

original research in dealing with their comparatively discrete subjects. Wilson, on the

other hand, is by necessity dependent on secondary sources for a larger portion of his

material. His broad and deep familiarity with the literature is in fact one of the works

greatest assets, and his ability to stay current with the most recent historiography on the

war and the Empire while completing a 1000-page manuscript is most impressive.

Wilsons mastery of national historiographies in languages other than German is not

quite up to the same level of comprehensiveness, and experts in the histories of these

lands can find openings to raise objections to some of his characterizations. That the

centre of gravity of Wilsons reading lies in the Empire, however, is in perfect keeping

with one of the books fundamental and most contentious claims, namely that the Thirty

Years War, although it came to involve most of the European powers to various extents,

was in its course and nature a Central European rather than general European event, a

struggle over the political and religious order of the Empire (p. xxi). This claim, and its

ramifications, will be returned to below.

Europes Tragedy is divided into three main parts following the traditional structure of

background (Part 1), conflict (Part 2) and consequences (Part 3). Frequent chapter and

section divisions within each of these parts are welcome aids as readers navigate through

the complexities of the material. The book is equipped with maps, illustrations, tables, aHabsburg family tree and an extensive and useful index, though it is lamentable that a

work that engages such a mighty body of literature, and will serve as a starting point for

others approaching the topic, should lack a bibliography. Those familiar with Wilsons

previous work will not be surprised that his analysis displays theoretical awareness mixed

with healthy scepticism towards the blind or excessive application of theory, and that his

account assigns explanatory value both to structural factors and (especially) to individual

agency. Wilson is also unafraid to stake out clearand sometimes polemicalpositions

on any of a number of scholarly debates, although the naming of his historiographical

opponents is mainly carried out in the notes.4Part 1 provides a rich overview of Imperial and European developments leading up to

the war and lays the foundation for the books big claims. The first of these is the

aforementioned insistence that the Thirty Years War be understood through the lens of

the Holy Roman Empire and not as part of a larger European crisis. An Empire-centric

reading of the war is not original with Wilson, and English-language readers have a

useful example available in Ronald G. Aschs succinct The Thirty Years War: The Holy

Roman Empire and Europe, 16181648(Basingstoke, 1997). It remains commonplace, in

fact, to situate the origins of the war and its early stages within a specifically Imperial

4 Of particular note are Wilsons disagreements with Parker et al. regarding the war in the Empire as a distinct entity

rather than a branch of a larger European strugglea theme taken up in the next paragraph of this reviewand

with Heinz Schilling on larger interpretative issues of early modern history and the relationship of the war to

processes of modernization.


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104 Discussion

framework, despite the efforts of scholars such as Nicola Sutherland to subsume the

conflict from its beginnings under a longue durestruggle for European hegemony between

the Habsburgs and their opponents.5 What distinguishes Wilsons account is his

insistence that the war in the Empirealthough admittedly involving foreign powers

remained a distinct entity throughout the entirety of its long course and did not, as

Swedens King Gustav Adolf famously declared in 1628, and as most subsequent

historians have concurred, fuse together and become a single conflict with all of the

other wars raging on the continent.6 Wilson argues forcefully that the main participants

in the Thirty Years War and the parallel DutchSpanish and FrancoSpanish wars

conceived of their struggles as separate if affiliated conflicts, and sometimes went to

great lengths to ensure that they remained so. The Emperor and the Dutch in particular

were careful to avoid becoming fully ensnared in each others struggles, while the Spanish

never viewed the war in the Empire as more than a sidelight to their main conflict with

the Dutch.

Treating the various wars as connected but separate allows Wilson to focus more

sharply than most scholars on the internal factors within the Empire that contributed not

only to the outbreak of hostilities in 1618, but also to the course those hostilities followed

over the next three decades, and to the resolution they eventually found at Westphalia.

Wilson concentrates here on the imperial constitution, and in particular on the potent

combination of a crisis in Habsburg leadership that began under Rudolf II and had not

been completely reversed by 1618, with unresolved constitutional issues from the Peace

of Augsburg (1555) that granted Lutherans legal equality but failed to give them

representation in proportionate numbers in the Reichstag and other imperial institutions

while leaving out Calvinists completely. Crucially, Wilson does not reorient the discussionof the war around the imperial constitution in order to make the frequently-abused

political structure of the Empire a scapegoat for its darkest hour. Rather, he argues

throughout the book that imperial structures must stand at the centre of any

understanding of the war precisely because they remained so vital throughout the early

modern period. Europes Tragedy is in fact an eloquent contribution to the growing body of

scholarship that rehabilitates the early modern Empire as a robust, vibrant and functional

political system that continued to hold the allegiance of the majority of its inhabitants

despite confessional disagreements and the ravages of war. Wilson notes the durability

of imperial political culture that preserved wide measures of order even as the warground on (p. 622), and argues that it was the resilience of the imperial constitution itself

that allowed the Empire to survive the war and provided the framework for its eventual

settlement. Westphalia revitalized rather than emaciated the Empire (p. 778), and the

Emperors own influence enjoyed a rapid recovery. The war by no means signalled the

demise of the Holy Roman Empire as has often been claimed.

Wilsons emphasis on constitutional issues feeds into his second main claim that the

war cannot be characterized as a religious war. While noting the pervasiveness of matters

of faith in all aspects of early modern life and freely conceding that confessional tension

was one of many contributing factors to the conflict, Wilson argues that the overall

5 See Sutherlands The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Structure of European Politics, English Historical

Review, 107 (1992), pp. 587625.

6 Cited in Parker et al., p. xiii.


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Discussion 105

confessional character of the war was never more than superficial (p. 566), and that

those examining the war need to recognize the primacy of politics over religion (p. 453)

in the motivations of most of the wars main actors. Wilsons distaste for the radicalized

minority who didview the war as a cosmic showdown between good and evil in which the

ends justified almost any means (p. 10) is palpable, and these religious militants on both

sides of the confessional divide emerge as the real villains of the story in those periodic

moments where they were able to influence policy (the Defenestration of Prague;

electoral Palatinate involvement in the Bohemian Revolt; Jesuit influence on the drafting

of the Edict of Restitution; and so on). The last sentence of the entire book warns of the

dangers of entrusting power to those who feel summoned by God to war (p. 851).

Wilsons acumen as a military historian appears in Part 2, which includes discussions

of the wars main military figures, campaigns and battles. Those interested in the

operational aspects of the conflict will be pleased with his consistent provision of specific

army size and casualty figures, as well as maps of most of the main engagements to take

place in the Empire (maps of battles taking place elsewhere in Europe are conspicuously

absent.) Wilson makes clear throughout the book his scepticism towards the claims of

those following Michael Robertss military revolution thesis that first the Dutch, and

then the Swedes, enjoyed systemic tactical superiority over their Catholic opponents

through their adoption of linear tactics and other theoretical innovations. He is especially

critical of the hagiography surrounding Gustav Adolf, whose credentials as a military

innovator he challenges and whose military reputation, he claims, rests as much on

wartime propaganda and the kings firm place on later staff college curricula (p. 511) as

it does on merit. Wilson is similarly critical of arguments for military effectiveness based

in a technological determinism that sees [military] change dictated by weaponry(p. 623). He places far higher value instead on the ability to field sufficient numbers of

disciplined, preferably veteran, troops, and on the effectiveness of command, as

factors that led to success on the early modern battlefield. Although it became far more

difficult to raise large, effective forces as the war progressed, Wilson argues that the

quality of command itself remained high, and in fact that the later years of the war

saw the emergence of a new generation of commanders (Turenne, Cond, Wrangel,

Knigsmarck, Mercy, Melander, Montecuccoli, Piccolomini) who were at least as skilful

as the more celebrated figures of the earlier period (Tilly, Wallenstein, Gustav Adolf,

Bernhard of Weimar; pp. 6224). While each of these points has substance, thoselooking for a fundamentally new interpretation of the military history of the war will not

find it in Europes Tragedy.

The books final main claim explains the titles description of the war as tragedy. On

one level, labelling the war as tragic clearly refers to the staggering loss of life (Wilson

places the death toll at around eight million) and the material destruction that the war

brought in its wake. Wilson deals with these matters in Part 3, providing a balanced and

relatively standard account of how the impact of the war varied by region and economic

sector, with the greatest killers having been disease and famine rather than deliberate

human action, no matter how gruesome that may have been. A more unexpected senseof tragedy, however, emerges from Wilsons repeated insistence that the outbreak,

spread and long duration of the conflict were all utterly avoidable, an argument running

directly counter to a great deal of scholarship that attributes the conflict to irresistible

structural forces (social, economic, environmental, confessional, for example) usually on


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106 Discussion

7 Wilson traces the origins of the view of the war as an event of tragic inevitability (p. 6) to German historians of the

early nineteenth century, with an emphasis on structural issues added in the mid-twentieth century by proponents

of the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century theory such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Eric Hobsbawm, and Theodore

Rabb.

a European (or even global) scale, and compares 1618 to the European powder keg

of 1914.7

Wilson, in contrast, states that into 1618 there was nothing to suggest a major war was

inevitable (p. 167). The expansion of the war, first out of Bohemia to other parts of the

Empire, and then through the involvement of foreign powers, was based on a series of

unfortunate miscalculations that brought unanticipated and unwelcome consequences

to nearly all involved. Furthermore, Wilson stresses the frequent opportunities for

settlement that existed throughout the length of the war and could have ended the

suffering far sooner had they been seized: a not unrealistic chance for peace in early

1621 in the wake of the Battle of White Mountain (p. 314); a general peace that was on

the brink of realization in 1627 (p. 418); the grave error of the Edict of Restitution

(1629) that was intended to facilitate peace, but achieved the opposite (p. 446); the real

possibility of peace between Sweden and the Emperor following the Peace of Prague in

1635 (p. 554), and so on. Laying so much of the responsibility for the war and its long

duration on the unintended consequences of human choice adds to the sense of

melancholy, senselessness and indeed tragedy that permeates the book.

Europes Tragedy is a work of erudition and thoughtfulness. This stands in contrast to

sensationalist decisions made in the way the book is packaged that undermine some of

the points Wilson has so carefully made. The dust jacket (and accompanying press release

issued by Penguin) speaks of fighting [that] rapidly spiralled out of control, with great

battles giving way to marauding bands of starving soldiers spreading plague, famine

and murder, whereas Wilson himself states that armies in the later stages of the war

remained firmly controlled and directed, with military operations continu[ing] to

support political objectives and with the relationship between war and diplomaticactivity strengthened rather than weakened as the conflict lurched towards its conclusion

(p. 624). The dust jacket goes on to state that the tangle of political and religious motives

made the war impossible to stop, a claim that, as we have seen, would mitigate the very

sense of tragic non-inevitability Wilson has laboured to construct. In addition, one

wonders whether a book that has gone so far to demonstrate that, at its root, the war was

the Empires rather than Europes event should grant Europe (through its choice of title)

an equal share in its tragedy, and claim (as the dust jacket does) that [a]t its end a

recognizably modern Europe had been created, but at a terrible price?

On a more substantive level, Wilsons own discussion fails at times to live up to theclaims he himself has set out. For instance, in a work that provocatively posits the ongoing

and complex negotiations for peace that stretched throughout the war as one of the great

untold stories overlooked by scholars bent upon giving the conflict a false sense of

inevitability, surprisingly little attention is given to describing the negotiations themselves

(other than mentioning their existence and results) or exploring their mechanics.

Similarly, Wilsons discussion of Danish entry into the war (pp. 38591) which comes

across as both sudden and flatloses sight of his well-placed reprimand of scholars who

race ahead (p. 424) to a point of action rather than patiently unearthing the complicated


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Discussion 107

prehistory without which the event cannot properly be interpreted. In other places

Wilson appears willing to smooth over detail in order to make his points. How, for

example, does his aforementioned insistence that military activity remained centrally

directed and tied to political objectives throughout the later stages of the war mesh with

his own discussion of the partisan leaders who played an increasingly important role as

the rapid escalation of the conflict left numerous isolated garrisons scattered across the

Empire and were often difficult to control and motivated at least in part by their own

agendas (pp. 6002)? Finally, on occasion Europes Tragedy takes recourse to tendentious

reasoning, for example in the statement (p. 597) that Swedens willingness to conclude

peace without satisfying the claims of the Palatinate and the Bohemian exiles in 1648

proves that its earlier insistence that the Emperor negotiate on these matters in 1638

must have been simply a ruse. Arguments such as this, which leave unmentioned the

myriad factors that could have changed in the intervening decade, resemble the hasty,

unnuanced conclusions of other scholars that are frequentlyand rightlythe object

of Wilsons criticism.

These occasional slips stand out as atypical in a book that on the whole will contribute

greatly to what this reviewer sees as an emergent direction in the study of the Thirty

Years Warand indeed of early modern Germany as a wholethat eschews grand

explanatory models in favour of embracing complexity and messiness. Wilsons work

will invite the criticism of some of its readersperhaps especially those in Germany

for its stubborn refusal to subsume its analysis under a singular explanatory framework

(the focus on the imperial constitution serves more as a unifying factor to tie the strands

of the argument together than as grand theory.) The importance of the book lies

precisely in its qualification of overly-smooth explanations of the war through the patientexcavation of complicated, frustrating or even apparently contradictory levels of detail,

nuance and meaning. That the books conclusions do not easily translate into singular

pronouncements on the causes, nature and consequences of the war is a strength rather

than a weakness, and should serve as a call for future researchers to embark on the hard

work involved in exploring the intricacies of a warand of the Empire that stood at its

heartthat defy simple characterization.

University of Alabama

[email protected]


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