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World Hotels - The Thirty Years War (New York Review Books Classics)
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Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.24
EAN: 9781590171462
ISBN: 1590171462
Label: NYRB Classics
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 536
Publication Date: 2005-03-10
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Release Date: 2005-06-30
Studio: NYRB Classics
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Editorial Reviews:
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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.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Detailed and thorough
Comment: A dense detailed account of the pan-European war that decimated Germany in the early 1600's. The war, ostensibly about religion, but, as usual, really just about aristocratic power conflicts, especially between the Hapsburgs and the Boubons. The war redrew borders and cemented Europe politics until WW1. Written in the 1930's by a woman historian, it is a difficult read with 500 pages of endless political intrigue. I enjoyed it, but it's only for those seriously interested.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Wedgwood's "Thirty Years War" is the Best History Available
Comment: The best enlightening history in English of this period remains C.V. Wedgwood's "The Thirty Years War", originally published in 1938 and now available in the NYRB paperback (2005, 536 pages, 1590171462) or a Book Club hardcover (1995, no isbn, but can be found used under the above isbn at half.com) or other older editions. Wedgwood's narrative breaths life into the crosscurrents of religion, politics, economics, military operations, and leading personalities. Her solid analysis of the underlying situation, the trends and the final results brings the whole picture into focus while supplying fascinating details. As a comparison, if you have read any history by Barbara Tuchman, Wedgwood's style is similar and just as engaging, suitable to take in the full flavor of this pivitol half century, and not just a dry compilation of facts and figures. Includes maps, footnotes, bibliography, and genealogical table. As previous rewiewers have written, clearly a dazzling and sophisticated history, with lessons still so relevant today.
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Summary: A little too detailed
Comment: While the data is accurate, I didn't find this an engrossing read, too much emphasis on details on less on the whole. But many history books make this mistake.
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Summary: One of the great books of the 20th century
Comment: I have had this book high on my reading list for over 40 years now, ever since a took a course in German Baroque literature as an undergraduate. It is far better than I had imagined, both in style and content. My only regret is that I didn't get around to reading it 40 years ago.
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Summary: A Panoramic and Poltically Sophisticated History
Comment: For the English-language reader Wedgwood's book, which has been in print for over sixty years, is still an excellent introduction and synoptic narrative of this lengthy and turbulent period of European history. It gives brief and judicious biographical sketches of the major political and military actors of three generations: The principal antagonists at the outset -- Ferdinand II of Austria and Frederick V, Elector Palatine; the condottieri-style generals - Spinola, von Mansfeld, Tilly, Wallenstein, Piccolomini, Christian of Halberstadt, Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, the duc d'Enghien (Conde); the contentious minor rulers -- Maximilian V of Bavaria, Johann Georg of Saxony; the northern monarchs -- Christian IV of Denmark and Gustavus Adophus of Sweden (and his daughter Christina and prime minister, Oxenstierna); the "spoiler", Cardinal Richelieu; the new Emperor Ferdinand III and his cousin, the warlord Cardinal-Infant Ferdinand of Spain; and many others. This book is written in a traditional English historian's prose style that is clear, eloquent and totally lacking the jargon of concurrent and later social and economic histories, while still covering these aspects of the period. In spite of some reviewers' claims of a "Protestant bias" in her interpretation, the author seems extremely fair when assessing responsibility for the long-running disaster of the war, taking the position that it was the self-serving political interests of the participants (dynasties, rulers, generals and paymasters) that kept the war going at the expense of the social and economic welfare of the vast majority of inhabitants of Germany and Bohemia.
Although I am not familiar with this new edition (and Grafton's introduction) I emphasize that any reissuing of this book should have a brief scholarly introduction which supplies more details on the constitutional arrangements and crises of the Holy Roman Empire during the sixteenth century, with a special emphasis on the composition of the Bohemian estates and the conflicts between the estates and the Habsburg king-emperors. The extent and internal organization of "the Bohemian crown lands" should also be outlined. A succinct review of the political status of Lutheranism, Calvinism, the Bohemian Brethren, and other Protestant confessions throughout all of Europe around the year 1600 and a note on how their status had altered by 1700 would also be useful in "setting the stage" for the events of 1618 and understanding the relgious-denomination consequences of the war.
The author supplies sufficient details on the major battles, but this is not a work of military history. As Wedgwood knows, battles were only significant in the larger view as a result of their political consequences. And it is in the elucidation of the underlying politics of the war (including how political prospects shifted with the waxing and waning of military fortunes) that Wedgwood excels. In her analysis of the general European situation at the outset of the war she proposes that there were three sets of forces which underlay and drove contemporary events. Each was a source of conflict and each might cross-cut the others, complicating the declared interests and objectives of the dynasties and nations involved. In brief, the forces were: (a) Religion, with three major competing factions (Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist; she notes that the conflict between the latter two forms of Protestantism was often as extreme as it was between each of them and the Roman Catholic Church). (b) Nationalism (French, German, Czech, etc.), which was a new force on the scene, crystallizing the idea that political entities might be defined by nationality (which here equals some combination of ethnicity and native language) rather than conceived of as polyglot territorial agglomerations brought about by dynastic interests. (c) Monarchic-constitutional issues, which were especially complicated and ambiguous within the "constitutional" grouping of major and minor powers known as The Holy Roman Empire (HRE).
The constitutional problem was twofold. Within the small arenas of developing nation states and the yet smaller ones of traditional rulerships throughout Europe (duchies, counties, "free-city" areas ruled by town councils and mayors) contests over the basis and extent of the rulers' powers and privileges were taking place. Aristocrats, oligarchs and merchants had traditional corporate bodies (estates) reluctant to cede their own powers (taxation, the organization of military service) to a central authority. The same conflict was also being played out on the larger scale of the Hly Roman Epire, that loose grouping of special obligations and exemptions which was the final residue of an earlier system of vassalage binding together the elected Emperor (who had been a Habsburg for several centuries) and the smaller rulerships of Central Europe. The religious reforms, rebellions and wars of the sixteenth century had produced a system that appeared to resolve some of the potential problems through the won privilege of cujus regio, eius religio ("whoever rules, his religion [is the religion of the ruled area]"). In the year of the war's inception, 1618, this new balance was very fragile, comprising four Catholic and three Protestant imperial Electors. In Germany the special arrangements regulating relationships between the Emperor (resident in Vienna or Prague) and local rulers and guaranteeing a great deal of political autonomy to the locals, especially the Protestant Electors, had been somewhat codified by the Augsburg Treaty of 1555, and were known as the "German Liberties". These would prove to be especially important to the three Protestant Electors at the outset of the war.
In the developing continental war one could be pro- or anti-Habsburg based on any one of the above factors or any combination of two or three of them. For example, a Catholic ruler (including the papacy) might seek Protestant allies in order to combat Habsburg territorial expansion in his direction or to combat constitutional changes in the Empire which affected his position adversely. Or a Protestant power might accept the Habsburg "program" in any given case because it did not wish to disturb constitutional arrangements that were to its advantage (this characterization is apt for Saxony and Brandenburg during the first twelve years of the war.)
As Wedgwood notes, all three considerations (religion, nationality, constitutional relations) could be and were used cynically to advance the positions and interests of individual rulers and factions. From the point of view of rationality or predictability, political choices and commitments were often self-contradictory (e.g., a Catholic power supporting a Protestant venture; a German Liberties party accepting occupation by the army of a foreign power, etc.) or temporary expedients that made the overall European situation more chaotic. The war began locally in Bohemia, but its complications and consequences radiated outward as far west as Spain and England (even farther, to the Caribbean naval theater), as far north as Sweden and northeast to Poland, as far south as Italy and southeast as Transylvania; in other words, it was a European continental war with global impact.
When the war broke out in 1618 it was over the Habsburg violation of a "constitutional guarantee" of religious freedom in Bohemia (the concessions stated in Rudolf II's Letter of Majesty). And here is where individual personalities and beliefs played an important role. Ferdinand II, who had knowingly violated the terms of the Letter soon after being selected by the Bohemian Diet as King (and therefore the first in precedence of the HRE Electors) was determined not only to expand the political powers of the Habsburg dynasty in Bohemia and elsewhere, he was firmly committed to the goals of the Catholic Counter-Reformation (i.e., re-Catholicizing all of the areas within the HRE which had become Protestant during the last one hundred years). When he was deposed by a special convention of the Bohemian estates (the defenestration of his deputies in Prague being the signal event of this deposition), the crown of Bohemia was offered to the Elector of the (Rhineland) Palatinate, Frederick V, who considered himself a champion of the Protestant cause. The religious zeal of these two antagonists led to extreme fixed positions at the very outset of the war.
Given the other major conflict hovering in the background -- the Spanish Habsburg determination to recover the now Protestant area of the Netherlands which had become the successful and defiant (Dutch) United Provinces - the war soon became international. While the entry of France and then Denmark followed by Sweden, into the war during the 1620's changed its nature and extended its duration, Wedgwood concentrates much of her analysis on the behavior of the two Protestant Electors, Johann Georg of Saxony and Georg Wilhelm of Brandenburg and one Catholic ruler, Maximilian of Bavaria. It is her contention throughout the book that Johann Georg and Maximilian in particular could have prevented the war's spread and forced Ferdinand into a compromise very early in the course of events that acquired their own dynamism once they got out of hand. Despite their religious differences these two were always strong "German Liberties" proponents, and each had the same view of the Austrian Habsburg rulers: they should be kept for the broader protections they offered, but kept in place with respect to encroachments on the traditional rights of local rulers. In the end both of these rulers survived the lengthy war in spite of numerous diplomatic and military reversals (Saxony switched sides and joined the Swedes for several years, while Maximilian's position was constantly and secretly supported by his nominal enemies, the French, as their potential foot in the Habsburg camp.) Wedgwood believes that the price of their survival was far too costly for the rest of Germany.
Wedgwood's gloss on the changing nature of the conflict is that by the year 1635 the war had become one of great-power politics, and that the earlier religious and ideological causes were losing their ability to motivate the antagonists. Her summary of the changes emphasizes the following:
(a) Religion had discredited itself as a plausible source of political programs and a legitimate cause for war. Religion was becoming more interiorized and private, and losing ground philosophically and ethically to the new prestige of empirical and applied science (this was the era of Galileo and Kepler, with Descartes, Harvey, Hook, Newton, Huygens, etc. on the near horizon; a time of laboratory science and scientific societies.) As the basis of a political program religion was viewed cynically by those who saw the devastation it had brought about.
(b) For thinking men, nationalism began to fill the emotional void in public life left by the withdrawal of religion as the underlying motive for political and cultural action. This was very obvious in France, but even true of Ferdinand III, for whom the new main cause was the construction of an Austrian-based hereditary monarchy whose additional obligations as the Holy Roman Imperial protector of far-flung German Catholics were no longer perceived as worthwhile. In the minds of both Germans and Austrian Habsburgs the Holy Roman Empire was becoming an honorific entity with ambiguous and weak political commitments in Germany. The Elbe-North German-Pomeranian ideal empire of Wallenstein was never again revived as a dynastic program. Austria began to move south and east (toward Italy, Croatia, and Hungary) in its expansionist aims.
(c) The control of immense polyglot, multi-religious, mercenary armies and their huge camp followings had become a pressing matter of concern for all of the political authorities that hired them - they were neither religious nor national in their motives and aims and were in fact independent "mobile states" unto themselves, cynical and rapacious and often as dangerous to their paymasters as to their foes; whenever their immediate prospects for pay and maintenance looked bad, they changed sides. The most successful mercenary generals had become mini-sovereigns. Officers were all "out for themselves" and for their troops (rather than for the cause or nation of their paymaster), since without troop loyalty they had no means of personal advancement -- the most famous commanders, Ernst von Mansfeld, Wallenstein, Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, the Swedish general Wrangel, all expected (and some received) grants of territory and titles of nobility as their rewards for service. The "national" armies of conscripts that came to the fore in the 18th century was the answer to this problem.
The pace of the war wound down during its last five years (although there were several major battles fought even then), which was a period of extended negotiatons in Münster and Osnabrück, with the "final treaty" being signed late in 1648. For the next five years a series of conferences met at Nürnberg to implement and enforce the peace treaty and to deal with difficult problems raised by demobilizing huge armies. Many of the loans of this period, which were raised to cover the demobilization costs, were not paid off for a century. Individual rulers such as Charles of Lorraine and the Duke of Savoy (who got nothing from the treaty) refused to vacate various fortresses for five or six years, but the war did not break out again. France and Spain continued at war with each other, but not in Germany. Numerous soldiers, especially officers, went into mercenary service all over Europe. Others took to the hills as professional bandits - for the next 20 years merchants traveled through certain parts of Germany and Bohemia in armed caravans.
Wedgwood accepts the more recent (1900-1930's) historical estimate that the population of the Imperial German lands (excluding Alsace and the Netherlands) dropped from about 21 million in 1618 to 13 million in 1648. The number of dislocated people was also substantial. While she acknowledges that the number of towns and villages destroyed and other "infrastructural" and economic losses were very large, she feels that all contemporary sources (e.g., the pamphlet literature of the next 100 years) exaggerated local losses, since all parties in the war continued to seek indemnities and restitution. The free peasantry benefited briefly, since landowners were desperate for manpower to restore their estates - prices fell while wages rose for a number of years, which increased the standard of living of peasants and artisans. But within a decade of the peace treaty the landowning gentry was pleading with Imperial, royal and local rulers to impose legal restrictions which would re-create bonded, serf-like conditions for peasants. Town councils now became pawns and bureaucrats of the dynastic courts of their rulers and also implemented restrictive legislations on peasants (e.g., prohibitions against mobility, domestic industry, and household craft production -- a trend which later historians refer to as "neo-serfdom"). Class stratification was as rigid as it was before the war started. There was a new, large class of mobile petty nobles and gentry seeking court-backed military and bureaucratic appointments, at the expense of town and peasant taxpayers.
Germany and the Austrian-based monarchy and empire were totally excluded from the international competition to establish overseas colonies and from the developing "Atlantic trade". For a number of years the outlets of Germany's major rivers (Rhine, Elbe, Oder, and for Brandenburg-Prussia, Vistula) were controlled by foreign powers, reducing Germany's commercial strength. Hamburg was the exception, becoming the major maritime merchant city of the North Sea coast, at the expense of the other Hanseatic cities and the Scandinavian powers. The only medium-sized German state to emerge with positive prospects was Brandenburg, soon to become the administratively efficient and militarily powerful Prussia. The peace, while ending the "wars of religion", set the stage for a long series of "nationalistic" wars that subsumed dynastic and religious sources of conflict. France replaced the Habsburg Spanish-Austrian coalition as the menacing and tyrannical continental power willing to disturb the peace. Austria turned to the south and east and Spain lost its great power status and became an economic and cultural backwater. There was no politically or culturally unified Germany within the boundaries of the old Empire (French culture began to reign supreme) and the cosmopolitanism (its openness to outside influences) of this area during the 18th century, instead of being a source of pride over its achievements, became a source of lament for later cultural and ethnic purists of revived German nationalism.
Author's Judgment and Conclusions: In terms of responsibility for the overall disaster, Wedgwood points to the futility and self-destructiveness of sincere religious zeal in the cases of Ferdinand II and the Elector Palatine. But, from the point of view of failures of practical (and ethical) politics, she highlights the behavior of Maximilian and Johann Georg, who could have prevented the spread of the conflict in 1620 and could have brought the war to an early end in 1635 if they had agreed to work together on a "unified German program" which would have forced Imperial compromises and concessions had they both stood behind it. Between these two she sees the Saxon as the greater victim of military circumstances (pressed by the Swedish juggernaut) and therefore less culpable for the mess, while she judges the Bavarian as too subtle and too ambitious in pursuit of his own dynastic and territorial ambitions at the expense of a general settlement good for his fellow Germans, thus identifying him as the more culpable.
Beautiful in its style and concision, Wedgwood's final summary is also gloomy (as one might expect of a work completed in 1939, on the verge of World War II):
"As there was no compulsion towards a conflict which, in despite of the apparent bitterness of the parties, took so long to engage and needed so much assiduous blowing to fan the flame, so no right was vindicated by its ragged end. The war solved no problem. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict."
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