****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
For too long the Thirty Years War has been for me little more than a name from history. I knew it occurred sometime in the seventeenth century (its actual dates were 1618 to 1648), that it was waged in Central Europe, and that it was devastating to the indigenous population. But that was the extent of my knowledge. I didn't even know who was fighting whom. Somewhere along the way I picked up that THE book on the Thirty Years War was the prosaically entitled THE THIRTY YEARS WAR written in 1938 by a twenty-eight-year-old English woman, C. V. Wedgwood (a descendent of the potter who founded the Wedgwood Company).So it was to Wedgwood's THE THIRTY YEARS WAR that I turned for my education on that slice of history. I learned more than I had anticipated. The book contains about 500 pages of detailed text. I set myself a goal of reading 50 pages per day, a target I managed to attain perhaps only every other day. I began to feel (obviously, facetiously) that reading THE THIRTY YEARS WAR was as interminable as was living through it for the few inhabitants of what is now Germany who did manage to live through it.Still, I am glad I read Wedgwood's account. It is history on a grand scale, magisterially written (the book brings to mind Edward Gibbon and his "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"). In his Foreword to this edition, Anthony Grafton calls Wedgwood "the greatest narrative historian" of the twentieth century. If by "narrative historian" Grafton means to refer to something other than the magisterial prose, I don't quite know what that would be. Perhaps he is alluding to another of his points about Wedgwood: that, as opposed to the "Why" histories of professional academics, she set out to write "How" history -- "detailed, vivid narratives that eschewed any effort to provide structural or social or economic explanations."Nonetheless, THE THIRTY YEARS WAR is not devoid of structural or social or economic considerations. Nor is it devoid of analysis. To be sure, though, primarily the book is a detailed account of what happened, in roughly chronological sequence. Included are profiles of the key players -- such as the Holy Roman Emperors of the German Nation Ferdinand II and his son Ferdinand III, John George of Saxony, Maximilian of Bavaria, Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate, Albrecht von Wallenstein, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, and Cardinal Richelieu. Also included are moderately detailed accounts of the major battles (along with schematic maps) -- namely, Breitenfeld, Lützen, Nördlingen, Rocroy, and Jankau.The Thirty Years War was in part a religious war -- Protestants versus Catholics (and each of those religious factions was itself internally divided). It was in part a political war among shifting alliances of the various states of German-speaking peoples. It also was a political war between the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons, and as such it was a European war fought primarily on German soil. For Wedgwood, it is best summed up as an unnecessary, meaningless war:"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. The overwhelming majority in Europe, the overwhelming majority in Germany, wanted no war; powerless and voiceless, there was no need even to persuade them that they did. The decision was made without thought of them."
