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Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Doubleday Anchor Books (1961), Paperback, 520 pages
Description
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.
User reviews
LibraryThing member Stbalbach
This is the best single-volume account of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). The war was very complex but Wedgwood provides singular clarity. Other interpretations are possible, but her vision is strong and memorable. The Machiavellian machinations are head-spinning, one has to read carefully, the
Wedgwood is an old-fashioned historian like Gibbon, retelling the events in highly-readable prose, focused on the "great men". This can be problematic, the Thirty Years War was more than just the decisions made by a few elites - social, economic and other forces were at work. Her sources are almost all 19th century. There are no new insights on the war, it is a retelling of established views. As a political narrative it is not only a great work of history but also literature.
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reward is a solid understanding of not only 17th C dynastic politics but how Medieval politics operated before the rise of the nation state.Wedgwood is an old-fashioned historian like Gibbon, retelling the events in highly-readable prose, focused on the "great men". This can be problematic, the Thirty Years War was more than just the decisions made by a few elites - social, economic and other forces were at work. Her sources are almost all 19th century. There are no new insights on the war, it is a retelling of established views. As a political narrative it is not only a great work of history but also literature.
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LibraryThing member Schmerguls
988 The Thirty Years War, by C. V. Wedgwood (read 21 Dec 1968) (Book of the Year) If I could remember all I read how smart I would be! This book is an excellent summary of a difficult period in history. I found I had forgotten much: e.g., the battle of Breitenfeld, Gustavus Adophus's greatest
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victory. A monument in the 19th century was erected on the field with the words: "Freedom of belief for all the world.' Wedgwood says: "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..." The battle was fought Sept 18, 1631. Gustavus Adolphus was killed in the battle of Lutzen on Nov 16, 1632. Nordlingen, the great Catholic victory, was fought Sept 6, 1634. This brought France openly into the war--on May 21, 1635. On Feb 15, 1637, Ferdinand II, emperor, died: "On Feb 15 at 9 in the morning his body and soul parted one from the other, the first to moulder in the vaults of Graz, the other to receive the reward for which he had laboured so long." This is an excellent book: The time was a fantastic time: 1618 to 1648. Show Less
LibraryThing member wildbill
This book is excellent narrative history writing and I know next to nothing about this era so I am going through it a second time. This was written in the 1930's and the author has a very literary as opposed to journalistic writing style. She does an excellent job of taking some of the main actors
This war was a world war of it's time. Spain, France, Austria and Sweden were some of the main combatants. They fought back and forth all over for Germany for the whole 30 years. At the end of the war German civilization was put back 200 years. There were numerous and sundry types of death and destruction. The battles were the least of it. Disease and the pillaging of the soldiers caused the greatest damage.
Soldiers killed each other and ravaged the civilian population. The descriptions of the destruction of the towns and countryside left me with more than one bad memory.
Through the thirty year span the reasons for the war changed. In the beginning it was primarily religion. The revolution of Protestant Prague against Catholic Austria began the conflict. Sweden invades Germany and Spain fights against Holland from Spain and the Spanish Netherlands. There were very few parts of Central and Western Europe that are not fighting at some point in time.
The author provides a very insightful analysis of the effects of the war on the countries involved and the area where the fighting took place. My understanding is that the war brought the end of medieval times and replaced the power of the churches with the beginning of nation states.
Excellent book and fascinating times. Change and destruction went hand in hand in a very significant era of European history.
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in the events all through the thirty year span of the book. Ferdinard III is the head of the Austrian Hapsburgs. Her portrayal of him was so vivid and true to life it made it easier to remember.This war was a world war of it's time. Spain, France, Austria and Sweden were some of the main combatants. They fought back and forth all over for Germany for the whole 30 years. At the end of the war German civilization was put back 200 years. There were numerous and sundry types of death and destruction. The battles were the least of it. Disease and the pillaging of the soldiers caused the greatest damage.
Soldiers killed each other and ravaged the civilian population. The descriptions of the destruction of the towns and countryside left me with more than one bad memory.
Through the thirty year span the reasons for the war changed. In the beginning it was primarily religion. The revolution of Protestant Prague against Catholic Austria began the conflict. Sweden invades Germany and Spain fights against Holland from Spain and the Spanish Netherlands. There were very few parts of Central and Western Europe that are not fighting at some point in time.
The author provides a very insightful analysis of the effects of the war on the countries involved and the area where the fighting took place. My understanding is that the war brought the end of medieval times and replaced the power of the churches with the beginning of nation states.
Excellent book and fascinating times. Change and destruction went hand in hand in a very significant era of European history.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Widsith
Before I started this, the sum total of my knowledge on the Thirty Years War did not extend much further than being able to guess its duration. In my defence, it turns out that the causes and motivations of this conflict were rather baffling even at the time – indeed even to those involved. One
The very geography is confused. ‘Germany’ at the time meant the Holy Roman Empire – summed up most memorably by Voltaire as being neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire – which in 1618 comprised a patchwork of semi-independent Central European margraviates, duchies and principalities of varying religions and allegiances. Its boundaries were not clear. It claimed to include, for instance, the Swiss Confederation, which had actually been functionally independent for a long time – while the King of Bohemia, which was nominally a separate state, retained his voting privileges within the Empire. ‘The system,’ as Wedgwood puts it, ‘had long ceased to conform to any known definition of a state.’
Across this politically hazy landscape strides an assortment of politically weak figures – spies and diplomats, acquisitive landgravines, petty princelings and mercenary warlords, most of them not so much prosecuting the war as merely failing to stop it. The most obvious tension is the three-way religious split between Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics. But the underlying dynastic struggle cut across denominations: what was in fact being realised was the long-running power play between the Bourbons and the Habsburgs. Like a proto-Vietnam, Germany was used by the superpowers of France and Spain to further their war against each other. This is why, despite the religious motivations of many of the local leaders, Catholic France was happy to ally with Protestant Sweden if it meant taking the Habsburgs down a peg or two.
The super-armies that resulted from these opportunistic alliances were beyond the control of any state. The idea of a national standing army was then in its infancy – indeed it's one of the concepts that the Thirty Years War has been said to have brought about – and most soldiers were mercenaries, coming from a whole range of different countries and of dubious loyalty even at the best of times. They roamed around, switching sides now and again depending on who paid better, laying waste vast swathes of the country. The cumulative impact was tremendous: crops were trampled, villages were destroyed, all food and money was funnelled into driving the mass of soldiery, and German peasants were stuck with plague, famine and near-constant starvation.
At Calw the pastor saw a woman gnawing the raw flesh of a dead horse on which a hungry dog and some ravens were also feeding. In Alsace the bodies of criminals were torn from the gallows and devoured; in Zweibrücken a woman confessed to having eaten her child. Acorns, goats' skins, grass, were all cooked in Alsace; cats, dogs, and rats were sold in the market at Worms. In Fulda and Coburg and near Frankfort and the great refugee camp, men went in terror of being killed and eaten by those maddened by hunger. Near Worms hands and feet were found half cooked in a gipsies' cauldron. Not far from Wertheim human bones were discovered in a pit, fresh, fleshless, sucked to the marrow.
Out of the maelstrom, a new kind of Europe emerged – one dominated less by dynasties and religions than by the growing idea of the nation state. Not just borders, but motivations seemed to have shifted. Wedgwood warns that this idea can be overstated, but she states it well:
A new emotional urge had to be found to fill the place of spiritual conviction; national feeling welled up to fill the gap. […] The terms Protestant and Catholic gradually lose their vigour; the terms German, Frenchman, Swede, assume a gathering menace.
CV Wedgwood sounds like an interesting character and I rather love her old-school, no-nonsense, technically excellent prose style. If nothing else this book is a masterpiece of historical synthesis, drawing on and citing innumerable primary sources in English, French, German and others. Still, to me at least it's not so essential as a narrative that I wouldn't be prepared to give it up in favour of a more modern treatment that benefits from more recent research.
But lots to explore here, and plenty of astonishing anecdotes and characters to be uncovered. Personally, I liked Christian of Brunswick, who had to have an arm amputated after a nasty injury. He went through with the amputation publicly, to a fanfare of trumpets, and promptly had a medal struck with the inscription Altera restat ["I've still got the other one"]!
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of the most startling facts in here is the revelation that, when all sides met in 1645 to discuss terms for peace, it took them nearly twelve months of debate just to agree on what exactly the previous quarter-century of fighting had been all about. National integrity? Religious freedom? Self-aggrandisement? Dynastic feuding? Why, yes…to all of the above.The very geography is confused. ‘Germany’ at the time meant the Holy Roman Empire – summed up most memorably by Voltaire as being neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire – which in 1618 comprised a patchwork of semi-independent Central European margraviates, duchies and principalities of varying religions and allegiances. Its boundaries were not clear. It claimed to include, for instance, the Swiss Confederation, which had actually been functionally independent for a long time – while the King of Bohemia, which was nominally a separate state, retained his voting privileges within the Empire. ‘The system,’ as Wedgwood puts it, ‘had long ceased to conform to any known definition of a state.’
Across this politically hazy landscape strides an assortment of politically weak figures – spies and diplomats, acquisitive landgravines, petty princelings and mercenary warlords, most of them not so much prosecuting the war as merely failing to stop it. The most obvious tension is the three-way religious split between Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics. But the underlying dynastic struggle cut across denominations: what was in fact being realised was the long-running power play between the Bourbons and the Habsburgs. Like a proto-Vietnam, Germany was used by the superpowers of France and Spain to further their war against each other. This is why, despite the religious motivations of many of the local leaders, Catholic France was happy to ally with Protestant Sweden if it meant taking the Habsburgs down a peg or two.
The super-armies that resulted from these opportunistic alliances were beyond the control of any state. The idea of a national standing army was then in its infancy – indeed it's one of the concepts that the Thirty Years War has been said to have brought about – and most soldiers were mercenaries, coming from a whole range of different countries and of dubious loyalty even at the best of times. They roamed around, switching sides now and again depending on who paid better, laying waste vast swathes of the country. The cumulative impact was tremendous: crops were trampled, villages were destroyed, all food and money was funnelled into driving the mass of soldiery, and German peasants were stuck with plague, famine and near-constant starvation.
At Calw the pastor saw a woman gnawing the raw flesh of a dead horse on which a hungry dog and some ravens were also feeding. In Alsace the bodies of criminals were torn from the gallows and devoured; in Zweibrücken a woman confessed to having eaten her child. Acorns, goats' skins, grass, were all cooked in Alsace; cats, dogs, and rats were sold in the market at Worms. In Fulda and Coburg and near Frankfort and the great refugee camp, men went in terror of being killed and eaten by those maddened by hunger. Near Worms hands and feet were found half cooked in a gipsies' cauldron. Not far from Wertheim human bones were discovered in a pit, fresh, fleshless, sucked to the marrow.
Out of the maelstrom, a new kind of Europe emerged – one dominated less by dynasties and religions than by the growing idea of the nation state. Not just borders, but motivations seemed to have shifted. Wedgwood warns that this idea can be overstated, but she states it well:
A new emotional urge had to be found to fill the place of spiritual conviction; national feeling welled up to fill the gap. […] The terms Protestant and Catholic gradually lose their vigour; the terms German, Frenchman, Swede, assume a gathering menace.
CV Wedgwood sounds like an interesting character and I rather love her old-school, no-nonsense, technically excellent prose style. If nothing else this book is a masterpiece of historical synthesis, drawing on and citing innumerable primary sources in English, French, German and others. Still, to me at least it's not so essential as a narrative that I wouldn't be prepared to give it up in favour of a more modern treatment that benefits from more recent research.
But lots to explore here, and plenty of astonishing anecdotes and characters to be uncovered. Personally, I liked Christian of Brunswick, who had to have an arm amputated after a nasty injury. He went through with the amputation publicly, to a fanfare of trumpets, and promptly had a medal struck with the inscription Altera restat ["I've still got the other one"]!
Show Less
LibraryThing member antiquary
This is very vivid, but for me written from an rather unusual viewpoint, essentially German nationalist, seeing a united Germany as best regardless of who ruled it. Very different from the popular Englsih-speaking Protestant historiography
LibraryThing member mimal
Read in August, 2013
The Thirty Years War by Cicely Veronica Wedgwood. Narrated by Charlton Griffin
Fraudio
nonfic> hist> central european war> prossies versus catlicks
The second defenestration of Prague. (The First Defenestration of Prague involved the killing of seven members of the city council by
Starting 1618, central europe errupted into a series of politico-religious conflicts that near bankrupted all of the (many) contestants, and the body count, according to wiki was, can you guess?: (view spoiler)
Utter lunacy.
Dense pedant-friendly text that covers all pretty well, yet some writers have a knack of drawing in a reader, so am left with the feeling that Tuchman, Massie and Fraser would have done a slightly better job. but we will never know.
4*
3 likes
The Thirty Years War by Cicely Veronica Wedgwood. Narrated by Charlton Griffin
Fraudio
nonfic> hist> central european war> prossies versus catlicks
The second defenestration of Prague. (The First Defenestration of Prague involved the killing of seven members of the city council by
Show More
a crowd of radical Czech Hussites on 30 July 1419.)Starting 1618, central europe errupted into a series of politico-religious conflicts that near bankrupted all of the (many) contestants, and the body count, according to wiki was, can you guess?: (view spoiler)
Utter lunacy.
Dense pedant-friendly text that covers all pretty well, yet some writers have a knack of drawing in a reader, so am left with the feeling that Tuchman, Massie and Fraser would have done a slightly better job. but we will never know.
4*
3 likes
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LibraryThing member Hae-Yu
Excellent book by an excellent author. Wedgwood documents the motivations, machinations and maneuverings which led to one of Europe's most destructive wars. While documenting battles, she also steps outside to illustrate the shifting political and dynastic settings.
Many great wars have long ranging
Most importantly, for better and worse, religion was divorced from State and communal functions. Prior to the TYW, religion was the common bond in a community. After the TYW, religion came to be a personal matter and turned inwards, so that a Protestant general could lead Catholic troops against another Protestant land. What replaced religion in this role was the beginnings of Nationalism. The common bonds that unite people became nationality, not religious outlook and expression. From this start, nationalism would roll outwards like a 400 year old tsunami to change the way people viewed themselves and related to those around them.
Many great wars have long ranging
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affects. Napoleon ended the Catholic church's secular authority. WW1 ended monarchy in Europe. WW2 ended imperialism. The Thirty Years War was also cataclymic for Europe, but especially in Germany. While Germany was utterly devastated, all the surrounding Euopean powers were affected in one way or another. Politically, one saw the rise of Bourbon France and the decline of the Hapsburgs. Greater Germany was broken into northern Protestant Germany and the southern Catholic Austria.Most importantly, for better and worse, religion was divorced from State and communal functions. Prior to the TYW, religion was the common bond in a community. After the TYW, religion came to be a personal matter and turned inwards, so that a Protestant general could lead Catholic troops against another Protestant land. What replaced religion in this role was the beginnings of Nationalism. The common bonds that unite people became nationality, not religious outlook and expression. From this start, nationalism would roll outwards like a 400 year old tsunami to change the way people viewed themselves and related to those around them.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Eyejaybee
Jolly good
LibraryThing member tommi180744
A succinct & yet detailed account of a brutally violent & politically-religiously dystopian era of European History in which all the main actors are hedonist Monarchial rulers whose opinion & attitude to the victimised, brutalised masses across the continent of Europe can best be summed up as
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vilely tyrannical. Show Less
LibraryThing member jonfaith
This book was loved, without a doubt, despite the lack of causality, it was a narrative feast of how.
LibraryThing member mattries37315
War is hell, just imagine it lasting for an entire generation with armies crisscrossing the same ground again and again producing famine, depopulation, and disease all in the name of religion, nationalism, and then finally simple greed. C.V. Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years War covers nearly a half
From the outset Wedgwood sets the German domestic and the continental political situations in focus by stating that everyone was expecting war but between Spain and the Dutch while the German economy was on the decline due to the rise of new trading patterns over the course of the last century. It was only with the succession of the Bohemian throne and the ultra-Catholic policies of the Ferdinand II after his election that started the war everyone knew was coming, sooner and further east than expected. The war began as a purely religious conflict that saw the Catholic German princes led by Emperor Ferdinand crush the Protestant opposition because many of the Protestants decided not to help one another until it was too late due to political conservatism that Ferdinand used to his advantage. It wasn’t until Gustavus Adolphus and the Swedes entered the conflict a decade later that the conflict turn slowly from religious to international and an extension of the Bourbon-Habsburg in which the former used first allies then their own troops to prevent the encirclement of France by both branches of the Habsburgs. The negotiations for the end of the war took nearly five years and would change as events in the field would change strategies until finally allied members of the Bourbon and Habsburgs would cut deals with the other side to quickly break deadlocks and achieve peace but how it took almost six years to stand down the armies to prevent chaos.
Wedgwood’s narrative historical style keeps the book a very lively read and makes the war’s progress advancing even when she’s relating how the continuous fighting was affecting the German population. She is very upfront with the men, and a few women, who influenced the conflict throughout it’s course from the great kings of Ferdinand II, Christian IV of Denmark, and Gustavus to the great princes Maximillian I of Bavaria, John George of Saxony, and Frederick Henry of Orange to the mercenary generals that gained in importance as the conflict continued like Albrecht von Wallenstein to finally the political masterminds of Richelieu and Mazarin. With such a large historical cast, Wedgwood’s writing keeps things simple and straight for the read thus allowing the conflict’s long drawn out nature to fully impact the reader and how it affected those out of power. And in describing the aftereffects, Wedgwood disarms many myths about the effects of the war that over three hundred years became considered fact.
The Thirty Years War by C.V. Wedgwood is an excellent narrative history of a conflict that saw the end of one kind of conflict and the beginnings of another with interesting personalities that fought and conducted policy around it while also showing the effects on the whole population. If you’re interested in seventeenth-century history or military history, this book is for you.
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century of history from the causes that led to the conflict through its deadly progression and finally it’s aftereffects.From the outset Wedgwood sets the German domestic and the continental political situations in focus by stating that everyone was expecting war but between Spain and the Dutch while the German economy was on the decline due to the rise of new trading patterns over the course of the last century. It was only with the succession of the Bohemian throne and the ultra-Catholic policies of the Ferdinand II after his election that started the war everyone knew was coming, sooner and further east than expected. The war began as a purely religious conflict that saw the Catholic German princes led by Emperor Ferdinand crush the Protestant opposition because many of the Protestants decided not to help one another until it was too late due to political conservatism that Ferdinand used to his advantage. It wasn’t until Gustavus Adolphus and the Swedes entered the conflict a decade later that the conflict turn slowly from religious to international and an extension of the Bourbon-Habsburg in which the former used first allies then their own troops to prevent the encirclement of France by both branches of the Habsburgs. The negotiations for the end of the war took nearly five years and would change as events in the field would change strategies until finally allied members of the Bourbon and Habsburgs would cut deals with the other side to quickly break deadlocks and achieve peace but how it took almost six years to stand down the armies to prevent chaos.
Wedgwood’s narrative historical style keeps the book a very lively read and makes the war’s progress advancing even when she’s relating how the continuous fighting was affecting the German population. She is very upfront with the men, and a few women, who influenced the conflict throughout it’s course from the great kings of Ferdinand II, Christian IV of Denmark, and Gustavus to the great princes Maximillian I of Bavaria, John George of Saxony, and Frederick Henry of Orange to the mercenary generals that gained in importance as the conflict continued like Albrecht von Wallenstein to finally the political masterminds of Richelieu and Mazarin. With such a large historical cast, Wedgwood’s writing keeps things simple and straight for the read thus allowing the conflict’s long drawn out nature to fully impact the reader and how it affected those out of power. And in describing the aftereffects, Wedgwood disarms many myths about the effects of the war that over three hundred years became considered fact.
The Thirty Years War by C.V. Wedgwood is an excellent narrative history of a conflict that saw the end of one kind of conflict and the beginnings of another with interesting personalities that fought and conducted policy around it while also showing the effects on the whole population. If you’re interested in seventeenth-century history or military history, this book is for you.
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LibraryThing member DinadansFriend
If you are going to survey the most complex European War in one volume, Dame Cecily Veronica Wedgewood nailed it. At the end you know most of the major players, you know what they wanted, and you know how they fared.
Subjects
Language
Original publication date
1938
ISBN
none