Whether motivated by idealism or cynicism, everyone drawn into the conflict was destroyed by it. The war was both a religious and a political one and it was this tangle of motives that made it impossible to stop. All the major European powers apart from Russia were heavily involved and, while each country started out with rational war aims, the fighting rapidly spiralled out of control, with great battles giving way to marauding bands of starving soldiers spreading plague and murder. The horrific series of conflicts known as the Thirty Years War (1618-48) tore the heart out of Europe, killing perhaps a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to whole areas of Central Europe to such a degree that many towns and regions never recovered. If (('gtm=off') const isAppRedirect = ('appRedirect') Ĭonst isAndroid = /Android/i.test(erAgent) Ĭonst isIphone = /iPhone|iPad|iPod/i.test(erAgent) As late as the 1960s, Germans placed it ahead of both world wars and the Black Death as their country's greatest disaster.

In a major reassessment, Wilson argues that religion was not the catalyst, but one element in a lethal stew of political, social, and dynastic forces that fed the conflict.īy war's end a recognizably modern Europe had been created, but at what price? The Thirty Years War condemned the Germans to two centuries of internal division and international impotence and became a benchmark of brutality for centuries. The sweeping narrative encompasses dramatic events and unforgettable individuals-the sack of Magdeburg the Dutch revolt the Swedish militant king Gustavus Adolphus the imperial generals, Wallenstein and Tilly and diplomat Cardinal Richelieu. Bohemia was ravaged by mercenary troops in the first battle of a conflagration that would engulf Europe from Spain to Sweden. When defiant Bohemians tossed the Habsburg emperor's envoys from the castle windows in Prague in 1618, the Holy Roman Empire struck back with a vengeance. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world. The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike.

Peter wilson the thirty years war