The Thirty Year War Part Two

As F. Schiller himself has defended, a work does not have to bear a purely academic and rather boring style, in order to be qualified as historical. The scene of this extensive work is the larger Europe from Russia to the Italian peninsula and the states bordering the Ottoman Empire. The actors of this so-called 30-year religious war were the sovereigns and churches of Europe. The political and military maneuvers are described, hence, in this masterpiece, in the literary style of a fiction, although the events and details related in it are truly historical. In the first parts of the book, the different warring forces as well as their motives for going to war are presented. "The prospect of independence, the rich plunder of the spiritual foundations must have made the regents craving for a religious conversion, and the weight of the inner conviction did certainly not have less strengthened this attraction in them; however, state reason alone could press them to that end." With this sentence, Schiller makes his whole point about the war. It was not so much a precise religious doctrine for which the European powers were fighting against each other, but certainly the acquisition and the possession of wealth and privileges detained by the spiritual foundations. Alliances, unions on one side, defections and betrayals on the other, are among all the various components that make up this war, to the image of the Hungarian leaders who allied themselves with whatever party would assure them the best of their interests. In addition to that, court judgments, intrigues and affairs, poisoning and outright financial corruption are among the weapons that Schiller also describes to render a vivid comprehension of this historical event to us.

As F. Schiller himself has defended, a work does not have to bear a purely academic and rather boring style, in order to be qualified as historical. The scene of this extensive work is the larger Europe from Russia to the Italian peninsula and the states bordering the Ottoman Empire. The actors of this so-called 30-year religious war were the sovereigns and churches of Europe. The political and military maneuvers are described, hence, in this masterpiece, in the literary style of a fiction, although the events and details related in it are truly historical. In the first parts of the book, the different warring forces as well as their motives for going to war are presented. "The prospect of independence, the rich plunder of the spiritual foundations must have made the regents craving for a religious conversion, and the weight of the inner conviction did certainly not have less strengthened this attraction in them; however, state reason alone could press them to that end." With this sentence, Schiller makes his whole point about the war. It was not so much a precise religious doctrine for which the European powers were fighting against each other, but certainly the acquisition and the possession of wealth and privileges detained by the spiritual foundations. Alliances, unions on one side, defections and betrayals on the other, are among all the various components that make up this war, to the image of the Hungarian leaders who allied themselves with whatever party would assure them the best of their interests. In addition to that, court judgments, intrigues and affairs, poisoning and outright financial corruption are among the weapons that Schiller also describes to render a vivid comprehension of this historical event to us.

Argues that religion was not the catalyst to the Thirty Years War, but one element in a mix of political, social, and dynastic forces that fed the conflict that ultimately transformed the map of the modern world.

The Thirty Years War: A Documentary History fills a gap in recent studies of the great pan-European conflict, providing fresh translations of thirty-eight primary documents for the student and general reader. The selections are drawn from the standard political documents, from the Apology of the Bohemian Estates for the Defenestration of Prague to the text of the Treaty of Westphalia, as well as from imperial edicts, trial records, letters, diary entries, and satirical broadsheets, all directly translated from the Early New High German, French, Swedish, and Latin. The volume contains some ten illustrations and one map . . . and on the whole is well organized and well presented with a judicious amount of footnotes and a slim For Further Reading section. A succinct introduction introduces the four sections, each with its own substantial introduction: (1) Outbreak of the Thirty Years War (1618-1623), (2) The Intervention of Denmark and Sweden (1623-1635), and (3) The Long War (1635-1648). The concluding section (4) Two Wartime Lives (1618-1648), interestingly juxtaposes the journals of a wandering mercenary and a settled townsman. The first is the diary of Peter Hagendorf, kept between the years 1624 and 1649 and only rediscovered in 1993. Hagendorf experienced the war as a common mercenary from the Baltic to Italy, from France to Pomerania. His counterpart is Hans Heberle, a shoemaker from a small town in the territory of the free imperial city of Ulm whose Zeytregister chronicled happenings both in the neighborhood and further afield. The engrossing accounts of their shifting fortunes over the three decades of the war really help to give this collection of texts, and the troublesome period itself, a human face. They are the stuff from which Grimmelshausen would craft his great novel of the war, The Adventuresome Simplicissimus (1668). Tryntje Helfferich is to be applauded for this consistently interesting and eminently useful volume. --Martin W. Walsh, University of Michigan, in Sixteenth Century Journal

London's News Press shows that seventeenth-century England was very much part of a European-wide news community. The book presents a new print history that looks across Europe and the interconnecting political and religious groups with international networks. It tells the story of which printers and publishers were engaged in the earliest, illicit publications, their sources and connections in Germany as well as the Netherlands, and the way legitimacy was achieved. These were the earliest printed periodical news publications. Periodicity and its implications for trade and customers is explored as well as the roles of publishers and editors. The period saw a much bigger circulation of news than had ever been experienced before. The book also describes the lively nature of relationships that ensued between news networkers (editors, writers and readers along the interconnecting chains). The subject is topical. Our understanding of reading and communications is undergoing major changes through the introduction of the internet and the real time transmission of moving pictures. James I and Charles I faced new media and an unprecedented growth in informed public opinion fuelled by a flow of information that was essentially beyond the reach of government control. So there are parallels with the contemporary struggle to adapt, and there is a corresponding growth in the publication of history books reflecting upon the origins of the public sphere and the development of public opinion. JAYNE E. E. BOYS is an independent scholar who lives in Suffolk.

The Palatine Family and the Thirty Years' War examines the experience of exiled royal and noble dynasties during the early modern period through a study of the rulers of the Electorate of the Palatinate during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). By drawing on a wide range of archival source materials, ranging from financial records, printed manifestos, and considerable quantities of diplomatic and personal correspondence, it investigates the resources available to the exiled 'Palatine Family' as well as their attempts to recover the lands and titles lost by Elector Frederick V—the son-in-law of King James VI and I of England and Scotland—in the opening stages of the Thirty Years' War. This work focuses on the years between Frederick's death in 1632 and the partial restoration of his son Charles Louis under the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Although the 'Palatine Question' remained one of the most divisive and important issues throughout the entire Thirty Years' War, the years 1632-1648 have been greatly overlooked in previous examinations of the Palatine Family's exile. By considering the experiences of exiled elites in early modern Europe—such as the relationship between the Palatine Family and the Stuart Dynasty—this work will reveal the influence of dynastic and familial obligations on the high politics of the period, as well as the importance of conspicuous display and diplomatic recognition for exiled regimes in seventeenth-century Europe. It will demonstrate that that dispossessed rulers and houses were not automatically rendered politically insignificant after losing their lands and titles, and could actually remain an important player on the geo-political stage of early modern Europe.

The first edition of The Thirty Years' War offered an unrivalled survey of a central period in European history. Drawing on a huge body of source material from different languages and countries throughout Europe, it provided a clear and comprehensive narrative and analytical account of the subject. It has established itself as the classic text with reviewers, students and the general reader. This second edition has been thoroughly revised to include the very latest research. The updated bibliographical information provides an invaluable resource, synthesising the major work in the field, in all languages, up to 1996. Written with great clarity and liveliness, the book brings alive the period in all its aspects. It covers the horrors of the war and the contorted politics of the period. It deals with all the major figures, including Wallerstein and Richelieu, Gustavus Adolphus and Tilly, the Winter King and the Habsburg emperors. For range and depth of coverage there is no other work like it. It has become the definitive book on the subject.