The Thirty Years War

What you are about to read is an attempt at a new and different account of the Thirty Years War, seen as an example of two civilizations and ideological conflict. The clash of one conception, deriving from the legacy of Humanism, tinged with Protestantism and taking as its model the United Netherlands, with another, Catholic-Humanist one which followed the example of Spain, becomes thus the point of departure for the development of political fronts and coalitions of power. It belongs to the central theme of this book to examine how during the War new and modern prototypes were evolved by France and England, models for experiment both in parliamentary government and absolutism, economic advance and manufactory production, colonial expansion and unbridled repression of minorities at home, scientific progress, religious toleration and witch-hunting. The traditional themes like the 'war for European hegemony', the fate of 'Europe divided', the relationship between Baroque and Classicism, will not be the center of attention here, but this author considers that the present interpretation of the Thirty Years War can throw light on those problems too. - page 9.

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.

This pamphlet guides the reader through one of the most complex periods of European history, when religion interacted with rebellion and dynastic rivalry in a series of conflicts in central Europe known collectively as the Thirty Years War.

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

This thoroughly revised new edition of Geoffrey Parker's classic text incorporates the latest research about this central episode of early modern history. `Judicious, lively, enlightening.' - Times Literary Supplement

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 - the first great pan-European war, and until the twentieth century the most terrible - ravaged Germany, but myth, propaganda and historical controversy have obscured its true nature. Another perspective is provided by the private diaries, memoirs and chronicles of soldiers and citizens who recorded their own experiences. War at the individual level is discussed and described using these sources, which are extensively quoted in their own words.