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Wilson, Peter H., Europe's Tragedy. a History of the Thirty Years' Book Reviews / Journal of Early Modern History 14 (2010) 267-290 285 Wilson, Peter H., Europe’s Tragedy. A History of the Th irty Years’ War (Lon- don: Allen Lane, 2009), 1040 pp., ISBN 978 0 713 99592 3, £35.00. Published in the USA as: Th e Th irty Years’ War: Europe’s Tragedy (Cam- bridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2009), 1040 pp., ISBN 978 0 674 03634 5, $35.00. Th is fi rst full length treatment of the Th irty Years War in English since Wedgwood’s 1938 classic is a most impressive brick of a book that spans a breath-taking range of material. Whereas most recent Anglo-Saxon research, from Geoff rey Parker and John H. Elliot to Jonathan Israel, focus on the Hispanic, French, and Dutch dimensions of that confl ict, Wilson re-directs our attention to the specifi cally Central European theatre of the Th irty Years War, rather than reviewing the Eighty Years War or the duel of Olivares and Richelieu. Wilson starts with a broad canvas of an introduction that covers the structure of the Holy Roman Empire as well as all the petty disputes that gradually led to the unraveling of the imperial constitution. He is con- cerned to put our understanding of the evolving confl ict on a sound foot- ing by providing us with statistics wherever possible, while not by-passing fascinating morsels of information like John Smith, the founder of Vir- ginia, fi ghting in Hungary in the 1600s; Cardinal Borromeo’s invention of the confessional; or the life-time record bagging of 113,000 pieces of game by “Bierjörg,” John Georg II, the Elector of Saxony. Th e Th irty Years’ War is a complex story, and Wilson tells it very well. He does not omit the details that help to give a diff erent perspective to well-known stories (like the convoluted manoeuvres that preceded the infamous sack of Magdeburg). Being a scholar of Germany but no Ger- man academic, Wilson is also not afraid of actually writing about battles when dealing with war. Particular praise is due to the two dozen maps that include encounters like Hessisch-Oldendorf in 1633 or Wittenweier in 1637, rarely found elsewhere. Th e big question about the Th irty Years War is not who started it (the “war guilt” debate) but why it became such a never-ending story that was primed again and again, for example, by the Protestant “paladins” who occupied center stage after the initial defeat of the Bohemian rebellion. Wilson is particularly enlightening and perceptive on the turning points of 1629-31; among which were the chances of a peace settlement rather than a continuation and escalation of the war, as well as re-assessing the chances © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/157006510X498022 286 Book Reviews / Journal of Early Modern History 14 (2010) 267-290 of Gustavus Adolphus whose triumph in late 1631 was far from inevitable and owed much to the mistakes of his opponents. Most histories of the German confl ict—following Friedrich Schiller’s example—skip over the second half of the confl ict after 1634-35. Instead, Wilson skillfully navigates through the shallow waters of many of the writ- ings on this chaotic period. To some extent, his narrative inevitably refl ects the strengths and weaknesses of existing literature: in general, this means French exploits get much bigger coverage than the far more important Swedish ones. Th us a dozen pages are devoted to Bernhard of Weimar’s 1638 campaign, even if Wilson rightly concludes that Breisach was far from being a “porta Germanica”; whereas the disaster of Gallas’ army that cost the Emperor half of Germany the same year is reduced to a single paragraph. Th e same holds true for 1644; six pages are dedicated to the fi ghting around Freiburg, six lines to the disintegration of Gallas’ forces around Magdeburg. Wilson does not propound any overarching thesis of the “meaning” of the war. In the best tradition of British scholarship, he remains skeptical about concepts like the “state-building war” or the dogmatisms of the “disastrous war” and “early decline” schools. Mercifully, he only briefl y refers to philosophical musings about Erlebnis (fl eeting experience of lived events) and Erfahrung (accumulative knowledge of experience) (822). If anything, he provides an antidote to the built-in pro-Protestant bias of most Anglo-Saxon literature. He is scrupulously fair to the Catholics, while taking occasional swipes at the clichés of Protestants who prided them- selves on being “the faith of historical progress” (310). In general, there are only two judgments the present reviewer would caution against: while rightly stressing elements of contingency, Wilson perhaps underestimates the extent of the Habsburg antagonism with France, in particular the degree to which Ferdinand II & III, father and son, both pursued an anti-French agenda in 1635. Along the same lines, I believe the impression that the Spanish infl uence in Vienna weakened after 1637 (589) is based on the reputation that Trauttmansdorff , Ferdi- nand III’s chief minister, acquired at a much later period during the nego- tiations in Münster when he quarreled with his Spanish counterpart. In the late 1630s, though, everybody agreed he was “tutto Spagnuolo.” On the other hand, Wilson perhaps tends to overemphasize the impor- tance of the “amnesty question” “that wrecked the peace of Prague” (571). Th e Habsburg intransigence on that point was petty-minded but did not prolong the war. It provided a propaganda pretext for the Swedes, but that .
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