Customer Reviews

The Thirty Years' War

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Geoffrey Parker is quite simply one of the most thoughtful and talented military historians out there. His works are always profound and thought-provoking. However, in this instance, he may have bitten off more than he can chew.

The ugly fact is that the Thirty Years' War is a conflict of incredible complexity. No one book can capture all elements of this war. It is quite simply the historian's Gordian Knot, and even Parker cannot do it all in one book.

The bottom line? If you are a military historian, this is a very good book. However, Parker's own "The Military Revolution" and Dodge's classic biography of Gustavus Adolphus (really a history of European military tactics from 1600-1712) do the job better, especially as compliments to one another. For a political history, Ronald Asch does a better job in his history of the Thirty Years' War from the Hapsburg perspective(especially when combined with the Dodge book on Gustavus). In contrast, Parker's political history gets buried beneath too much detail (thereby running the risk of missing the forest for the trees).

Folks, don't let the complexity of the Thirty Years' War scare you. It is a fascinating conflict, one that is essential to understanding European history, military evolution and the emergence of the modern state. If you've got the stomach to read two or more books on the subject, you will be richly rewarded. Taken in conjunction with other works, Parker's book can add enormously to one's understanding of a seminal event in world history.

This book is a concise introduction to the Thirty Years War. It is written primarily by Geoffrey Parker, though he recruited expert colleagues to assist on some chapters. Parker is a careful editor, as the book has a uniform style and reads like a single author text. I suspect its target audience is advanced undergraduates, and grad students and scholars specializing in other areas seeking an entry into the extensive literature on the Thirty Years War. It is not a comprehensive and detailed narrative history. Military history aficionados, in particular, will be disappointed because there is little coverage of campaigns and battles. There is, however, a nice chapter analyzing the nature of warfare during the Thirty Years War. The book is devoted primarly to political history, diplomatic history, and the structural effects of the Thirty Years War on the European State System and the organization of individual states. These topics are addressed very well. Of particular interest to the authors is the question of why the Thirty Years War lasted so long. Wars were very common in Early Modern Europe both before and after this conflict but usually of shorter duration. The answer(s) appear to be a combination of factors including changes in military technology, the organizational immaturity of states that precluded decisive victory, the religous dimension of the war, and unwillingness of key actors to compromise. Often presented as a pointless and exhausting conflict, the Thirty Years War did produce lasting effects; for example, the Austrian Hapsburgs would never again try to impose hegemony on Germany. In exchange, however, their grip on the core lands of Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary tightened. The alliance between the Austrian and Spanish Hapsburgs was severed and France emerged as the preeminent continental European Power. One aspect that the authors slight is the international, indeed, intercontinental aspects of the Thirty Years War. Implicit in the narrative is the fact that events all over the world, such as conflict between the Dutch and Spanish/Portugese in South America, and Ottoman-Persian rivalries in the Near East had a huge impact on the Thirty Years War. A very attractive feature is an excellent annotated bibliography written by Professor Parker that will take interested readers deeper into the literature. This book fulfills its goal of being a concise introduction but there is still a need for a substantial narrative history based on modern scholarship.

Geoffrey Parker can have one epitaph: concise. A lot of information is packed into this edited history of the 30 Years War. The reader may feel that he or she is not getting the full treatment, but it is all there. Of significant note and contribution is the exposure of the many facets of cause and continuation of the war; religion played a key role, but the war gave birth to national identities that eventual consumed confessional politics. A lot of attention is given to on the surface "irrational" behavior by generals and potentates, and this is the first place I've seen an objective perspective from both sides during the first decade of decision. This makes a great case study for analyzing grand and military strategy. Tactics and operations are not ignored, but rather they figure into their proper place. It was intrigue and financial systems that determined the outcome, not decisive battles or campaigns.

There is a unique aberation, though. The section entitled "Total War" doesn't give much on totality in the modern sense that we think of total war. Particularly since the last section tells how France could not wage anything but small war until the 1640s.

Despite that, the reader gets the sense of the true scope of conflict: from the Iberian peninsula to the fringe of the Ottoman Empire; from south of the Alps to the northern reaches of Sweden. The war was not just a German affair, nor did it result in just a German solution.

Geoffrey Parker is excellent as usual, providing in-depth insight and an engaging style. Novices to the topic might also wish to consult his "Europe in Crisis" or "Dutch Revolt" texts. It's difficult to find a good and unbiased investigation into the Catholic/Habsburg side elsewhere. The "one star" review is a gross misjudgement - it goes without saying that a book of this type may be too complex for someone with no experience at all with the seventeenth century, but a history can't spend all of its time on explanatory hand-holding. As for stylistic criticism, it's difficult to find history as good as Parker's written as well, let alone better.

If Parker is too "complex," "boring" or "complicated," it is likely that the topic simply will not be of interest to you no matter who writes it. A 50 page chapter in a textbook is only a meaningless gloss.

This book is an exallent book on The Thirty Years War. It begins its narative in 1608 to show some of the background of the War. The Thirty Years War was an very complex war; Mr. Parker tries to examine the War from all of the sides invovled. He doesn't take any side. The two drawbacks of the book are that it is written by a number of different authors and is a bit choppy because of this. The other drawback is that it is quite terse. Each major incedent is described in in a brief and acurate way. In order to understand the book, one has to either read it very carefully or read the book a number of times. While the main focus of the book is the political incedents, there is an appendix which discusses the major military changes that occured in the War.

The Thirty Years' War was a very confusing conflict on many levels, and to attempt any account of it in barely 200 pages is almost foolhardy. But this book succeeds, at least in setting the stage and following the people and politics. It is a good place to start a study of the conflict. It is not a military history (there is a brief account of some specifically military aspects toward the end) nor a social history, and a great deal of detail had to be left out. But the basics of the war are there, which can be fleshed out with more extensive or specialist works.

For modern students of international relations, the Thirty Years' War is something like a great book, such as "Democracy in America" or "The Education of Henry Adams": it is often referenced and quoted but rarely examined in toto nor ever fully understood. For many years, the topic of the Thirty Years' War remained on my "to do" reading list. But it was the emerging Sunni-Shia divide in the Middle East that finally prompted me to pick up this book, hoping to get a fuller picture and appreciation of how Christians dealt with their internal doctrinal differences nearly half-a-millennium ago.

On one level, this book was a let down. I have read a number of other works by Geoffrey Parker and have come to respect and admire his ability to blend the best attributes of the Academy with the self-assured and highly readable style of the popular historian. Perhaps I should have paid greater heed to his role as editor and not author of this comprehensive history of a conflict that has become synonymous with rape, pillage, and plunder. I was expecting an eye-popping tour de force; what I got was a rather stale political-military history of the 17th century. I have no doubt that this volume is as good as it gets. I've read other introductory works and the classic by C.V. Wedgewood, and they are no more engaging than this. Whereas Parker made Philip II and the affairs of 16th century Spain come to life in "The Grand Strategy of Philip II" the major actors of the Thirty Years' War, who were ever bit as compelling as Philip, unfortunately come across as bland and uninspiring. Gustavus Adolphus, Tilly, Richeleau, Wallenstein, Oxenstierna and others remain mere names on a page rather than the larger-than-life characters they really were and their contemporaries saw them as.

Nevertheless, this overview is still the best that is available to the lay reader or undergraduate student and has many redeeming qualities, not least of which are a great number of helpful maps and graphs that make some sense of the bewildering array of states that enter and exit and re-enter the conflict over the course of decades.

Also, I was struck by the portrayal of Sweden and the role of the military revolution in the outcome of the conflict. Parker is one of the leading historians (and proponents) of the argument that tactical and doctrinal changes in land warfare during the early part of the 17th century led to a discontinuous change in the conduct of military operations and ultimately propelled the West to global imperial domination. Yet, the so-called military revolution gets little attention here and the specifically military history of the entire conflict is rather muted. A couple of things are clear, however. First, the victories of Gustavus Adolphus and the Swedish armies were, indeed, stunning. Not only had the Protestants finally found an answer to Tilly and the Catholic armies, which had been undefeated over more than a decade, but they nearly annihilated the Catholics at Breitenfield in 1631. The heavy use of musketeers in shallow ranks, supported by mobile field artillery and shock cavalry tactics were as decisive tactically as the German blitzkrieg three centuries later. Second, just as the Germans achieved breathtaking battlefield victories with their panzer units but were unable to achieve strategic victory, so too did the Swedes find that winning a battle, however decisively, is not the same as winning a war.

Parker also ascribes interesting political motives to the Swedes. He writes that both Gustavus Adolphus and Oxensteirna were driven primarily to defend Swedish control of the Baltic Sea, which was threatened in the late 1620s as Tilly and Wallenstein marched northward. The authors suggest that defending the Protestant faith in Germany, especially after the promulgation of the Edict of Restitution, played only a minor role in driving Swedish policy and actions. Moreover, as the war grinded on, the Swedes decided to pursue a policy of "Germanification" of the war, much like the US tried in Vietnam and, one can easily surmise, eventually in Iraq. That is, the Swedes grew tired of expending so much blood and treasure in a conflict that they did not see as their own and whose outcome could only be determined by Germans.

Finally, Parker and company dismiss the notion that the Thirty Years' War was the economic and demographic castrophe that it has often been portrayed as. Indeed, the war is often synonymous with apocalyptic religious conflict. Here the authors surmise that the German population fell by maybe 15% during the war, not the 50% figure often tossed about. And they argue that the barbarity that did occur was the result of widespread starvation and the fact that the country was teeming with unpaid, hungry troops, both Catholic and Protestant. So, according to the authors, it was hunger and not religious hatred that fueled whatever atrocities that did occur.

In sum, this is likely as solid and readable an overview of the war that one is likely to find, although it cannot be recommended broadly as it is a tough, dry read.

It is hard to grasp how difficult it is to produce a sound single-volume study of the Thirty Years' War. This continent-wide conflagration engulfed most European states, compelled the resolution of many of the era's crucial issues, and actually extended beyond the conventional time frame of 1618-48. Writing a book of manageable size thus requires choices, and Geoffrey Parker's are eminently reasonable. He concentrates on the international political and diplomatic aspects, while including more than enough on religion, economy, the impact of war on society, and other "background" concerns. Readers looking here for full-blown accounts of military ops may be chagrined, but this is not the goal of Parker (who wrote most of the text) and his colleagues. They provide perfectly adequate data on battles and campaigns, deftly locating military affairs within a fully comprehensible framework highlighting great-power rivalry and doctrinal conflict. The prose is consistently readable, another neat achievement in a multiauthored work, and the many illustrations and maps are a definite plus. For more on actual combat, C.V. Wedgwood's standard "Thirty Years' War" is still a fine description, though much less analytical than Parker's contribution. G. Mortimer, "Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years' War" is recent scholarship (with extensive quotes from primary sources) adding nuance to the older view that the TYW was an unmitigated disaster throughout Germany.

This is a very interesting history book. I enjoyed reading it as if it were a novel.
It provides a complete view of all the parts involved in the conflict and their reasons to intervene. The book shed some light to this complex period of European history. Another worth reading book of the same author and period is The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567-1659: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries' Wars (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History).

Parker edited the chapters by others into a terse, scholarly narrative with many good features as described by the other reviewers. However, the best standard history in English of this period remains C.V. Wedgwood's "The Thirty Years War", originally published in 1938 and available now in the NYRB paperback (2005, 536 pages, 1590171462) or a Book Club hardcover (1995, no isbn, but can be found used under the above isbn at half.com, or elsewhere). Wedgwood's narrative breaths more life into the crosscurrents of religion, politics, economics, military operations, and leading personalities. Her solid analysis of the underlying situation, the trends and the final results brings the whole picture into focus while supplying fascinating details. As a comparison, if you have read any history by Barbara Tuchman, Wedgwood's style is similar and just as engaging, suitable to take in the full flavor of this pivitol half century, and not just a dry compilation of facts and figures. Nevertheless, Parker's book is a worthwhile addition to the subject, but see the review "Good, But Not In Isolation, July 19, 2001"