Dynasticism and state rivalries tangentially shaped imperial religious policies, as well as the balance of power in Central Europe. The empire's constitution provides the fundamental context for understanding the multitude of conflicts in these three decades. Like Ronald Asch in his 1997 monograph on the Thirty Years War, Wilson emphasizes the political struggle over the relationship between religion and imperial law.

Wilson delves back to the 1555 Peace of Augsburg and examines how Catholics and Protestants understood their places in the Holy Roman Empire, the starting point both for the war and for this book. 9), and he questions the inevitability of the last phase of the wars of religion, suggesting that political, dynastic, and legal remedies might have shortened or even averted altogether the Thirty Years War. Wilson opines that 'the war was religious only to the extent that faith guided all early modern public policy and private behaviour' (p. The 1618-1648 war (or series of wars) is characterized as the final and bloodiest stage of the conflicts precipitated by the Reformation. Recommended.Undertaking a new narrative of the Thirty Years War is daunting enough, but Peter Wilson also dares swim against the prevailing tide of interpretation. While at nearly 1,000 pages this book is a significant investment of time, it is one that repays that investment ten fold.

The quality and plenitude of maps and illustrations are a great aid in following the often highly complex narrative. The longer the war continued however, the harder it became to stop with none of the numerous participants able to muster enough strength to force a conclusion, leading to atrocities like the sack of Magdeburg and to a loss of life from plague and famine on an unimaginable scale. Wilson shows there was nothing inevitable about the war that broke out in 1618 and argues that there were many opportunities for peace throughout the period.

Wilson has produced a magisterial work that eloquently covers the causes, the main events and the consequences of this conflagration, perhaps the most terrible period in European history between the Black Death and the Second World War.’ With Europe’s Tragedy, the first major history of the war in English for seventy years, Peter H. The Thirty Years’ War ravaged Europe from 1618 to 1648, splitting the Holy Roman Empire into opposing confessional camps and drawing almost every major power into conflict. Europe’s Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years’ War

The thirty years war europe's tragedy