Europe's Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War

"Absolutely. Confessional diversity was a crucial feature of the Empire, but this does not mean that this war was just about religion, because, as I already mentioned, religion was inseparable from the social, political and economic order. There were severe political consequences if, for example, a prince changed his religious denomination. I think this is a very general pre-modern characteristic. Today we are used to separating social fields such as religion, economy, politics, law, science, etc., all of them following their own, distinct social logic. However, this is a modern phenomenon. These fields were not separable in the early modern period. And this is something that historians in the 19th century very often did not realize or take into account. Peter Wilson’s book is 1,200 pages or so. It is extremely detailed. You can find every political and military event, but also structural features that are very important, like how the military was organized. And the book is not just about the Thirty Years War as such, but includes the time before 1618, the preconditions, the structures, the complex beginnings of this war, as well as its aftermath and structural consequences. “It was not just one war, but a complex bundle of conflicts that were all interrelated” He calls it “Europe’s Tragedy.” It is not just about Germany, although contemporaries called the Thirty Years War ‘ Der Teutsche Krieg’ —the German War—because it took place on German territory and the German-speaking lands were affected most, some regions more than others. But Wilson tries to show how everything was connected to everything else. It was not just one war, but a complex bundle of conflicts that were all interrelated. The war was a European event (or series of events), since almost all foreign powers were more or less involved, not only Sweden and France that intervened directly. The European ‘society of princes’ and the imperial order were deeply intertwined, since European sovereigns such as the king of Denmark were at the same time members of the Empire. Peter Wilson makes clear that the war was also a conflict about the Imperial Constitution, the power of the Emperor and the autonomy of the imperial members. All of this was entangled with political conflicts that had begun before 1618 and others that were not finished in 1648, so you can even argue that it was not just a 30-year war, but a much longer conflict. Peter Wilson also shows that it was not primarily a religious war. The troops were called Swedish, or French, or the Emperor’s troops, but not Catholic or Protestant troops. There were soldiers fighting alongside each other from all different denominations. He also shows that the war was not inevitable. There were certain moments in the course of this war when it could have been ended, but then something happened that made it carry on. I think it is important for historians to make clear that history is always contingent. Nothing is inevitable; everything could have happened differently."