Peter Wilson's Reading List

"The Peace of Westphalia is so complex that it takes at least five years to negotiate and the war continues while the negotiations are taking place. It’s an intricate puzzle that is slowly put together, interacting with military events. Just unravelling all of that is a challenge. Then the peace has this kind of benchmark status, particularly in political science, but also I think in general public consciousness. It supposedly created the “Westphalian system,” the idea that the world is divided into sovereign national states that should all interact equally within a rules-based international order. So the peace has that longer-term importance. “The popular perception of the war…is of a national disaster and almost, in many respects, a greater calamity than the world wars” What Derek Croxton does is present all of this in a very clear and lucid manner in a way that—whilst not undermining the importance of the peace—does voice very pertinent criticisms of the rather simple view that it somehow created this order. The choice of the title, The Last Christian Peace, is significant because in the classic paradigm, religion is taken out of politics and this, supposedly, enables a more peaceful domestic and international order. You get these accusations that the Islamic world has not yet had its Westphalian moment and this is part of its problem. Croxton points out that Westphalia is actually explicitly a Christian peace. It’s not based on modern ideas, or on Western ideas of toleration. Religion is an important factor in the peace and indeed remains so in domestic and international affairs afterwards."

"This is a classic text from the Thirty Years War. The book also encapsulates so much about why the war is so complex. Monro was depicted by Walter Scott as the archetypal mercenary, as Dugald Dalgetty in A Legend of Montrose . He’s a Scotsman, but he serves the Danes and then the Swedes and he then returns to fight in the British civil wars. In this book, he’s very explicit about his motives. He believes he’s serving the Stuart dynasty because the point of his intervention was to restore James I’s daughter and son-in-law to their position as the Electress and Elector Palatine. He sees himself as a professional soldier and he sees himself as a Protestant. The book is a succession of alternating chapters. One chapter recounts his own experiences and gives a very good insight into the life of an officer and the events of the war, and then the next chapter will be a reflection on ideas of duty which bring in these themes about military professionalism and dynastic and religious loyalties. England is one of the major powers that is not directly involved in the Thirty Years War, but they actually send as many troops to the continent as the Swedes do. They do so in a piecemeal fashion, usually by permitting another power to recruit or occasionally organizing an expedition that was sent in support of one of the belligerents, but without making Britain itself directly a belligerent. Monro goes out in one of these expeditionary forces in the mid-1620s. Monro’s book is, I think rightly, viewed as a very early regimental history. He’s also a well-known figure because he plays a role subsequently as a senior commander in the British civil wars. It is surprisingly readable. Anyone who can access Early English Books Online (EEBO), for example, can access it online either in its original format or as a Word document. There’s a very good—quite expensive, unfortunately—modern critical edition. It’s 17th-century English, but it’s full of arresting anecdotes and turns of phrase. It’s really a very, very good read."

"Wallenstein is one of the towering figures in the war. He comes from the lesser nobility, like a lot of the senior commanders, and he rises to prominence through being a general, especially an organizer of armies for the Holy Roman Emperor. So from 1625 he is the senior field commander of the main army in the Empire. Because the emperor can’t pay him and because he’s financing much of the mobilization of the army on his own personal credit, he’s rewarded with captured territory. He receives the Duchy of Mecklenburg, because the then-Dukes of Mecklenburg have backed the wrong side, and so they’re expropriated. This raises him to the senior ranks of the aristocracy in the Empire and incurs the suspicions of those who otherwise back the Emperor. They think, ‘Well, if the Emperor can do this what might he do to us?’ First, they engineer his dismissal. Then the imperial army suffers a major defeat and he’s recalled. After that, he’s increasingly perceived as a barrier to peace negotiations by part of the anti-imperial faction. That’s rather ironic, because personally he probably favoured a negotiated peace. “England is one of the major powers that is not directly involved Thirty Years War, but they actually send as many troops to the continent as the Swedes do.” But he’s unconventional in the sense that although he builds a lavish palace in Prague—which is now the Czech Senate—he doesn’t play the role of the courtier. He doesn’t really have a faction at court. He’s always away commanding the army and so a whispering campaign starts that he’s about to betray the Emperor. Ultimately, the Emperor sanctions his murder and he’s assassinated in the town of what’s now Cheb in Bohemia. It doesn’t, actually. That demonstrates, I think, that although much is changing during the war, the basic socio-political order remains intact. Wallenstein is conscious that he’s about to be removed and at the very last minute genuinely does try to defect and attempts to take the officer corps and soldiers with him. But they don’t follow. They know on which side their bread is buttered and they know that only the Emperor can grant rewards that would be considered legitimate, whereas Wallenstein is not, on his own, a legitimate player. He only derives legitimacy through his relationship to the Emperor. Once that’s gone, his soldiers know his days are numbered and his card is marked. There are a good number of Wallenstein biographies; I think there’s something like two and a half thousand books and articles written about him. He’s such a fascinating figure, with so many questions to ask. Was he a Czech nationalist? Was he a peacemaker? Was he the last of the great mercenary captains? He fits all of these different archetypes. He’s also interested in astrology. So there are a lot of interesting angles. Mann’s biography is very solid. He wasn’t a professional historian, but he did read everything and he also had advice from the best Czech historians at the time and corresponded with them. Mann provides a lot of detail, but it doesn’t weigh heavy. There are some passages that are a bit strange. In the German version, there is a passage where he imagines what Wallenstein might be dreaming, which is perhaps exhibiting his novelistic heritage a bit too much. Golo Mann was obsessed with Wallenstein. He played him in a school play. But this book is a very good attempt to try and provide a balanced picture of the man and his role in the Thirty Years War. Yes, it was a bestseller. The German edition of Wallenstein sold at least 100,000 copies. It was the basis of the most expensive West German TV production in the 20th centur y, a four-part series. It captured the public imagination. There have been a number of attempts to do it. Famously, there’s the film made in the 1970s called The Last Valley , starring Michael Caine and Omar Sharif. It has everything: the plague, mercenaries and a witch burnt at the stake. But the problem is that the war is a drama on such a grand scale. There are so many characters that it’s very, very difficult to do and I haven’t seen anything that really brings it off."

"That’s why I picked it. This period of the Thirty Years War is very visual, in the sense that it sees a massive expansion of print media and the first regular newspapers. All this is propelled by the war. But these illustrated broadsheets are produced as much for propaganda purposes as for pure information. There are some fantastic engravers producing panoramic battle scenes and so forth. So there’s a great wealth of material, and this book is based on those illustrations and on surviving items of equipment from the war. It provides a very good compendium of what the armies looked like, what their military equipment looked like, to a level of detail that’s generally missing. For example, it shows you what the baggage wagons looked like. In the very influential ‘military revolution thesis’ first advanced in the 1950s, it’s supposed to have done that, yes. But I’m sceptical. It’s much more of an evolutionary process over the course of the war and there are some developments that are specific to this conflict. Because of the interlinking between military operations, the need to hold territory to resource armies, and the peace negotiations, the field armies actually change composition so that they become predominantly cavalry forces by the end of the war. That is totally at odds with the general European trend and isn’t replicated in any later conflict. But in the Thirty Years War, armies needed to be mobile to respond to the needs of the diplomats and cavalry could forage more easily, too. Cavalry could pitch up in an area, draw out infantry from the garrisons in the towns, make up an army and then fight a battle. That trend is not replicated in the wars that, for example, the Spanish and French are fighting at the same time, and it is not replicated after the war, where the trend is towards infantry and relying on infantry fire power. I think when we look at the detail, we see some things are part of a general trend, but it’s a trend rather than a revolution. Other things are particular to the conflict and are peculiar to it. This is one of the things that you can tell from Wagner’s book. He shows all the different troop types, how each type of soldier is armed in a specific way. Battles were fought with a combination of different types of soldier. Infantry included pikemen who were more heavily armoured and had pikes to protect the musketeers against cavalry attack, because reloading firearms was a fairly slow process. There were different types of cavalry: light cavalry for scouting and harassing the enemy and plundering their baggage and causing panic, and heavy cavalry that were meant to attack infantry formations that had lost cohesion. Most of the casualties in battles actually occurred towards the end, when one side broke. If one side’s formations lost cohesion, then soldiers were exposed individually. A pike on its own is very unwieldy and they are only effective en masse . Much the same can be said for contemporary firearms. Yes, there are all sorts of statistics. The Holy Roman Empire’s population is reduced by about 20%, but more than a fifth of the population died. Overall numbers are difficult to estimate. The major killer is the plague, which was spread by troop movements. The worst period is the 1630s, when the war becomes truly general throughout the Empire and the armies are moving fairly rapidly. One contingent brought the plague into the German part of the Empire from Northern Italy. Malnourishment, due to the disruption of agriculture and trade, left people vulnerable. These were much more likely causes of death than direct killing. Direct killing was usually much more situational, specific and often used as a terror tactic: you murdered the servant in order to get a householder to reveal where they had buried their treasure."