Peter H. Wilson, professor of history at the University of Hull, is a well-known specialist of German and central European history during the early modern period, especially of its political and military aspects. Among his many books dedicated to these topics are German Armies: War and German Politics 1648–1806 (London: UCL Press, 1998) and Absolutism in Central Europe (London: Routledge, 2000) in which Wilson already showed a rare gift for perfectly informed and well-written synthesis. Since 2002 he has coordinated a series of remarkable annual workshops on early modern German history with Michael Schaich at the German Historical Institute, London. He was thus particularly well prepared to write a general survey of one of the most long-lasting and devastating wars of all time, which started as a conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor, the Catholic Ferdinand II, and the Protestant nobles in his Bohemian kingdom before spilling over into German lands. Protestant Denmark (in 1625) and the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus (in 1630) joined the fray. Spain had committed itself into the German mire by the mid-1630s, which in turn led the French king to commit his own troops. The horrors of that unceasing war struck the contemporaries as exceptional: “I would not believe a land could have been so despoiled had I not seen it with my own eyes,” reported the Swedish general Mortaigne when he passed through northern Germany late in the war. If confessional hatreds had already torn France in the late sixteenth century, driven the Dutch revolt and Spanish reaction, and were soon to spark the British civil war, nothing compared with the disaster that scourged Germany and surrounding lands until the peace of Westphalia in 1648. The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus by Grimmelshausen and Les horreurs de la guerre, the well-known series of engravings by Jacques Callot, have left unforgettable artistic testimonies of this “European tragedy” that claimed eight million dead—in a conservative estimate—and whose settlement in 1648 was at the origin of a modern European states-system that excluded religious war between Christian nations as a matter of principle.

Wilson's first achievement is thus to distinguish himself from the vast majority of literature on the Thirty Years War, essentially comprised of short overviews intended for students and innumerous specialist studies. Wilson provides for the first time a general, thorough, and balanced account of the conflict, complete with excellent maps and battle plans, tables on subjects such as population change in the Habsburg between 1600 and 1650, the Habsburg family tree, a huge index, seventy densely packed pages of scholarly notes, and forty well-chosen illustrations. If I add that he is able to give both a detailed account of this immensely complex war and due summaries when needed, and that his treatment of larger than life figures such as Wallenstein, Gustavus Adolphus, Olivares, and Richelieu is worthy of the greatest historians of the past, one will understand why this ponderous but always elegant book will remain for a long time the definitive reference tool on the subject. Every reader concerned by politics and religion in early modern Europe will be well advised to use and peruse; anyone interested in religiously motivated wars will learn from it.

But Wilson is mostly to be commended for treating the Thirty Years War as “a struggle over the political and religious order of Central Europe” (xxi). He does not stick to a minute narrative of operations—although his command of military matters allows him to give precise and vivid accounts of the great battles of the war—nor does he follow the dominating trend among European historians that belittles the specificity of events in the Empire to the benefice of the description of a wider conflict between the Protestant powers of Sweden, Denmark, England, the United Provinces, and the German Reformed states, seconded by Catholic France and the Spanish-Habsburg hegemony. No less than a third of the book—its first part “Beginnings” (1–268)—is thus dedicated to an analysis of the situation of the Holy Roman Empire during the later sixteenth century. If all of us will be grateful to Wilson for leading us into a learned, guided tour of the arcane legal and political structures of the imperial state, or for emphasizing convincingly the importance of the Turkish War that left Habsburg financially and politically bankrupt at the eve of the Defenestration of Prague, religious historians will particularly admire chapters such as “Religion and Imperial Law” (41–48), with its subtle analysis of the conflicting interpretations of the Peace of Augsburg, “Confession and Imperial Politics to 1608” (207–24), in which he follows the vicissitudes of the ever elusive international Protestant alliance, or the rivalry between Saxony and the Palatinate, the two leading German Protestant states. “Conflict,” the second part of the book (269–751), dedicated to the war proper, is a masterpiece of diplomatic and political history that makes us understand how much this “last of the religious wars” as it has often been called was “religious only to the extent that faith guided all early modern public policy and private behavior” (9) and that the historian should not interpret the conflict through the eyes of militants or fundamentalists on both sides. The last three chapters of “Aftermath” (751–852) are an in-depth examination of the political consequences of the war as well as of its human and political costs. In this brief review I want to draw special attention to the last chapter, “Experiencing War,” in which Wilson subtly examines the impact of the war on contemporary consciousness, noting for example how in 1648 Lutherans in the Empire celebrated peace as a God-given chance to prove themselves worthy of his grace, which consequently lessened the confessional polemic as “the war became a product of the population's own failings, not the aggression of their Catholic neighbors” (848), and emphasizing the “widespread yearning for stability” (849) that followed the conflict and was to play a prominent role, in the Empire and in Europe, toward a redefinition of the relationship between religion and the state, based on the demise of the militants, during the second half of the seventeenth century.