Denmark in the Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648


Book Description

Although Denmark, under the leadership of the dynamic King Christian IV (1596-1648) was truly one of Europe's great powers in the early seventeenth century, historians have generally neglected its role in the Thirty Years' War.




Scotland and the Thirty Years' War


Book Description

This volume deals with the entanglement of Scotland in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), discussing the diplomatic and military aspects of the conflict that were interwoven with the fate of the Scottish princess, Elizabeth of Bohemia, the famous Winter Queen.




The Thirty Years War


Book Description

The Thirty Years War: A Documentary History fills a gap in recent studies of the great pan-European conflict, providing fresh translations of thirty-eight primary documents for the student and general reader. The selections are drawn from the standard political documents, from the Apology of the Bohemian Estates for the Defenestration of Prague to the text of the Treaty of Westphalia, as well as from imperial edicts, trial records, letters, diary entries, and satirical broadsheets, all directly translated from the Early New High German, French, Swedish, and Latin. The volume contains some ten illustrations and one map . . . and on the whole is well organized and well presented with a judicious amount of footnotes and a slim For Further Reading section. A succinct introduction introduces the four sections, each with its own substantial introduction: (1) Outbreak of the Thirty Years War (1618-1623), (2) The Intervention of Denmark and Sweden (1623-1635), and (3) The Long War (1635-1648). The concluding section (4) Two Wartime Lives (1618-1648), interestingly juxtaposes the journals of a wandering mercenary and a settled townsman. The first is the diary of Peter Hagendorf, kept between the years 1624 and 1649 and only rediscovered in 1993. Hagendorf experienced the war as a common mercenary from the Baltic to Italy, from France to Pomerania. His counterpart is Hans Heberle, a shoemaker from a small town in the territory of the free imperial city of Ulm whose Zeytregister chronicled happenings both in the neighborhood and further afield. The engrossing accounts of their shifting fortunes over the three decades of the war really help to give this collection of texts, and the troublesome period itself, a human face. They are the stuff from which Grimmelshausen would craft his great novel of the war, The Adventuresome Simplicissimus (1668). Tryntje Helfferich is to be applauded for this consistently interesting and eminently useful volume. --Martin W. Walsh, University of Michigan, in Sixteenth Century Journal




The Thirty Years War, 1618–1648


Book Description

The 'Defenestration of Prague', the coup d'etat staged by Protestant Bohemian nobles against officials of the Hapsburg Emperor triggered the Thirty Years War. When Habsburg Spain intervened in support of their Holy Roman Emperor relative, what had started as a localised political and religious dispute in Germany, transformed into a European and global conflict. In seeking to exploit the Bohemian revolt, Spanish Habsburg revanchist ambitions directed by the Spanish Count of Olivarez at the economically powerful Dutch Republic were allied with the Habsburg Emperor’s counter-reformation ambitions. After the Bohemian defeat at the White Mountain in 1620 the war widened as the Dutch Republic, England, Transylvania, Denmark, Sweden, and Richelieu’s France all intervened to roll back Habsburg hegemony and restore the balance power. There was extensive fighting across the globe, as the Dutch and English sought to challenge the Spanish Habsburg global monopoly. These colonial wars were a major factor in the Iberian revolutions with brought down the Habsburg Imperium. Professor Charles Boxer called it: “the first world war”. It was a tragic war of attrition but also an epic story of remarkable individuals including the 'titans’ of the era,' Imperial General Wallenstein, warrior King Gustavus, sinister Count Olivarez, and the masters of international intrigue, realpolitik and diplomacy- Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin. Above all there were the decisive victories of the under-sung military genius of the era, Lennart Torstensson. The Treaties of Westphalia followed a war which not only changed the global balance of power, but accelerated over thirty years the transformation of the European continent from a world characterized by dynasties and the medieval concept of United Christendom to a European order that was recognisably modern.




Military Revolution and the Thirty Years War 1618–1648


Book Description

Military Revolution and the Thirty Years War 1618–1648 investigates change and decline in military institutions during a period of protracted and destructive European warfare. Conceptual background is provided by the Military Revolution thesis, which argues that changes in military technology and tactics drove revolutionary transformation in the way states organised and waged war in the early modern era. This transformation of military institutions became evident during the long and destructive Thirty Years War in 1618–1648. The outcome of the Military Revolution was the centralised fiscal-military state that possessed a strong claim to the monopoly of violence within its territorial boundaries. The book examines how the Thirty Years War accelerated and even initiated transformation in four military institutions that defined land warfare: feudal cavalry services, militias, regular armies, and war commissariats. The regional scope of the investigation covers the Holy Roman Empire, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, and the Dutch Republic. The book combines military-historical inquiry with ancillary sciences of sociology and economics. It argues that the Military Revolution of the Thirty Years War stimulated institutions capable of increased complexification and specialisation while curtailing those that were locked in stasis and immutability. The institutional legacy of the Thirty Years War was the emergence of complex military organisations that are characteristic to the modern society and its self-renewing social subsystems. Previous scholarship on the Military Revolution has concentrated on military technicalities and the wider process of early modern state formation. This book proposes an alternative way of viewing early modern military transformations from the perspectives of institutions and systems. System-analytical survey of change and decline in the military institutions of the Thirty Years War introduces qualifications to the Military Revolution theory and offers a novel way of conceptualising early modern military history.




The Thirty Years' War 1618–1648


Book Description

More than three and a half centuries have passed since the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War (1618-48); but this most devastating of wars in the early modern period continues to capture the imagination of readers: this book reveals why. It was one of the first wars where contemporaries stressed the importance of atrocities, the horrors of the fighting and also the sufferings of the civilian population. The Thirty Years' War remains a conflict of key importance in the history of the development of warfare and the 'military revolution'.




The Thirty Years War


Book Description

Europe in 1618 was riven between Protestants and Catholics, Bourbon and Hapsburg--as well as empires, kingdoms, and countless principalities. After angry Protestants tossed three representatives of the Holy Roman Empire out the window of the royal castle in Prague, world war spread from Bohemia with relentless abandon, drawing powers from Spain to Sweden into a nightmarish world of famine, disease, and seemingly unstoppable destruction.




Alexander Leslie and the Scottish Generals of the Thirty Years' War, 1618–1648


Book Description

Field Marshal Alexander Leslie was the highest ranking commander from the British Isles to serve in the Thirty Years’ War. Though Leslie’s life provides the thread that runs through this work, the authors use his story to explore the impacts of the Thirty Years’ War, the British Civil Wars and the age of Military Revolution.




The Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648


Book Description

The Emperor was chosen by three ecclesiastical electors, the Archbishops of Mentz, Treves and Cologne, and four lay electors, the Elector Palatine, the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, and the King of Bohemia. In theory he was the successor of the Roman Emperors Julius and Constantine, the ruler of the world, or of so much of it at least as he could bring under his sway. More particularly, he was the successor of Charles the Great and Otto the Great, the lay head of Western Christendom. The Emperor Sigismund, on his death-bed, had directed that his body should lie in state for some days, that men might see 'that the lord of all the world was dead.' 'We have chosen your grace, ' said the electors to Frederick III., 'as head, protector, and governor of all Christendom.' Yet it would be hard to find a single fragment of reality corresponding to the magnificence of the claim




The Thirty Years War


Book Description

An edited and annotated collection of translated documents on the Thirty Years War, providing students with accessible source material on this destructive conflict. Covering all aspects of the war from a variety of contemporary perspectives, it brings together an exciting range of material from treaties to literature to eyewitness accounts.