There is no end to the abyss of human folly. It is an infinite chasm into which entire generations of humans have been consigned thanks to the arrogance and the superciliousness of the so-called great men of history. Their unwillingness to allow those beneath them to live as they wish, along with their petty need to impose their will upon events, have burdened decades, sometimes even centuries, with death, despair and the ruination of our hopes and dreams. If they were merely CEOs and we boards of their corporations, we could but fire them. But alas, history is not so tidy, or just. Instead, we can only look back and remember those destructive epochs and learn from them so that they might never again be repeated. Of all of these disturbing times, few were as nihilistic as the 30-years War. Mr. Wilson demonstrates this in exhaustive and soul-crushing detail.
Declared in Bohemia by the dramatic defenestration of two officials of the Holy Roman Emperor, and ended three decades later with the Peace of Westfalia, the 30-years War (1618-1648) was a savage conflict that convulsed most of Europe. Staged primarily in the Germanic states, it was the seemingly inevitable manifestation of long-simmering tensions between protestants and catholics, each of whom were compelled by circumstance to uncomfortably coexist in a largely Catholic empire. Though the Peace of Augsburg (1555) had sought to avoid this conflict by acknowledging Protestantism and Catholicism as official religions of the Holy Roman Empire, and by granting the princes of each of its 225 states the power to choose the dominant religion in his state, this peace would last only 60 years until the imperial elevation of the staunchly Catholic Ferdinand. Fearing that Ferdinand would betray the Augsburg peace, the protestants rebelled, triggering this long and terrible war that killed eight million people, deforested much of western Europe, lead to famine and disease that reduced by half the populations within the conflict zones, and drew in the kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, France and Spain before the last gun was fired, the last sword swung.
For all of its destructiveness, for all of the price in blood and grief paid so that princes and kings could play at war, some good emerged from this conflict. The Peace of Westfalia formalized the notion of a sovereign state whose laws would have to be adhered to by all of its constituents; it ended the era of mercenary warfare popularized by Italian feuds, ushering in national armies to replace them; and, perhaps most significantly, it cemented the existence of the Dutch Republic and ruined the fortune of the Spanish Empire, events which helped to catalyze the rise of mercantile capitalism over authoritarian imperialism, setting into motion a 200-year trend that would eventually lead to the end of a world of competing empires.
This is a long and difficult tale, involving dozens of countries, hundreds of captains, and thousands of skirmishes. Consequently, we must cut Mr. Wilson some slack in the length of his telling. Nonetheless, while his thousand-page account is academically rigorous, its mind-numbing tedium makes it a nearly impossible read. Europe's Tragedy reads like the worst university textbook, an interminable bore so chalked full of dates and battles, kings and whores, captains and criminals, that the unanchored mind flails for something, anything, to grab onto in order to avoid being swept away by outgoing tides of data. Mr. Wilson possesses absolutely no capacity for distinguishing the crucial from the insignificant. Instead, he includes every detail, every shred of information, packing his work until its seams are stressed to the breaking. Whatever value this work had, whatever effort it made to educate, is lost in an undifferentiated sea of minutia.
This is an important war that proved to be a turning point in human history. Mr. Wilson does the conflict justice by thoroughly covering its every twist and turn. This service, this accomplishment, should be acknowledged and appreciated. But we learn best through stories, through narratives. Hell, we learn best wen our eyes haven't blurred over from a sea of charts and ink. Therefore, as much as Mr. Wilson has succeeded in presenting us a history of the 30-years War, he has failed utterly to make us care about, much less to immerse us in, its times. This is a flaw I cannot forgive. (2/5 Stars)
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