Peter H. Wilson (1)Rezensionen

"Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500" by Peter H. Wilson is a thoroughly researched and comprehensive book about the military history of the German-speaking people, if you couldn't guess from the title. It is a detailed exploration of war, political creation, and destruction that has shaped the German-speaking people for the past four centuries.

The book begins with an introduction that explains the historical forces that united the German states into a political entity, while also giving a brief history of the concept of German-speaking people and discussing what distinguishes it from the political entity that is Germany.

The book provides a detailed examination of the wars of the past and shows how development in military strategy, tactics, and technology enabled them to repeatedly succeed in warfare. Wilson provides vivid accounts of significant battles throughout history,

Wilson also shows how Germany's military ability influenced the global political landscape. He details how different military leaders' decisions influenced the evolution of warfare. The book explores the moral and ethical dimensions of German militarism, which contribute to the development of their strategies and tactics.

The narrative style of the book is engaging and detailed, making it accessible to readers. The book is not just about military history but also explores social, political, and cultural aspects.

Overall, "Iron and Blood" is a comprehensive and informative work that offers a detailed view of the German-speaking people's military history and its impact on global politics. The book is recommended for students of military history, cultural history, and politics.

History, Holy Roman Empire, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, War,

This is the third big, fat, impressive-looking volume of European history written by Peter Wilson and published by Harvard University Press. I bought the previous two and let them languish on the shelf, but Iron and Blood caught my attention, and I finished reading it a few months after purchasing it.

I think a lot of people would find this book to be too dry for their tastes, but I liked its dispassionate approach. For some reason, I also liked the way it presented broad, authoritative-sounding statements, one after another. They made me think, and often I ended up feeling that they conveyed important truths. As for concrete content, I think (for example) that it corrected faulty notions I had had about the unique military competence of Prussia, and also about the nature of Swiss neutrality.

When the book finally got up to the Nazi era, it seemed that Wilson had reached the limits of what he could address dispassionately. It was for this section that I subtracted half a point, because I felt that a little sloppiness slipped in:

1) On page 669, Wilson suggests that its success in the Spanish Civil War made Germany overconfident about the ease of carrying out aerial bombing of citizens. But on page 675, he says that German experience in that war "instilled false confidence in [the] effectiveness" of anti-aircraft artillery. It's hard to see how Germany could overestimate both sides of this equation.

2) On page 589, Wilson says: "The conservatives and Catholic Centre Party regrouped as the Christian Democratic Union (CDU - with its Bavarian sister party, the CSU)". But on page 696, he says: "The political right expressly reconstituted itself as Christian (the CDU and CSU)". I think the Catholic Centre Party was clearly and sincerely already Christian.

3) On page 700, Wilson first plays up the fact that "around 2,100 of the 35,000 long-service professionals" in the Bundeswehr were members of the "anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party". But later in the same paragraph he says that AfD allegiance among the Bundeswehr is less than that among the general population. Why even bother bringing it up then?

4) On page 672, Wilson writes that the deliberate targeting of German citizens by Allied bombers "fed into Germany's post-war sense of victimhood". On page 722, Wilson writes that the rape of 2 million German women by Red Army soldiers "reinforced Germans' sense of victimhood". On page 732, Wilson writes that the Soviet Union's retention of German civilians as slave laborers 11 years after the end of WWII "fuelled Germany's post-war victim narrative". To me, this incessant slant is offensive.½

More about historiography than giving a summary of the period. It was still interesting and makes me want to tackle "Heart of Europe" !

If you like your history bone dry, this is the book for you! Clearly superior to a series of Wikipedia entries, so who can complain? The notes for the most part refer to secondary sources, but hey, there are an awful lot of them. Wilson has wisely included lists of the emperors and kings in the back of the book, without which most readers would be lost. Some will surely be lost anyway. There were times when I had that feeling – e.g. whenever he lumped several centuries together. Besides this tendency to generalize across the centuries, there is also that of simply piling fact upon fact, and to forego such things as narrative and chronology. The latter, Wilson writes, "would be unfeasibly long" – but is found, to a degree, in Part III (Governance) and also in the last couple of chapters of Part IV, as well as in the Appendix - but narrative only occasionally.

I am quite stubborn, which is proven by the fact that I actually did finish this book. There were times when I feared it might be my bane. It clearly has the potential at least. For in case you are not sufficiently awestruck by the Holy Roman Empire, not to worry. Wilson will do his best to try to reduce you to a dazed, trembling mess. One way he achieves this is by jumping around in time like a squirrel on amphetamine. At one point I only figured out from the footnote that he had moved a century ahead from where he was just a couple of sentences ago.

And at times he writes the strangest things:
"The Ludowinger family inherited (...) the castles of Neuburg on the Unstrut and the Wartburg, the latter made famous in 1817 as the venue for the gathering of German liberal-nationalist students." (p. 374) - Really? He’s just pulling your leg here – it most definitely was made famous around three centuries earlier – which is surely why they gathered there in the first place.
I also note that this has actually been changed in the Belknap-edition, messing it up all over again. There it reads: "...and the Wartburg, the latter made famous in 1517 when Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses on its chapel door." – Wouldn’t it have been witty if Luther had ridden out to the Wartburg to invite the Burgherr to participate in the disputation? Sure! But sorry, no, he did no such thing. He arrived there only in 1521, exhausted, constipated, and most probably also rather anxious.

From this you can perhaps better see my point, when I state that in approaching "the material like an eagle flying over the Empire" (p. 5) – we often fly so high that details tend to disappear, and even emperors, princes and centuries get blurred together – and just as this reader was starting to wonder whether we would ever hear anything about the masses of people within the Empire below the ranks of, say, lesser nobility, we finally got there in Part IV. Our tour guide, Peter Wilson (a.k.a. ‘The Eagle’), here continues to be as bureaucratic in his approach as ever, and we get lots and lots of numbers. He displays his impeccable British humour only rarely, but you can sense that it is there when, to illustrate how change was also "stimulated by lordly pressures," an anecdote is offered about the bishop of Paderborn who had peasants beaten for laziness, and "once had one woman dragged on her bottom across her garden until it was clear of weeds." (p. 490) There are a couple more anecdotes in the book - but far too few. It's the same thing here as with the general lack of real narrative - there is simply very little that can help you keep all this information in your memory. The illustrations are good and helps a bit though. It seems Wilson’s mind works somewhat like a computer. Mine, alas, does not. I would happily have read twice the amount of pages if only more chronology and more good old-fashioned narrative had been offered.

Take the topic of Justice. This is treated in chapter 12 (which, by the way, offered surprisingly little about the reception of Roman Law within the Empire.) There had been ample opportunity to bring much of this up earlier, but no. Wilson is adamant. The problem is that it’s not always easy remember back and be able to connect it to those particular historical circumstances when you had a specific need for this information hundreds of pages ago. Perhaps I should have read the book backwards? - I have been moaning about this book since I first started reading it, and when I nevertheless give it a fairly good rating you may think that I have exaggerated a lot in what I’ve written. That would be a mistake. It is the most challenging book I have read in a long time.



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My expectations for this monograph were, shall we say, indeterminate. I've seen very good books published in this series. I've seen books that are best described as "meh." This is one of the very good ones, in that Wilson packs in a great deal of data and insight, describing the strategic state of play, analyzing the battle itself, and considering how the meaning of the battle evolved over time, down to the present day. The short version is that Lutzen was probably a tactical "Imperialist" victory, but since both armies had been badly smashed up, and the Swedes were allowed to retain the field of battle, it went down as a Protestant victory. The last is the key point, in that a big chunk of the book is devoted to how Gustavus Adolphus was transformed into an exemplary hero for those of the Lutheran persuasion. Much of this might be old news to those who have already read Wilson's books about the Holy Roman Empire and the Thirty Years War, but I'm now inclined to move those books way up in priority on my reading list.

Deep and comprehensive. Almost too comprehensive — there's a cast of thousands here, and keeping all the real historical personages straight was very difficult. But a good introduction to an important and overlooked period of history.

A beautifully designed book that is almost entirely unreadable: less a monograph than an encyclopedia. There is, no doubt, very good reason to write the history of the HRE in this order (Sections: Ideal, Belonging, Governance, Society). Wilson gets to avoid the perils of Great Man History (i.e., it's totally fatuous), and the perils of Materialist History (i.e., it's totally fatuous). He gets to privilege the very hip no-really-ideas-matter-a-lot perspective of contemporary history.

The form doesn't really help in what seems to be the main goal of this book, which is to convince people that old historiography of the HRE is wrong to see it as a doddering mess always holding back the development of nation states. It is, you'll be surprised to learn, more complex than that. All well and good; do we need to be reminded in every section? In every chapter? Every part of every chapter? Yes, because that's the only thing holding this mass of small bits together. Otherwise it is a compendium of short essays on various topics, each one very worthwhile, but on the whole utterly unreadable. A better way to hold them together would have been some sense of narrative, but that would have required a more traditionally chronological book, which would have vitiated all that great avoiding the Great Men and avoiding the Materialists stuff.

Unless that stuff isn't really all that much of a worry, when the third option is a collection of very well-researched, cutting edge wikipedia entries on, e.g., the position of the Hohenzollerns in the Prussian governance systems between 1680 and 1700, particularly when Wilson has literally one sentence structure available to him: clause, but anti-clause, at the same time synthesis clause.

Two things to note: Wilson clearly knows a lot about his subject matter, and I'd love to take a class with him on it. And there's a chronology at the back of the book, f0r mere mortals like me who can't handle the constant flipping between time periods. It's 54 pages long, detailed, but focused. If only the book had more in common with that.

How do you review what is pretty clearly the work of decades? When you’re not entirely sure you understood everything, because there was just so much to understand?

About how you write such a book, I think: by compartmentalizing.

First, some explanation, though, because the Holy Roman Empire isn’t that well-known of a historical entity. Basically, we’re talking about German-speaking Europe with some extra bits—northern Italy, bits of Poland, bits of France, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Hungary—between the late 700s to the early 1800s. (Napoleon ruins everything.) The HRE was a pretty big deal in a lot of ways too, like, part of the “Holy” and “Roman” was that many Emperors either chose the Pope or protected the Pope and the Church.

As you can maybe guess by that half-joke, this doesn’t have the structure I’d expected. Wilson starts at the beginning and ends at the end, yes, but he does this multiple times, running through the changes of dynasty and ideas of kingship, the wider political structures and wars, the social order, and the justice system so that the reader gets a good sense of how one state of affairs lead directly into another, but less sense of concurrent events. For instance, he’ll discuss an emperor’s ruling style in one section, the war he was fighting in another, and the peasant uprisings he was contending with in a third. Honestly, I’m kind of impressed how well Wilson manages to remind the reader of information, but it’s not perfect and when I need to reference this book in the future, I will be very grateful for the timeline of events, the genealogies, and the index.

I’m equally impressed by the amount of research and synthesis Wilson’s done. Even if he didn’t read through all the tax records and law codes and contemporary political writings himself, he has to have all the articles and books that discuss them, and to have read a whole lot of 19th and 20th century histories of the Empire to boot—and then somehow he’s managed to write a narrative in reasonably non-academic English. It’s still pretty dense and dry, but the book gives a good overview of the Empire in all its facets without getting bogged down in details (and yes, the names of kings, emperors, and popes are frequently details, that’s how macro this book gets).

Those two points alone are enough for me to call this a solidly good history book and to recommend this to people genuinely interested in the topic, but then we come to Wilson’s thesis, which honestly? I wasn’t expecting to get. I enjoyed seeing him pointing out the more than a little biased historical readings out there, the ones that, say, apply a 19th century idea of a nation state and political identities to the past and find the 1100s decidedly lacking, and seeing him point out, at the same time, that not only was the 1100s in the HRE about the same as the neighbouring countries, but that in many ways, the fluid, flexible, “works for us” structure of the Empire gave it more stability over time than other regions of Europe. Probably Wilson comes with his own biases—he certainly is passionate about his subject—but it’s also a bias that works for me.

So those are a few of the biggest things I took away from reading this: the overall history of the Holy Roman Empire and how it was structured and run; the Empire more or less in context of the rest of European history; and the ways history can be misdirected but also interrogated. I also learned a lot about historical political systems and social orders in general, and have a better idea of what Europe looked like in the past when it wasn’t being British or, occasionally, French. There were also a number of wars and uprisings that I’d only heard vaguely of or didn’t have the historical run-up to (like the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War) which I have a much better idea of now.

If you quizzed me on any particular aspect, though, a month from finishing this and nearly three from starting it, I’d be hard-pressed to give more than a vague answer. There’s too much scope in the book for that. I was a little disappointed too that Wilson assumes the reader has a decent general understanding of European history, and will mention the Pope fleeing to Avignon or a monarch outside of the Empire or a war without filing you in on context except for how it relates to the Empire. (And that he scraps a lot of social history in favour of politics.) Can’t say I really blame him, since this book is already 1000 pages long, but all the same. It’s something to go in aware of, I think.

In sum: this book was excellent. It does everything a history book of this scale should, does little if anything such a book shouldn’t do, contains more information than a human brain can retain in one go, and is, dare I say it only having read the one book on the topic, the definitive book on the Holy Roman Empire. If you’re interested in European history, medieval history, or anything else that the HRE touches on, especially if you’re working in an academic framework, this is an important book to have. I’ll definitely be rereading sections and working through the index when that one writing project comes up on the docket.

To bear in mind: This is a heavy book, in terms of both size and content. While the sentences are always readable, the paragraphs and sections often need time to sink in, and even if you’re an actual historian of the HRE or adjacent topics, I’d highly advise giving your brain a rest at least at the end of every section. Also, I spent most of my reading time with this either held in both hands or propped up on some object or other and I definitely strained my thumb at one point, so there’s also that.

Also, fair warning: there is reasonably frequent reference to historical Muslim peoples as a “threat” or “menace”, as in “the Ottomans are threatening our borders and political stability”, and also the occasional reference to or discussion of early medieval slavery, intra-European racism, poor treatment of women and peasants, war and famine, and similar things which I’m undoubtedly forgetting now but should probably be expected in a history book. Oh, and historians and political leaders using the HRE’s existence to support their own agendas.

9.5/10

Peter Wilson's book is about more than the war that consumed central Europe in the 17th century. To adequately explain the factors that led up to it and influenced its outcome, he describes the context of politics and government in the Holy Roman Empire. This vast, unwieldy, and yet surprisingly effective institution was at the center of the struggle, as Protestants and Catholics struggle to coexist within it in the years following the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. Fragile as it was, this peace was strained by the efforts of successive Habsburg emperors to strengthen their power within the empire, an effort that fueled Protestant anxieties that the Habsburgs would use this power to advance the Catholic faith at their expense.

Yet Wilson makes a persuasive argument that the war was more about politics than religion. Though confessional issues sparked the initial outbreak, the war often led to cross-confessional alliances that set co-religionists against each other. Here Wilson builds upon his extensive discussion of prewar politics to highlight the dynastic ambitions of people like Frederick V of Palatine and Maximilian of Bavaria and their efforts to use the war to advance their interests. Nobody exemplified this better than Gustavus Adolphus, the Swedish king whose intervention reversed the string of Imperial victories. Though his death deprived the rebels of their greatest leader, the war dragged on thanks to the support provided by the French, whose rise to European dominance coincided with the conflict.

All of this is described in an elaborate narrative designed to give the reader an understanding of the factors at work in the conflict and how the war turned out the way it did. The text is dense with the names of people and locations, yet this helps convey the considerable complexity of events. Simply put, this is the best history of the war available, and with remain the definitive source for anyone interested in the conflict for years to come.

Admirably scholarly but just too dense for any but the professional historian. C.V. Wedgewood's book on the same topic is far more accessible.

Very interesting. A wealth of information, but not easy to read.

The historian facing an unmanageably large topic has a few strategies open to her. She can knuckle down and simply plough through in chronological order – in the manner of, let's say, Diarmaid MacCulloch's History of Christianity (which is great). Another solution is to do what Simon Winder did in Danubia: throw up your hands and say, ‘Fuck it, this is impossible, so here's a few choice historical anecdotes and some postcards from my city-break to Vienna.’ This can work surprisingly well, too, if you can find a suitable prose style and if you don't mind surrendering any claim to writing an objective history.

Or you can do what Peter H. Wilson does here: abandon chronology altogether, and structure your book entirely thematically. It sounds logical but having read this, I don't think it really works. Arguably, the problem of trying to maintain a working timeline in your head is even worse than the problem of trying to maintain themes in your head when reading a chronological study. What happens here is that you leap centuries from one paragraph to the next in pursuit of details relating to (for instance) the empire's interaction with the papacy, but you never stay anywhere long enough to get a sense of the personalities or societies at play.

Frederick Barbarossa, the twelfth-century emperor, should have been a shoo-in for compelling hero: a dashingly handsome, multilingual polymath who rewrote law codes and led an army on the Third Crusade. Here, he's a nonentity who shuffles vaguely in and out at intervals of several hundred pages. Similarly, I've read a fair bit about Ferdinand II in books about the Thirty Years War, and was hoping to get a fuller picture of him: he remains a complete cipher. Social convulsions like the witchcraft craze or the Black Death might as well never have happened, and even such enormities as the Reformation only seem to feature when they intersect with one of Wilson's master-themes. I am told that the Nine Years War required the calling-up of 31,340 Kreistruppen – but when it comes to who they were fighting, or where, or why, I'm completely in the dark. Incidentally, am I the only one who cannot read any reference to the Schmalkaldic League without hearing it as a Jewish dismissal? ‘Balkaldic League? Schmalkaldic League!’

On page 490 of The Holy Roman Empire, Wilson pauses to note that Bishop Meinward of Paderborn ‘once had a woman dragged on her bottom across her garden until it was clear of weeds’. It's funny to see how this detail reappears in almost every printed review of the book – because it's the only thing even vaguely anecdotal in the whole one thousand pages. There is a huge lack of first-person sources – diaries, journals, letters, something to connect the history with real life. If you have a particular area of interest, and look it up in the index, then Wilson's book is sure to be very enlightening (I was interested in how Switzerland came about, and he's great on that subject). He's enlightening and thorough and admirable on loads of subjects. But the book's structure abandons any attempt at narrative history by definition – it leaves the whole thing working fairly well in an encyclopaedic way, but not as something to read through in sequence.

Perhaps the most interesting and important sections are Part Two, which discusses the geographical entities that made up the Empire (why he delays this for so long is beyond me), and the last section where Wilson looks at the empire's reputation in subsequent historiography. Through the blunt force of repetition, his central argument is at least pretty clear: that the empire, as a decentralised entity with multiple sites of power (Germany still doesn't have a single dominant metropolis), did not fit the emerging model of sovereign states – but that it worked rather well all the same, and might be a useful study for contemporary structures like the European Union.

This is a counterargument to the traditional view, which is that it was already an inefficient and moribund dinosaur when Napoleon put it out of its misery in 1806. Adolf Hitler often talked about the Holy Roman Empire for a rhetorical contrast to his own vision of a united Germany, and at one point sent an internal memo that people should stop referring to Germany as the ‘Third Reich’ because it would put people in mind of the hopelessness of the first empire. (Which is ironic, considering that one of the things that has interfered with reassessments of the Holy Roman Empire is the fact that the very word Reich, even in German, has become tainted by Nazism.)

I think overall this book feels like a necessary, but sometimes tedious, laying-out of the groundwork, presenting a lot of otherwise inaccessible German historiography to an English audience and bringing the conversation up to date. It does a really good job of that, but I am definitely looking forward to future writers who can build on this work to do something with a bit more narrative power – because it really is an interesting story, to have this huge and very unusual ‘state’ that was right in the middle of Europe for a thousand years, and then almost completely forgotten.

Nowadays, with Brexit hurtling towards us, the debate is split between people who are ‘pro-Europe’ and people who are ‘anti-Europe’ – but both sides, Wilson points out, are ‘bound by the same understanding of the state as a single, centralized monopoly of legitimate power over a recognized territory. This definition is a European invention, retrospectively backdated to the Peace of Westphalia…’. The Holy Roman Empire was qualitatively different, and including such differences might be a crucial necessity for modern politics. It's a fascinating idea, but in the end I don't think you really need to push through this whole thing to get the point.

hen the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V besieged Metz in 1522 the city taunted him with a banner emblazoned with the imperial eagle chained between two pillars. These represented the ancient pillars of Hercules, the border of the known world at the straits of Gibraltar, where a notice warned “Non plus ultra” – “no further beyond”. Charles had adopted the motto “Plus ultra” to emphasise his imperial power, so underneath the restrained eagle, the defenders of Metz wrote “Non plus Metas”, meaning both “not beyond Metz” and “not beyond the boundaries”.

For an entire millennium, from 800 to 1806, from its birth with Charlemagne to its death at the hands of Napoleon, the Holy Roman Empire’s borders defined the heart of Europe. As the dust jacket for Peter Wilson’s new book puts it, Europe made “no sense without it”. Centred on Germany, it also encompassed much of what is now France, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia and Italy.

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Yet for over two centuries, the empire has had a bad reputation. Voltaire disparaged it as not holy, not Roman, and not an empire. James Madison deemed its institutions “feeble”, its history one of “general imbecility, confusion, and misery”. And Leopold von Ranke, father of the modern study of history, thought it one long decline and failure. With exhaustive detail, Wilson argues that these titanic figures were wrong. He encourages us to reassess the history of Europe with an empire state of mind.

Wilson, who is Chichele professor of the history of war at Oxford, makes the complex understandable, but the sheer depth and daunting length of the book – and its focus on ideas and institutions rather than individuals and stories – may mean that only the most motivated non-academic readers are likely to reach the end. For those who do, there are many interesting and provocative ideas.

A patchwork of principalities, free cities, archbishoprics, confederations, grand duchies and even full kingdoms, the imperial system worked surprisingly well. Neither a “single command chain nor a neat pyramid”, it was instead a framework, focused on consensus not coercion, accepting rather than rationalising anomalies and diversity. Its guiding principle was “workable compromise” (in practice, often fudge) but it was not impotent: pioneering the first commercial postal service is one of many examples of the empire’s highly developed governance.



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This decentralised structure was supported and reinforced by a multicentred society. Unlike the national dominations of London and Paris, the empire had many different concentrations of power, business and culture: Vienna, Prague, Antwerp, Hamburg, Augsburg, Milan. Power was “local and particular”, not universal or linear. Ordered imperial society encompassed diverse peoples and corporate groups, and the empire’s role was to protect their patterns and hierarchies. It survived centuries of change, the schism of the Reformation, and even the catastrophe of the thirty years’ war. As one of its last chancellors commented, while it “might not conform to all the building regulations”, it was a “permanent Gothic structure … in which one lives securely”.

Instead of criticising it for the lack of a centralised state, Wilson’s focus is how the empire’s territories and groups generally succeeded on their own terms. While there were many failures of consensus – endless tolls restricting trade; dozens of shifting currencies; outdated fiscal structures – it is only in hindsight or ideology that the 18th-century empire appears as dying. While not overlooking the destabilising effect of Prussian and Austrian expansion, Wilson shows that the growth of territorial states was integrated within the imperial framework, rather than destroying it from the inside out. Had Napoleon not intervened, the empire could have persisted well into the 1800s until it felt the “leveling and homogenising forces” of industrialisation.

The empire has often flummoxed scholars because its history is so difficult to tell. After 24 volumes explaining the imperial constitution the 18th-century legal scholar Johann Jakob Moser effectively gave up, concluding that “Germany is governed in the German way”. A comprehensive narrative of the empire’s millennium would consume a small forest – Joachim Whaley’s excellent recent history of its last 300 years required two volumes – and be dizzyingly complicated.

To escape such pitfalls, Wilson takes an approach somewhat reminiscent of Marc Bloch’s 1939 classic Feudal Society, assessing the institution in its entirety (“like an eagle flying over the empire”). Rather than telling a chronological story, Wilson asks what it was, “how it worked, why it mattered” and inquires into its legacy for today. The book is structured in four parts: ideal, belonging, governance and society. It is a challenging format, but it allows conceptual analysis that would be impossible in a linear narrative.

Wilson aims to avoid the pervasive idea of history as a road to modernity, a tradition that often relegates the empire to the slow lane while England races ahead. Indeed he argues that “the empire’s greatest posthumous influence lay in how criticism of its structures created the discipline of modern history’: ideas of progress and national histories have coloured our view of it ever since. The empire did not “fail” to build a centralised German state or nation because “no one felt either needed building”.

Rather than a distant irrelevance, the empire was an important focus of attachment for its people. Individuals and groups had multiple identities within an imperial framework of solidarities and hierarchies. A Berliner could be a Lutheran, a city burgher, a father, a guildsman, and a Prussian. Many weaker groups, such as religious minorities and those with grievances against their rulers, saw the empire as protection from the strong. Far from it being just “German”, Wilson emphasises the overlooked engagement of Czechs, Italians and others in the imperial framework, all the way through to its end.

Not many books stretch from Charlemagne to Ukip, but today’s multinational European framework is central to Wilson’s epilogue on the empire’s afterlife. The EU shares many of the its structures – permeable boundaries, multilayered jurisdictions – and its problems: Byzantine complexity, a reliance on fudge. Yet while Eurofederalists and Eurosceptics both see political institutions as centralising rulers of hermetically sealed areas, the empire reminds us that that was not Europe’s past, and – with disenchantment in our current model of democracy – is unlikely to be its future.

Wilson argues that legitimacy can come from debate, not just votes; citizenship from civil society, not just formal rights; and that politics can be a multicentred process of consensus bargaining. He is too good a historian to suggest that the empire – with its stark pre-modern hierarchies and inequalities – is a blueprint for today. But he is right to suggest that it could help us understand current problems more clearly

Libro fondamentale per la comprensione dell'idea di SRI così come si è evoluta nel tempo in contrapposizione con le idee fondanti degli altri imperi precedenti o contemporanei come, fra gli altri, impero romano, impero persiano, impero ottomano, impero zarista, regno di Francia e, soprattutto, la chiesa romana. Libro di approfondimento, quindi di non immediata comprensione per chi si avvicina all'argomento senza nozioni storiche precedenti sui temi trattati.

Winner of the Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award 2011 The horrific series of conflicts known as the Thirty Years War (1618-48) tore the heart out of Europe, killing perhaps a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to whole areas of Central Europe to such a degree that many towns and regions never recovered. All the major European powers apart from Russia were heavily involved and, while each country started out with rational war aims, the fighting rapidly spiralled out of control, with great battles giving way to marauding bands of starving soldiers spreading plague and murder. The war was both a religious and a political one and it was this tangle of motives that made it impossible to stop. Whether motivated by idealism or cynicism, everyone drawn into the conflict was destroyed by it. At its end a recognizably modern Europe had been created but at a terrible price. Peter Wilson's book is a major work, the first new history of the war in a generation, and a fascinating, brilliantly written attempt to explain a compelling series of events. Wilson's great strength is in allowing the reader to understand the tragedy of mixed motives that allowed rulers to gamble their countries' future with such horrifying results. The principal actors in the drama (Wallenstein, Ferdinand II, Gustavus Adolphus, Richelieu) are all here, but so is the experience of the ordinary soldiers and civilians, desperately trying to stay alive under impossible circums

Heart of Europe is one of those books which can rightfully be called a tome: a sprawling history of the Holy Roman Empire from its beginnings with Charlemagne to its dismantling by Napoleon to the ways in which the Empire has been used and abused by modern historians and politicians. I'm giving it a four stars out of five largely out of sheer respect for the mastery of such a wide range of sources and scholarship that are needed to write such a work. Peter Wilson is clearly steeped in knowledge about central Europe, and I think his central argument—that the HRE shouldn't be dismissed as a ramshackle, inefficient failure because it doesn't look like a modern nation state, but rather assessed on its own terms as a decentralised system that embraced consensus, diverse identities, and local variation—is broadly persuasive.

However, Wilson's writing perhaps mimics the HRE a little too much. By eschewing the Grand Narrative/Big Man view of history (again, something I'm broadly sympathetic to), Wilson must fall back on exploring the HRE through the development of ideas and institutions. That could have worked, but Wilson's tendency to mention every name, date, battle, or other event that relates to the matter at hand means that it's sometimes hard to see the wood for the trees. I found it a bit of a slog at times, and I'm a historian; I'm pretty sure Heart of Europe would be very tedious for the general reader, particularly if they have no prior knowledge of the history of the HRE. Still, as an encyclopaedic guide to the HRE and its historiography, it's sure to become the standard reference work on the topic.

Despite having read many books about European history, I still had only the haziest idea about what the Holy Roman Empire was. The Wikipedia entry for it very helpfully carries a warning at the head of the page that readers should not confuse it with ‘The Roman Empire’, so I took consolation that I was not alone.

Peter Wilson’s comprehensive book resolves any uncertainties about the nature, extent, achievements and ultimate decline of the Holy Roman Empire. He has produced a deeply researched and clearly written history, from its roots encompassing the western relic of the original Roman Empire. The general consensus dates the start of the Holy Roman Empire to Christmas Day, 800, when Charlemagne, King of the Franks, was crowned Emperor by Pope Leo III. This cemented one of the key relationships that would characterise the history of the Empire. The Emperor and the Pope found themselves in a form of symbiosis, with each dependent upon, though contributing to, the authority and status of the other.

Oddly, the term ‘Holy Roman Empire’ did not emerge until the thirteenth century, because the status of the emperor relied to a considerable extent upon the kudos derived from association with the original empire. It also marked an intriguing early experiment in the concept of international federation. The various lands making up the Holy Roman Empire all had their own, largely autonomous rulers, with the German ‘Prince Electors’ electing one of their number to be elevated to Emperor.

Wilson handles his material well. His exposition is clear, and his prose is engaging. The subject is complicated, not least because of the plethora of unfamiliar names, many of them recast through several different languages, but Wilson retains the reader’s attention, peppering his account with amusing, often bizarre anecdotes.

In his book "Europe's Tragedy", author Peter H Wilson skilfully navigates the ever-changing patchwork of lands, estates and religions in the sixteenth century for us. He leaves us in no doubt that this was a very messy period in European history, where allegiances were switched, and sometimes switched back again, on the whim, beliefs or inclinations of the rulers and power-brokers of that day.

Allied to these changes, as well, were developments in military theory and technology, which the author also covers, including the surprising (to me) revelation that poison gas shells were used in the Netherlands as early as the 1590's.

A very comprehensive exposition of the state of Europe leading up to the 30 Years' War is followed by an equally thorough chronology of the conflict itself, from the Bohemian Revolt of 1618-20 to the Westphalia Settlement of 1648.

Finally, an assessment of the Peace of Westphalia is given, and in particular its methods and ideals (rather than the conflicts it resolved, not always successfully), and as a marker for future international development.

Peter Wilson's book is also richly illustrated, and includes a map of Central Europe in 1618 showing the then boundaries of the holy Roman Empire and the patchwork of other empires, kingdoms and territories in and around it.

This is a detailed and scholarly study into this often overlooked part of European history.

I am currently reading this book and struggling in the process. The thirty years war is intrinsically confusing (e.g. there are dozens of figures with shifting alliances and borders and everyone seems to be named Frederick or Ferdinand). This book manages to make a confusing epoch even more confusing.

My personal feeling is that this book really does contain the right level of detail but the details are presented in ways that maximize confusion. For example, within one paragraph, events jump from one end of Europe to the other based upon references to obscure little villages.

I would recommend this book only for people that already know the subject in detail and have a commanding knowledge of the geography and villages of Europe.

This is really complicated 30 years of religious war. His conclusion is that people were cynically manipulated by way of religion to fight for the elite. It was, like any other war, a rich man's war and a poor man's fight which in 1648 left thousands of men without hope or a trade, they have only learned fighting.

5253. The Thirty Years War Europe's Tragedy, by Peter H. Wilson (read 10 Mar 2015) Even though I read and hugely appreciated C. V. Wedgwood's book on the 30 Years War--it was my Book of the Year in 1968--I thought I should read this more recent book. It is indeed a formidable work (852 pages of text, 72 pages of Notes) but I found it much less enjoyable since it drowns one in detail. Not only do we have maps of the famous battles (which battles I remembered well from my class in Modern European History taught by Father Bill Green at Loras in 1946-1947) White Mountain in 1620, Breitendfeld in 1631, Nordlingen in 1634, but we also have accounts and maps of 22 other battles. I confess I felt overwhelmed by detail which no doubt would be appreciated by a war gamer but I felt it did not hold my interest well. After the book opens with an account of the Defenestration of Prague on May 23, 1618, it is not till page 269 that the war begins--the lead-up to the war was not that necessary, I could not help but feel. The book certainly shows the dire effects of the war on the areas of Europe affected, and there is much about the account full of interest. But I am not eager to read more about the war after slogging through these pages.

Well writtten but nevertheless heavy going because of its extremely detailed character, with every movement of troops, opinions, positions listed. A bit too much of a good thing

Nine hundred pages on one of the bloodiest wars in European history. A considerable portion of Germans, when polled, consider this to be the worst war in Germany's history, including both World Wars!

Perfect Christmas-time reading.

This is a very thorough one-volume overview of the Thirty Years War, providing some 290 pages of background before finally reaching the Defenestration of Prague.

The machinations of the Swedes, the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs, the French, and the separate duchies, kingdoms, and bishoprics of the Holy Roman Empire are a bit hard to follow at times, although the author does try extremely hard to make it all follow some chronology. The battles and tactics are described well, as is society before, during, and the aftermath of this long struggle.

Out of all of this mess, the Dutch finally received their independence, and the very idea of the nation-state was born, perhaps being the spark of the whole modern era in Europe. Out of the hottest crucibles of war, the Enlightenment rose.

Mr. Wilson has a gift, somewhat unequalled for the time period he cares for; that of making clear to the reader extraordinarily complex events.

He reexamines them under the light of the Holy Roman Empire and those leaders Gustave Adolphe of Sweden, Louis XIV of France and the Ottomans who use their maces, canons or swords to hit at its fringes.

Whether religious, economical, legal, fiscal, societal or military his analyses give the reader the clues to understand.
Wilson's touch on events is never boring as too many history books give dates, places and events without concern for how dainty they can be to absorb.

Particularly well described is the importance of the "Spanish Road", how the cost of the military could contribute to the demise of an empire, that of Philip III of Spain while the Dutch were wiser in the administration of their resources.
Now it may be granted that when you wake up in the morning the importance of the Peace of Vervins signed on May 2 1598 between Henry IV of France and Philip II of Spain may escape you, but like all the events of this period, they changed the landscape to bring us closer to the Europe we now know.
If you like history without the squeamishness, you will like the Thirty Years War; Europe's Tragedy and fly through its 997 pages.