Continent in carnage

The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy
By Peter H. Wilson
(Belknap/Harvard, 997 pages, $35)




The war fought between 1618 and 1648 remains, by many measures, the most destructive in Europe's history. During those years the Holy Roman Empire—which governed most of the European continent east of the Rhine—lost as many as eight million subjects, or a staggering 20% of its population. This amount to three times Europe's death rate during World War II. Whole swaths of central Europe were depopulated, abandoned to wild pigs and wolves.

Among continental Europeans, the Thirty Years War is etched in memory, immortalized by the stormy prose of Friedrich Schiller, who in the late 18th century published a multi-volume Sturm und Drang history of the war. In the English-speaking world, the closest we have to a classic narrative is Veronica Wedgewood's stylish, if outmoded, history of 1938. A definitive account has been needed, and now Peter Wilson, one of Britain's leading historians of Germany, has provided it.