It is often claimed that Samuel Pufendorf, the eminent seventeenthcentury jurist and historian, was the first to coin the term 'The Thirty Years' War' to describe the series of conflicts which ravaged Europe between 1618 and 1648. That phrase certainly appears in his book, The Present State of Germany, first published in 1667; but by then it was hardly new. In May 1648, even before the fighting stopped, one of the delegates at the Westphalian Peace Congress spoke of 'the Thirty Years' War' that had ravaged his country; and in 1649 the English weekly newspaper The Moderate Intelligencer began to publish a series of articles entitled 'An epitome of the late Thirty Years' War in Germany'. Issue 203, dated 8 February 1649, summarized the 'Bohemian war', 1618-23; issue 204 followed with the Dutch phase of the war; issue 205 covered the Danish phase; and so on. Within three months of the signature of the peace of Westphalia, which brought the war to an end in October 1648, English readers were thus provided with a framework for interpreting the war which was recognizably modern. At the same time, a similar service was provided for German readers in a pamphlet in that language entitled 'A short chronicle of the Thirty Years' War', which not only gave the dates and places of the major military actions but also offered a rough calculation of the losses of life and property caused by the conflict.1
But, in the seventeenth century, historians were rarely as free from bias as their modern-day descendants claim to be. All of the publications discussed above were composed by Protestants who had an interest in emphasizing that the various wars fought in Europe during the decades following 1618 were linked together in a single struggle in defence of religious and constitutional liberty. They sought to justify retrospectively the rebellion of Bohemia in 1618-21 against Emperor Ferdinand II by reference to his subsequent behaviour. At the time, the Bohemians' cause seemed far from just to many observers - which is why so many Protestants princes refused to support it. Only afterwards, as Imperial strength increased and constitutional proprieties were forgotten, did they repent of their neutrality and oppose the Habsburgs themselves. Thus rewriting the history of the war helped to salve their consciences. When Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, claimed in 1628 that 'All the wars that are on foot in Europe have been fused together and have become a single war', he was in part expressing a wish that it should be so, since it helped to justify the transfer of his armies from Poland and Livonia to Germany.2
Catholic Europe, however, saw matters otherwise. One of the Habsburgs' official historians, Eberhard Wassenberg, published an interim account of the war in 1639 which handled each campaign as yet another unjustified attack on the emperor: its title ran 'Commentary upon the wars between Ferdinand II and III and their enemies'. Wassenberg's account of 'the Danish War' of 1625-9 was accompanied by descriptions of 'the other Austrian War' (i.e. the 1626 Peasants' Revolt), 'the third Transylvanian War', 'the Dutch War', 'the Mantuan War' and so on. This was, perhaps, an extreme view; but even Catholics who lacked Wassenberg's neat, compartmentalized vision still perceived a grave difference between the campaigns up to 1629, in which the emperor was opposed principally by his own subjects with some foreign aid, and the struggle after 1630, in which he fought mainly against foreign powers whose German supporters were, at most times, few in number and limited in resources. Bishop Gepeckh of Freising (1618-51), in the heart of Bavaria, always distinguished in his correspondence between 'the Bohemian troubles' of the 1620s (little different in nature from the series of alarms and petty wars which had disturbed the peace of the Empire since the Augsburg Settlement of 1555), and 'this war' (which began with the Swedish invasion in 1630 and forced him to flee from his capital eight times before the peace was signed in 1648). For the bishop, the war lasted not thirty years but eighteen.3
These, of course, are the opinions of but half a dozen individuals. Now that all public archives for the period are open to historians, tens of thousands of opinions are available. In the Czech and Slovak Republics alone, twenty-seven repositories today possess important collections left by participants in the war; twenty folio volumes concerning just the Edict of Restitution, issued in 1629, are available in the Saxon archives alone; and so on. Admittedly, heroic efforts have been made to print some of the more important sources. No less than forty-five volumes are envisaged to publish in full the correspondence and negotiations generated by the peace of Westphalia; thirteen volumes will be needed to publish the edited correspondence of Maximilian I of Bavaria and his allies between 1618 and 1635; scores of volumes would be needed to calendar the relevant State Papers Foreign in the Public Record Office, London. And this still represents only a fragment of the available unpublished material. Everywhere, the war increased paperwork. In Protestant Bremen, the secretariat of the ruling archbishop-administrator had to be doubled in 1632 in order to cope with the exigencies of the armies in the area; and when, in the 1650s, the archives of the Catholic diocese of Würzburg were reclassified, two series were required - one 'pre-war', which stretched back into the mists of time; the other 'since the war began', which was of almost equal bulk.4
We live, as Lord Acton once predicted, in the 'documentary age... which will tend to make history independent of historians, to develop learning at the expense of writing'. Certainly, the miles of documents produced by a continent at war present a daunting challenge to stamina.5 Yet even superhuman dedication to archival research will not be enough, for the documentary records of the Thirty Years' War are written in too many different languages. The Habsburg Monarchy included a German, Czech and Hungarian chancery; the court of Spain maintained secretaries for correspondence in French, Dutch, German, Latin, Italian, Aragonese, Portuguese and Castilian; and there are documents in each tongue which refer to the war. It is true that, on the Protestant side, the lingua franca tended to be an inexorably verbose High German liberally peppered with Latinisms; but correspondence and state papers couched in Latin, Danish, Swedish, English and Dutch are also to be found in abundance. At the distant court of Bethlen Gabor, prince of Transylvania, documents concerning the war were composed in German, Hungarian, Romanian, Latin and (when the Ottoman Porte was concerned) Court Persian.
There have been a number of homeric attempts, despite the obvious problems, to provide an acceptable synthesis of this material. In the West, two of the most celebrated were produced on the eve of the Second World War: C. V. Wedgwood (in 1938) saw the struggle as essentially a German conflict influenced from time to time by the northern and western powers, while G. Pages (in 1939) seemed obsessed by the importance of France as the arbiter of Europe's destinies throughout the war, to the exclusion of almost all other considerations. In the East, similarly circumscribed views have been advanced by the Czech historian J. V. Polišenský (1971), who argued that events in his native Bohemia were at all times central; while the Russian B. F. Porshnev (1976) claimed that the climax of the war in 1630-41, when the Swedish armies dominated the Empire, could only be explained in terms of Russia's policy towards Poland.6 German historians have tended to be even more parochial: writers from Bavaria and Brandenburg, in particular, have tended to study the war in almost exclusively regional terms. There is nothing to rival the three-volume German synthesis of Moriz Ritter, A History of Germany During the Age of Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years' War 1555-1648, first published in 1889 and never translated. Since then, although there have been hundreds of studies of the conflict - almost all of them entitled (like this one) The Thirty Years' War - the persevering student of the subject looks almost in vain for a modern survey that pays attention not only to Germany, Scandinavia, England and France, but to Spain, Italy, Transylvania, Poland and the Netherlands as well.
The sole exception was published by an East German historian. Herbert Langer's The Thirty Years' War (Poole, 1981) offers a cultural history of Germany during the war based on little-known data drawn from all over continental Europe, with text and illustrations pleasingly integrated. But it is not a history of the war. Langer's book makes it possible for this volume to pass over most of the cultural impact of the war; but his study should be seen as a complement, not an alternative, to the present work, which seeks to provide a structured analysis of the conflict itself.
Not all periods are covered here in the same detail, because some periods - particularly the 1620s - are more complex than others.7 Moreover the text covers more than just Germany and more than just the thirty years: the war of Mantua and the Swedish campaigns in Poland are included because they were crucially important for developments in the Empire; and the narrative goes back to the 'Donauwörth incident' of 1607, which accelerated the polarization of Germany into hostile confessional camps, and stretches onwards to the final agreement in 1650, at Nuremberg, concerning the demobilization of the armies that still occupied Germany. Donauwörth to Nuremberg: on the ground barely 150 kilometres separate them, yet in history more than forty years of war and rumours of war lie between. Sometimes the conflict seemed to become so intense, and to involve so many states, that it has justly been termed 'the European Civil War'.8 To do justice to such turmoil within the framework of a single volume, without over-simplification or distortion, is not easy.