the thirty years war

this is surely the greatest thread ever to have been on ILX.

I read that book a while ago... I can't rememember all those people. The Cardinal Infanta (fightin' clergymen, I wuv em) is tempting, as is Wallenstein, Gustavus Adolphus, and many others. The Earl of Leven wins points for appearing in both this and CVW's books about the English-Scottish-Irish Civil Wars of the 1640s.

The best bit in that book is the description of Johann Georg of Saxony having dinner, so I will have to vote for him.

I think the book (and the war generally) would make a great TV series - it goes on and on, has great characters, and lots of blood. Not much in the way of women characters, sadly.

I know none of these people BUT there is a common turn of phrase that apparently dates back to the thirty years' war, that I had to look up for work, and turned out to be a mishearing by Polish soldiers of a French term, or something like that. I will find it!

Oh my goodness I should probably read this book. Because I don't even know where to begin, honestly.

xp yeah when i started the book i was joking to my girlfriend that it was going to be my "game of thrones" replacement--and then it turns out to be, well, kind of the same thing, only with no magic or dragons or anything.

the problem with turning it into a tv series though is that its so COMPLICATED and there are so many characters! through the whole book i was wishing that wedgwood had included a "cast list" or something, shell refer to people that i havent thought about for hundreds of pages by their last names and im like wait who was that

this list is from wikipedia btw, so it doesnt include people that wedgwood probably would have included, like axel oxenstierna

max you're always reading the most interesting things! i never know what i should read--how do you do it??

ta-nehisi coates is reading this book right now and it was on sale at the borders in providence for 30% off

Found it!!

The word "gauntlet" is derived from "gantelope", from the Swedish "gatlopp" (street run, street race); a loanword probably acquired by English soldiers during the Thirty Years' War. The modern spelling of "gauntlet" was influenced by the French-derived word used for a glove worn as protection or armour.

--------

Gantlet comes from the Swedish gatlopp, a running down a lane, from gata, street, lane, and lopp, course, running, wherefore a gantlet is (1) a lane between two lines of men who beat some unfortunate as he tries to run through it, as in ‘run the gantlet,’ and (2) a stretch of railroad track on which on which two sets of tracks overlap to avoid switching in a narrow place. [[note this 2nd meaning]]

Gauntlet comes from French gantelet, diminutive of gant, glove, wherefore a gauntlet is (1) a protective glove and (2) a challenge, as in ‘fling down the gauntlet,’ from the former use of the glove as a symbol of defiance.

I'm gonna vote for the Earl of Leven, on account of 1) being Scottish and 2) having a most excellent mustache. But most of them had excellent facial hair in the 17th Century and also he was a mercenary for some dour protestant dudes, but still. I've decided polls on lesser criteria in the past.

step 1 to finding books: read more blogs

I find reading PW also works. Even if I only like the sound of one book per issue, that's still every week, and that list gets big fast.

I read Wedgewood's book in May after falling in love with the NYROB edition – a marvelous read.

*Wedgwood

Killed more ppl as a percentage of population than any other war in German history.

Also, "defenestration"!

Voted Gustavus Adolphus, btw

At a journalism workshop held last Friday, a staff writer at one of our local papers and a good friend explained how he fought to get "defenestrate" in a crime story. When he noticed the blank looks on our students' faces he told the story of the monks.

"The victim got de-windowed"

I prefer exfenestrate, really

"The victim was given a dose of pane"

I read Wedgewood's book in May after falling in love with the NYROB edition – a marvelous read.

― a 'catch-all', almost humorous, 'Jeez' quality (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, August 17, 2011 10:10 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah this is the one i read--great cover with a detail from this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/The_Hanging_by_Jacques_Callot.jpg

"The victim was given a dose of pane"

lol

Killed more ppl as a percentage of population than any other war in German history.

Also, "defenestration"!

― returning the native population to its violent 18th-century high (Michael White), Wednesday, August 17, 2011 10:14 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

wikipedia sez "the male population of the German states was reduced by almost half"

staying local, voting Buckingham – incarnates early Stuart court mix of power-politics-sex-aesthetics - set up to catch James I's fancy, becoming astonishingly powerful as favourite, failed and farcical endeavours, public hatred, an assassination.

Frederick V in second place. There is a weird romantic charge to him & Elizabeth ( I mean deliberately constructed, yes, but it endures), the Winter King and Queen in exile.

DOn't really know a lot of the continental names. I keep meaning to have a serious reading session about the 30yw, but it's pretty miserable even to casually think about.

"Franz von Mercy" ftw IMO.

ive been reading about the war for acouple weeks now and i can recognize maybe 1/2 the names

Alsace-Lorraine

alsace-lorraine newman

Wallenstein, because he has a good social wargame named after him.

I read this last year and hated it- so dry and confusing. I heard good things about Wedgwood but never got around to it.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51DcVhOBfVL._SS500_.jpg

I'm voting for Christian of Denmark because the world loves a loser.

yeah, that's what I keep promising myself I'll read. I am a bit wary - modern historical prose can be a quagmire. Maybe I'll line up the Wedgwood instead.

wedgwood can be confusing--i mean the war is confusing, so--but shes anything but dry. i expected this to take me a couple months of drawn-out "when im in the mood" reading, but it flew by in a couple weeks

RIYL game of thrones

lol i wondered if this was why you were reading this!

lol i mean it isnt, really, but it is, kind of

ill tell you one thing, there are about 40x as many things going on in the 30 years war as i ASoIaF, and wedgwood manages to get it all done in 1 book

yes but how much do we know about frederick the fifth's incestuous relationship w/ his sister???

Been meaning to read this version of the Wedgwood book that's been sitting on my shelf for a while:

http://www.foliosociety.com/bookcat/9042/TYW/thirty-years-war

So maybe I will soon! The whole story really is headspinning and sad.

More even than the other wars of religion, this is a conflict I always bring up w/ppl who are sketchy about separation of church and state.

Pictures may help some people choose their favourite. Here is Gustavus Adolphus:

http://www.waylandgames.co.uk/images/uploads/warlord/wgp-tyw-01.jpg

and here's the Count of Tilly:

http://www.waylandgames.co.uk/images/uploads/warlord/wgp-tyw-03.jpg

I'm voting for Christian of Denmark because the world loves a loser.

his invasion of Germany is great. One of my friends always imagined the Danes riding in on Shetland ponies.

this list is from wikipedia btw, so it doesnt include people that wedgwood probably would have included, like axel oxenstierna

but surely he is in the book? I only know about the 30 years war from reading it, and I have heard of this guy.

As a kid studying the 30 yrs war, I learned that bayonets are the synthesis of pikes and muskets.

The Peace of Westphalia marks the beginning of the "modern" states system, according to trad IR theory, interestingly. Also, 30 Years' War can be thought of in terms of the playing out of the reformation and counter-reformation, and in the broader context of other 17th century conflicts, e.g. English Civil War, Glorious Revolution.

The Peace of Westphalia marks the beginning of the "modern" states system, according to trad IR theory

man, I remember writing an essay for AP European History in which this was the topic sentence. Good times.

Also crucial in forging a sense of pan-German identity, and facilitating the slow but inexorable rise of Prussia IIRC. In fact, arguably the whole German question, which has overshadowed European history up until 1945/ 1992/ to date can be traced back to the 30 Years' War.

iirc the thirty years war was also the last major european war to be fought with mercenaries and your mixed hired goons instead of standing national armies

xpost - I don't think they (bayonets) had been invented by the end of the 30 Years War.

One other great thing about the 30 Years War was that it was itself kind of part of the 90 Years War between the United Provinces and Spain.

xps to myself

although it is of course possible to characterise European history as essentially French up until 1814(?), then German from then onwards (to the present day?).

Where's a rolling historiography thread when you need one?

holy roman empire germanic

it was a helluva war

some called it the "war of a lifetime"

for some, their lifetime WAS the war of a lifetime, because they were born after 1618 and died before 1648

legend has it that the phrase "put up your dukes" was coined during the thirty years war, after one nobleman, after hearing tell of the maiming of an enemy duke, said "gather anew thy dukes of replacement, for we shall battle again as soon as it stops raining"

re: economics and bottom-up social business upthread, she does start after protestantism has been firmly entrenched across parts of europe. my thumbnail understanding was that war broke out right away after the reformation but duh there was a generation or two in between. it's during the period of protestant emergence when socio/demo/economic type questions are really interesting imo.

interestingly she does touch -- breezily! -- on intersecting questions of demographics, money and technology when explaining why most of the armies of this period were mecernaries

retroactively it was briefly named "world war -I", and historians referred to it as such for a time in the late 1940s to mid 1950s, until the popular re-release of the wedgwood book returned the name "thirty years war" to popularity

elector frederick, whatta dope!

rereading right now: seems all too grimly apt suddenly :(

i actually think she does touch on the element tracer was missing, abt the cultural dimension, in the first chapter -- if only to say that its salience was small relatively small (i'll go back and have a closer look)

Can't believe Wallenstein got only one vote.

fans of both the 30 years war and The Sot Weed Factor (and indeed Don Quixote) may want to dip into this. Written in 1669 about a naif who wanders about the horrors of the 30YW.

http://rbsche.people.wm.edu/teaching/grimmelshausen/

The officer bade them dig on stoutly. And presently they came to a cask, which they burst open, and therein found a fellow that had neither nose nor ears, and yet still lived. He, when he was somewhat revived, and had recognized some of the troop, told them how on the day before, as some of his regiment were a-foraging, the peasants had caught six of them. And of these they first of all, about an hour before, had shot five dead at once, making them stand one behind another; and because the bullet, having already passed through five bodies, did not reach him, who stood sixth and last, they had cut off his nose and ears, yet before that had forced him to render to five of them the filthiest service in the world* . But when he saw himself thus degraded by these rogues without shame or knowledge of God, he had heaped upon them the vilest reproaches, though they were willing now to let him go. Yet in the hope one of them would from annoyance send a ball through his head, he called them all by their right names: yet in vain. Only this, that when he had thus chafed them they had clapped him in the cask here present and buried him alive, saying, since he so desired death they would not cheat him of his amusement. ...

george smiley reads grimmelshausen!! (i think his academic studies were in medieval german)

rereading

p certain he comes up in wolfgang kayser’s v good the grotesque in art and literature, which is v strong on the “german” 17th century groteske.

see ask adam tooze’s powerpoint for the thirty year’s war, a lecture in his current series on germany and war

battle of the white mountain not how i imagined it from wedgwood

Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria

He banned dancing and anyone under the age of 55 from using a horse and carriage, paid his servants a pittance, "his meanness a byword in Europe". lol, I couldn't vote for this one in good conscience.

that PowerPoint is fabulous but ironically I'm too wrapped up in China this year to have time for Wedgwood or Wilson

I like Tooze's books on the Nazi economy and the tumultuous "Deluge" of the interwar period. His twitter is always good value as well.

i didn't vote bcz polls are bad and you should feel bad: however i have a fondness for johann tserclaes count of tilly as he shares a name w/my niece

In 1619 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was truly massive! https://t.co/5Nc4669zIm pic.twitter.com/QShLEhFH2P

— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) January 30, 2018

also i realised i have a residual fondness for gustavus adolphus bcz purely he was mentioned in passing in an erich kästner book i enjoyed as a kid

(i think he appears in a dream, the book is in storage so i can't check)

just reached the part where gustavus adolphus dies and was overcome with unexpected sadness, this despite the the fact that

a) he probably wasn't that great of a guy, given that he was a king invading several other countries uninvited, razing crops and towns to the ground etc
b) given that he is not around today aged 424 i kind of suspected he had to have died at some point
c) i have read the book before
d) CVWedgwood foreshadows his death some pages before

also lol he is at the head of the poll with max's † by his name

he had to destroy Germany to save it, you see

Wedgwood has written an account of the life and times of Cardinal Richlieu, which i have bought, yet it sits forlorn and unread on the shelf above my desk

Started reading this last year but didn't get very far and I've resolved not to read any history this year, it's too depressing.

I found myself chuckling out loud at some audio-book Wedgewood the other day. It probably wasn't actually very funny, but it tickled me at the time. It was some quote from a diplomat reporting that Johann Georg had become very heated with the consumption of much wine, or words to that effect.

attention 30yw fans! i recently discovered that cv wedgwood wrote a biography of CARDINAL RICHELIEU, and it covers much of the same territory but from the french/bourbon angle, which was sort of a sideline in the og text

and i am happy to report that her Authority and Tone is present and correct throughout

for those in need of regular additional info on the territories central to this history, this twitter account is liveblogging the many regions that made up the holy roman empire. this particular episode involves an aristocratic family that named all its male children heinrich for 700 years:

Fear not, vassals, I have not forgotten you! I bring you news of the Vogtei of Greiz and Reichenbach! pic.twitter.com/OqnoQnnsLB

— Empire Roman Holy (@EmpireRomanHoly) February 25, 2019

https://dzwonsemrish7.cloudfront.net/items/0R1m2i0C172V1j0F1t1F/Closed%20burgonet%20(1620).jpg

https://i.imgur.com/AxTjQj0.jpg

can anyone tell me what these windmills are doing on the battlefield? they look mobile.

https://i.imgur.com/0sVgi1Q.png

https://i.imgur.com/291EucF.png

both of these are from drawings of the battle of lutzen

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/pvzcc/images/2/26/Windmill_Zombie.png/revision/latest?cb=20131022024322

Battles happen in spaces occupied by whatever was there before it became a battle field. The odds are pretty good those windmills were put there to grind grain into flour. The armies just happened to converge in battle around them.

they look mobile.

how so?

i thought that too aimless and you could be right. as drawn they just don't look like permanent structures to me, and it seems odd to have several of them in a row? but i dunno

googling windmills of lutzen seems to confirm that the battle happened to take place near a miller's house and some windmills -- they do look impermanent yes but i think that may just be that the artists aren't there for photorealist reproduction of structures that are incidental to th action except as obstacles? the ones in the second pic do look to be on little stands so you can move them easily around a board -- but the entire drawing looks more like a wargaming table than an actual snapshot… and maybe it is? i mean, maybe that's what the artist set up to have something to draw?

I think the stands are just the bases, the bit that you can't turn to face the wind. a lot of old windmills had a v temporary look

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/Meindert_Hobbema._Landscape_with_a_windmill_%2817th_century%29.jpg/800px-Meindert_Hobbema._Landscape_with_a_windmill_%2817th_century%29.jpg

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/ADC2GG/exploded-view-of-windmill-for-milling-grain-17th-century-engraving-ADC2GG.jpg

ok I'm gonna reluctantly stand down on this "war windmill" idea :(

I did wonder if they could be some sort of battlefield semaphore tower but looks like they don't arrive til the early C19th

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e7/Chappe_semaphore.jpg/441px-Chappe_semaphore.jpg

https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/v4000066/800wm/V4000066-Chappe_s_semaphore_station.jpg

wedgwood fans will probably like the biography of elizabeth stuart written by carola oman - it's got that same tart authority and vivid flashes of reality that swim up suddenly like a fish. i.e. this description of Marie de Medici:

"Queen Mother," as Elizabeth invariably called her, had proved a terrifying old dame with a towering coiffure of metallic gold curls and sharp features, strongly marked by rage and chagrin

the next sentence:

She had stayed in London until her son-in-law's subjects began to break her windows.

The Habsburgs offer a vision of European unity even the hardest of Brexiteers could get behind, says @RCCoulombe https://t.co/9GD2aGdnDd

— Catholic Herald (@CatholicHerald) May 30, 2019

there will never be a cool pope until a pope excommunicates the trad caths

wallenstein.

funny: i had the opposite goofy experience from tracer hand re “the windmills of lutzen”. i walk thru the battles as best i can on google earth as I read; the lutzen section describes a ditch set back from the eastern road and beyond that a line of windmills, so hovering around the area and zooming in on a possible road i was excited to indeed find a parallel ditch and some ways back a line of obviously modern 20/21c wind turbines. there they are!!! i failed to keep myself from thinking.

At the beginning of the pandemic I ran through the 'Ring of Fire' series where an American town is transported back to southern Germany in 1632. Boy do they fuck up the Thirty Years War!

Madness and idealism flickered up among the oppressed in occasional tongues of flame. A dispossessed Protestant farmer in Austria, Martin Leimbauer, collected a band of followers by preaching and prophesying against the government. The third time his own people betrayed him, his headquarters was surrounded and he himself was dragged ignominiously from his hiding-place under the outspread skirts of two old women and carried with his young wife prisoner to Linz. Here, after declaring that God had made him his deputy on earth, he broke down under sentence of death and went to the block penitent and a Catholic. His wife, sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, escaped with the hangman’s assistant on the eve of her husband’s execution. With its gross humour, its cynical morality and its touch of spiritual grandeur, the story is typical of its time.

still living in the looooong 17th century

elector frederick, whatta dope!

― goole, Tuesday, November 11, 2014 9:29 AM bookmarkflaglink

this guy makes ned stark look like lenin

CVW is never cruel but she comes the closest when noting “the last known resting place of his coffin was a wine-merchant’s cellar at Metz”

D’jall read Tyll? I liked it!

no that looks cool tho! haven’t read grimmelhausen either. was gonna take a look at schiller’s wallenstein trilogy to see if it would be suited for my ongoing community-focused project of proposing plays absolutely no one wants to see.

grimmelshausen. i was working without a net there.

"based" !!

As today is the day everybody and their aunt will quote the famous St. Francis quote
"Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words if necessary"
to you, it is almost painful to be THAT spoilsport and tell you... it is NOT by St. Francis.
Sorry folks.
As based as it sounds. pic.twitter.com/UF0pUE5ARp

— Eduard Habsburg (@EduardHabsburg) October 4, 2022

Just found this account on X, which has been blogging this war (found it via Adam Tooze).

Lindau, 29. Sept 1625
* Bünder im Veltlin durch von Pappenheim gr. Schaden erlitten!
* Pappenheim hat ihnen 5 Schanzen, 12 Kanonen, 5 Schiffe abgenommen und viele Soldaten erlegt
* Uri geben dem König von Frankreich 2.000 Mann fürs Veltlin
* weitere Truppen nach Riva 1/3 pic.twitter.com/HIbmT3guff

— vor400 (1625) (@vor400) September 29, 2025