Asch, The Thirty Years War

Asch, Ronald. The Thirty Years War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

Written by Ronald Asch, The Thirty Years War is a revisionist account of the great conflict that gripped Europe from 1618 to 1648. This book presents a mostly diplomatic history of the war, both explaining its course in the different theaters of war and also analyzing the way the component parts added up the whole. This book takes a revisionist approach not through sources (which are drawn from other works on the subject) but through its framework; in surveying and analyzing the events and aspects of the Thirty Years War, Asch places our historical understanding of the war back into the context of the constitutional and confessional struggle in the Holy Roman Empire. According to him, this framework is crucial to explaining why the Thirty Years War happened, and why it took the course that it did.

As Asch rightly points out, too many scholars have made the mistake of divorcing the conflict from its most important context. Recent historians of culture have argued that the Thirty Years War was merely a hodgepodge of several different wars, and, at most, a mere episode in Habsburg-Valois/Bourbon conflicts that lasted for three centuries. They argue, as Asch quotes Nicola Sutherland, that the “Thirty Years War is a largely fictitious conception.” This assertion is true, of course—but only in the tautologically technical sense that the Third Crusade or the Seven Years’ War are also fictitious conceptions—that is, they are only discrete events because historians find them to be so. But this point is a theoretical question about the relationship between historical reality and its representations, not one that detracts from the facts of the Thirty Years War.

This is not the only error which Asch’s argument cuts against. There are also historians who see the Thirty Years War as a social and economic crisis for which high politics and religious conflict were merely a veneer. Some historians, in this vein, hold that the population, agricultural, and urban crises of the turn of the 17th century were funneled into a war between the Great Powers. By applying a broad scope of analysis and comparing different regions and nations to others, Asch is able to demonstrate the futility of any such explanation of the war. Asch’s argument is strongest in its re-anchoring of the war in the context in which it can be best understood. It is also strengthened by a thoroughly comprehensive approach to the war, giving full attention, as some histories of the time period have failed to do, to the peripheral conflicts in Italy, the Netherlands, the Pyrenees, and even North America and Asia. Despite The Thirty Years War’s brevity, it provides a truly global perspective on the eponymous conflict, in contradistinction to more Eurocentric studies of the war.

In terms of structure, the book breaks the topic into four main chapters based upon the relevant dates that are considered turning points (1618 in Bohemia, 1629 and Habsburg ascendancy, 1635 and Sweden, the 1648 peace); these are bookended by an introduction on the political and religious origins to the war and a conclusion which examines the relationship between state finances and the making of war in the period. While the main part of the book does an admirable job of describing the course of the Thirty Years War, its first and last chapters are the most unique because the former restores the political and confessional causes of the war as primary, and the latter provides an insightful look at the way these states, pushing (or being dragged) into the modern age, struggled to finance their unprecedented martial commitments.

Asch’s book does not break much ground in terms of sources. Most of those he uses are documents drawn from the Acta Pacis Westphalicae and the secondary sources of older books (from Morriz Ritter’s groundbreaking 19th-century work to Peter H. Wilson’s masterful treatment of 2009) on the subject of the Thirty Years’ War. Despite this lack of time spent in the archives, however, Asch is able to use well-tread sources to create interesting new arguments, as best evidenced in the chapter “State Finance and the Structure of Warfare.” This chapter is based almost entirely on other historical monographs, but draws an excellent picture of the changing financial relationship between state and war in this period and demonstrates the fact that the states that were most successful during the war were those which best came to terms with financing herculean military efforts. The only flaw of this chapter is that its topic deserves more study than thirty-four pages; we can hope that it will be turned into a full monograph with the period of 1616-1648 as a case study in the topic.

In terms of audience, this is book is very accessible. Given its brevity and lack of substantial innovation of sources, The Thirty Years War is more appropriate for students of history and the educated general public than for specialists of the subject. In the field of the Thirty Years War, its refocusing on politics and religion is essential at a time when these most important aspects of the conflict have been given short shrift. In terms of prose, Asch’s text is both well-written and quite easy to read. While not perfect, it is a strong entry to the field that does an admirable job of both summarizing what others have written in a clear way while also drawing new and interesting conclusions.