Geoffrey Parker is Andreas Dorpalen Professor of European History and an Associate of the Mershon Center at The Ohio State University. It has become the definitive book on the subject. For range and depth of coverage there is no other work like it.

It deals with all the major figures, including Wallerstein and Richelieu, Gustavus Adolphus and Tilly, the Winter King and the Habsburg emperors. It covers the horrors of the war and the contorted politics of the period. Written with great clarity and liveliness, the book brings alive the period in all its aspects. The updated bibliographical information provides an invaluable resource, synthesising the major work in the field, in all languages, up to 1996. This second edition has been thoroughly revised to include the very latest research. It has established itself as the classic text with reviewers, students and the general reader. Drawing on a huge body of source material from different languages and countries throughout Europe, it provided a clear and comprehensive narrative and analytical account of the subject. (Oct.The first edition of The Thirty Years' War offered an unrivalled survey of a central period in European history.

Wilson's scholarship and attention to both the details and the larger picture make his the definitive history of the Thirty Years War. By the war's end, ravaged as all the states were by violence, disease and destruction, Europe was more stable, but with sovereign states rather than empires, and with a secular order. Wilson then provides a meticulous account of the war, introducing some of its great personalities: the crafty General Wallenstein the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus, who preserved his state through canny political treaties and military operations and Hapsburg archdukes Rudolf and Matthias, the brothers whose quarrels marked the future of Bohemia, Austria and Hungary. He explores instead the political, social, economic as well as religious forces behind the conflict-for example, an Ottoman incursion left the Hapsburg Empire considerably weakened and overshadowed by the Spanish empire. In his monumental study of the causes and the consequences of the Thirty Years War, Wilson, a professor of history at the University of Hull in England, challenges traditional interpretations of the war as primarily religious. From the Defenestration of Prague in 1618 until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, brutal warfare swept across Europe.

The thirty years war europe's tragedy