The Thirty Years War was one of the decisive episodes in the history of Western civilization. This war served to delay the unification of Germany for two centuries, and would have a profound, and disastrous, effect on the future.The war is believed by most historians to have set the progress of German civilization back 200 years.
Click here to see the rest of this review...
The effect of the Thirty Years War on German history has been greatly exaggerated, because the economic decline of Germany pre-dates the war by many years, and Germany's political disintegration was a cause rather than an effect of the war. Thirty Years War is a perfect example of an unnecessary war, which settled nothing, at least nothing that was worth settling. The war assured the replacement of Spain by France as the dominant power in Western Europe, which was certainly an event of some importance in the Western world, but this result could also have been achieved at far less cost.
The review of this Book prepared by Nathaniel Ford