The Hero of Italy Hanlon, Gregory
2014, 2014-03-06, 2014-02-18, 2019-08-15
eBook
This book examines a salient episode in Italy’s Thirty Years’ War between Spain and France, whereby the young duke Odoardo Farnese of Parma embraced the French alliance only to experience defeat and ...occupation after two tumultuous years (1635–1637). In five ample chapters stressing the narrative of events unfolding in northern Italy, the book examines the participation of the little state in these great European events. The first chapter describes the constitution of cardinal Richelieu’s anti-Habsburg alliance and Odoardo’s eagerness to be part of it. A chapter on the Parman professional army, based on an extraordinary collection of company roster-books, sheds light on the identity of over 13,000 individuals, soldier by soldier, the origin and background of their officers, the conditions of their lodgings and the good state of their equipment. Part three follows the first campaign of 1635 alongside French and Savoyard contingents at the failed siege of Valenza, and the logistical difficulties of organizing such large-scale operations. Another chapter examines the financial expedients the duchy adopted to fend off incursions on all its borders in 1636, and how militia contingents on both sides were drawn into the fighting. A final chapter relates the Spanish invasion and occupation which forced duke Odoardo to make a separate peace. It includes a detailed assessment of the impact of war on civilians, based on parish registers for city and country. The moderating influence of the laws of war were largely nullified by widespread starvation, disease and routine sex-selective infanticide. These quantitative analyses, supported by maps and tables, are among the most detailed anywhere in Europe in the era of the Thirty Years’ War.
Military Revolution and the Thirty Years War 1618–1648 investigates change and decline in military institutions during a period of protracted and destructive European warfare. Conceptual background ...is provided by the Military Revolution thesis, which argues that changes in military technology and tactics drove revolutionary transformation in the way states organised and waged war in the early modern era. This transformation of military institutions became evident during the long and destructive Thirty Years War in 1618–1648. The outcome of the Military Revolution was the centralised fiscal-military state that possessed a strong claim to the monopoly of violence within its territorial boundaries. The book examines how the Thirty Years War accelerated and even initiated transformation in four military institutions that defined land warfare: feudal cavalry services, militias, regular armies, and war commissariats. The regional scope of the investigation covers the Holy Roman Empire, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, and the Dutch Republic. The book combines military-historical inquiry with ancillary sciences of sociology and economics. It argues that the Military Revolution of the Thirty Years War stimulated institutions capable of increased complexification and specialisation while curtailing those that were locked in stasis and immutability. The institutional legacy of the Thirty Years War was the emergence of complex military organisations that are characteristic to the modern society and its self-renewing social subsystems. Previous scholarship on the Military Revolution has concentrated on military technicalities and the wider process of early modern state formation. This book proposes an alternative way of viewing early modern military transformations from the perspectives of institutions and systems. System-analytical survey of change and decline in the military institutions of the Thirty Years War introduces qualifications to the Military Revolution theory and offers a novel way of conceptualising early modern military history.
Courage and Griefilluminates in a nuanced fashion Sweden's involvement in Europe's destructive Thirty Years' War (1618-48). Focusing on the various roles women performed in the bloody and extended ...conflict, Mary Elizabeth Ailes analyzes how methods of warfare and Swedish society were changing in profound ways. This study considers the experiences of unmarried camp followers and officers' wives as well as peasant women who remained in the countryside during times of conflict and upheaval.Women contributed to the war effort in a variety of ways. On campaign they provided support services to armies in the field. On the home front they helped to minimize disruptions incurred within their frayed communities. As increasing numbers of men left to fight overseas, women took over local economic activities and defended their families' interests. Such activities significantly altered the fabric of Swedish society.Examining women's wartime experiences in the Thirty Years' War enhances our understanding of women's roles in society, the nature of female power and authority, and the opportunities and hardships that warfare brought to women's lives.
The nineteenth century witnessed the birth of German nationalism and the unification of Germany as a powerful nation-state. In this era the reading public's obsession with the most destructive and ...divisive war in its history-the Thirty Years' War-resurrected old animosities and sparked a violent, century-long debate over the origins and aftermath of the war. The core of this bitter argument was a clash between Protestant and Catholic historians over the cultural criteria determining authentic German identity and the territorial and political form of the future German nation.
This groundbreaking study of modern Germany's morbid fascination with the war explores the ideological uses of history writing, commemoration, and collective remembrance to show how the passionate argument over the "meaning" of the Thirty Years' War shaped Germans' conception of their nation. The first book in the extensive literature on German history writing to examine how modern German historians reinterpreted a specific event to define national identity and legitimate political and ideological agendas,The Thirty Years' War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Centuryis a bold intellectual history of the confluence of history writing, religion, culture, and politics in nineteenth-century Germany.
This English-language translation of Mark Hengerer's Kaiser Ferdinand III: 1608–1657 Eine Biographie is based on an analysis of the weekly reports sent by the papal nuncio’s office to the Vatican. ...These reports give detailed information about the daily whereabouts of the dynasty, courtiers, and foreign visitors, and they contain the gossip of the court in addition to weekly analysis of some political problems. This material enabled the author to report on daily life of the dynasty and to analyze the circumstances under which policy was made, which has led to a balance between the personality of Ferdinand III and the problems with which he dealt. In this biography, Hengerer provides answers to the question: Why did it take the emperor more than ten years to end a devastating war, the traumatizing effects of which on central Europe lasted into the twentieth century, particularly since there was no hope of victory against his foreign adversaries from the very moment he came into power?
Sonnino examines the diplomatic negotiations that took place in Westphalia from 1643 to 1648, which brought an end to the agonizing civil and religious conflict of the Thirty Years' War.
La guerre de Trente ans (1618-1648) fut le plus grand et le plus important des conflits qui ont marque l'Europe moderne. Son echelle, sa duree et l'intensite des violences lui ont donne un caractere ...singulier. Structurellement, il ne s'agissait pourtant que d'une partie d'un affrontement plus large qui opposait les deux branches de la dynastie des Habsbourg a leurs nombreux adversaires.Cet ouvrage propose une synthese claire et detaillee des differentes phases de ce conflit. Il explique la naissance et l'evolution de la guerre de Trente Ans en donnant a son centre de gravite (le Saint Empire) germanique tout le poids qui lui revient, mais en l'analysant dans son contexte europeen, voire mondial. Il interroge son caractere specifique, entre guerre de Religion, guerre civile et guerre entre Etats. Outre les developpements politiques et diplomatiques de la periode, il s'attache egalement a decrire les impacts d'un conflit qui marquera en profondeur les Etats (politiquement et economiquement) comme les populations, confrontees aux violences guerrieres.Enfin, il montre comment le traite de Westphalie qui clot le conflit est l'acte fondateur de l'Europe moderne, en constituant un espace et une communaute politique, de l'Espagne jusqu'a la Suede, en y integrant ou, au moins, en y associant l'Angleterre et la Russie. Car c'est bien la guerre de Trente ans qui a etabli cette Europe en formulant des regles du jeu (et de la guerre) qui valaient pour tous et en faisant naitre la necessite d'un equilibre entre les royaumes.Des cartes, des illustrations et des genealogies completent le volume.
The Iron Princess Helfferich, Tryntje
2013, 2013-06-03, 2013-07-01
eBook
In the bloodiest conflict Europe had ever experienced, Amalia Elisabeth fought to save her tiny German state, her Calvinist church, and her children's inheritance. Tryntje Helfferich reveals how this ...embattled ruler used diplomacy to play the European powers against one another, while raising one of the continent's most effective fighting forces.
In Coping with Life during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), Sigrun Haude explores how people tried to survive the Thirty Years' War, on what resources they drew, and how they attempted to make ...sense of it.
