The Thirty Years War

°°° 

“I’ve been reading C. V Wedgwood’s really excellent history, The Thirty Years War (1957), to fill-in my rather hazy knowledge about the period. It is absolutely amazing: a model of how to write this kind of book, managing a huge amount of specific data without losing sight of the larger narrative, juggling half a dozen national throughlines without ever confusing the reader. I was particularly struck by Wedgwood’s account of the extraordinary mode by which Germany, the old Holy Roman Empire — the tesselation of German states & statelets & free-cities & so on — effected its governance in the 17th-century... 

The Holy Roman Emperor notionally had overall power, although in practice it was difficult-to-impossible for him to wield that power. There were somewhere between (depending on when you tally the number, & what you include) 1,700 & 1,900 independent units, from great states like Brandenburg (later to become Prussia), Meklenberg & Bavaria, to the many smaller states & the vast rash of tiny statelets & individual free-cities. Some of the latter were quite substantial. Other were not. ‘Some free imperial cities, like Nuremberg & Ulm, owned whole provinces; others, like Nordhausen or Wetzlar, owned no more than the tidy orchards & gardens about their walls. There were even free imperial villages.’... — Adam Roberts @ Medium.com