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PODs of the Thirty Years War XXI

That portrait of Amalie Elisabeth has led me down a bit of a rabbit hole- turns out there are at least two versions out there, the Ashdown House original which ended up being attributed to be the wife of Sir William Craven, Lord Mayor of London (Hence the Lady Craven of London inscription) and one in the Museumlandschaft Hessen Kassel which appears to be a copy of the Ashdown version and was attributed to being of the Landgräfin Hedwig Sophie instead.

In other news the next article is about the Hessian War.

I'm going to be including a bit about Salic succession law.

Woop.
 
That portrait of Amalie Elisabeth has led me down a bit of a rabbit hole- turns out there are at least two versions out there, the Ashdown House original which ended up being attributed to be the wife of Sir William Craven, Lord Mayor of London (Hence the Lady Craven of London inscription) and one in the Museumlandschaft Hessen Kassel which appears to be a copy of the Ashdown version and was attributed to being of the Landgräfin Hedwig Sophie instead.

In other news the next article is about the Hessian War.

I'm going to be including a bit about Salic succession law.

Woop.

Ah, damnit. Will switch out for another portrait once I get home.
 
I know that he picked it for the particular resonance the war has- had? - in German culture, but I think that's one of the reasons Mother Courage works so well. You could set it in the Wars of the Coalition and have a similar timescale, and even give Brecht more of an excuse than he generally needed to get didactic about the hypocrisy of the political rhetoric. But the problem is that things changed.

I know it's the narrative fallacy, but we do look for climaxes and reverses and strong characters. The Napoleonic Wars have that, the World Wars have that, the various sixteenth century Wars of Religion often have that.

The Thirty Years War, though, just keeps grinding on. It's amazing how even historians seem to get sick of the subject- one of the things that struck me when I read Peter Wilson's Europe's Tragedy is that the latter half of the war receives less attention than the contextualising chapters on the Empire and the prelude to the war. It was as if he got exhausted.
 
I know that he picked it for the particular resonance the war has- had? - in German culture, but I think that's one of the reasons Mother Courage works so well. You could set it in the Wars of the Coalition and have a similar timescale, and even give Brecht more of an excuse than he generally needed to get didactic about the hypocrisy of the political rhetoric. But the problem is that things changed.

I know it's the narrative fallacy, but we do look for climaxes and reverses and strong characters. The Napoleonic Wars have that, the World Wars have that, the various sixteenth century Wars of Religion often have that.

The Thirty Years War, though, just keeps grinding on. It's amazing how even historians seem to get sick of the subject- one of the things that struck me when I read Peter Wilson's Europe's Tragedy is that the latter half of the war receives less attention than the contextualising chapters on the Empire and the prelude to the war. It was as if he got exhausted.

And Peter Wilson is by far one of the better historians on this front.

Most basically get to the Peace of Prague and then ignore the rest of the war altogether.

It's going to make writing the remaining articles a bit tricky because all my sources start running dry.
 
Honestly though I still have no idea how the eighty years war actually happened and produced so little in terms of results.

What do you mean it produced so little? It single handily dragged the centre of gravity of the world from Southern Europe to Northern Europe. It revolutionised military tactics, banking tactics and shattered the Iberian Union and their control over the Indian Ocean trade in a way which was era defining.
 
What do you mean it produced so little? It single handily dragged the centre of gravity of the world from Southern Europe to Northern Europe. It revolutionised military tactics, banking tactics and shattered the Iberian Union and their control over the Indian Ocean trade in a way which was era defining.

I don't think the first part checks out at tbh but as for the rest I meant a lot more in terms of for such small territory invested in by all the Great Powers of the region it's astounding no one managed to decisively win and it just kept on going.

Given the wars that preceded and followed it's bizzare at how little ground was gained or lost and how the end result was half of a territory shifting one way and the other half staying as was.
 
I don't think the first part checks out at tbh but as for the rest I meant a lot more in terms of for such small territory invested in by all the Great Powers of the region it's astounding no one managed to decisively win and it just kept on going.

Given the wars that preceded and followed it's bizzare at how little ground was gained or lost and how the end result was half of a territory shifting one way and the other half staying as was.

This is what happens when one side has the resources of the world's largest Empire and a largely loyal populace in the bits they've held onto initially, and the other can just stop any army from attacking by flooding enough land to make a moat around the important bits of the country.
 
This is what happens when one side has the resources of the world's largest Empire and a largely loyal populace in the bits they've held onto initially, and the other can just stop any army from attacking by flooding enough land to make a moat around the important bits of the country.

But it just seems a bit of an oddity and a kind of boring one.
 
I don't think the first part checks out at tbh but as for the rest I meant a lot more in terms of for such small territory invested in by all the Great Powers of the region it's astounding no one managed to decisively win and it just kept on going.

It doesn't?

The tercios were unbeatable for a century. For a century, the Siglo de Oro, Spain ruled Europe. It went from a war-torn peninsula in the fourteenth and fifteenth century to all of a sudden utterly dominating, completely checking French expansion and then pushing it back, then meddling with France's internal politics to have it tear itself apart for half a century. France, the bull in the china shop, the demographic behemoth. While doing that, fighting the revolt in the Netherlands, they still managed to send the Armada to England. It failed, yes, but the point is they had all those irons in the fire and losing it didn't set them back that much and ruling or influencing Germany, controlling the pope and running roughshod over Italy and taking the fight to the Ottomans and North Africa. And again, all of the Americas or virtually so, the Philippines, trading with China and Japan. It was the original 'empire on which the sun never sets'.

And then after eighty years of this fighting, they weren't, the tercios weren't unbeatable anymore and Spain started to be the turf other powers were fighting over.
 
It doesn't?

The tercios were unbeatable for a century. For a century, the Siglo de Oro, Spain ruled Europe. It went from a war-torn peninsula in the fourteenth and fifteenth century to all of a sudden utterly dominating, completely checking French expansion and then pushing it back, then meddling with France's internal politics to have it tear itself apart for half a century. France, the bull in the china shop, the demographic behemoth. While doing that, fighting the revolt in the Netherlands, they still managed to send the Armada to England. It failed, yes, but the point is they had all those irons in the fire and losing it didn't set them back that much and ruling or influencing Germany, controlling the pope and running roughshod over Italy and taking the fight to the Ottomans and North Africa. And again, all of the Americas or virtually so, the Philippines, trading with China and Japan. It was the original 'empire on which the sun never sets'.

And then after eighty years of this fighting, they weren't, the tercios weren't unbeatable anymore and Spain started to be the turf other powers were fighting over.
But what does the Eighty year's war have to do with Tericos losing their dominance so much as advances in tactics and technology happening across Europe? And the Terico at the start of the war were basically unrecognizable save by name by the end with weapons, numbers and ratios all changing.

I'd argue that between the EYW TYW and just about every war of the next century Spain was going to come down from its relative height. I'm fairly sure that far more important than losing about half their territory in the Netherlands was England and France surging forwards, the economic cost of fighting expensive wars all over Europe for basically centuries and well the whole eighteenth century.
 
But what does the Eighty year's war have to do with Tericos losing their dominance so much as advances in tactics and technology happening across Europe? And the Terico at the start of the war were basically unrecognizable save by name by the end with weapons, numbers and ratios all changing.

I'd argue that between the EYW TYW and just about every war of the next century Spain was going to come down from its relative height. I'm fairly sure that far more important than losing about half their territory in the Netherlands was England and France surging forwards, the economic cost of fighting expensive wars all over Europe for basically centuries and well the whole eighteenth century.

The biggest effect, it's fair to say, is that the EYW and TYW combined essentially broke Spanish finances while also triggering revolts that saw Portugal successfully break away from a near-century long union (and bear in mind Spain itself was only a thing a century before that) and Catalonia nearly followed.
 
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