The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618 by Geoff Mortimer (review)

At the foundation of this book lies a straightforward, but nonetheless important, contention: that the Thirty Years' War was not the inevitable result of international conflict and the collapse of imperial mechanisms to defuse religious tension in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. Rather, Geoff Mortimer argues that the Bohemian Revolt in 1618, and the consequent expansion of the military conflict across the Holy Roman Empire, emerged from a confluence of events that were primarily local to the Czech lands and contingent on that kingdom's troubled religious and political history. In making this argument, Mortimer is pushing back at "internationalist" explanations for the Thirty Years' War that frame it primarily as an aspect of the wider Franco-Habsburg struggle that shaped seventeenth-century politics; in his view, this "internationalist" perspective creates a distorted, teleological view of the war that assumes its inevitability, yet fails to account for why, where, and when it started. Mortimer therefore seeks to answer that specific question, and to spool out his analysis from there to understand the eruption of a wider war.

In making his case for a regional interpretation of the outbreak of war, Mortimer offers a very detailed narrative of events in Bohemia and Austria during the crucial decade of the 1610s. His focus is not, however, always so narrow; in the first four chapters of the book, Mortimer treats the broader international context of seventeenth-century politics, the tensions that wracked the Habsburg dynasty, and the longer history of both the Bohemian Reformation and Catholic responses to it. Altogether, these chapters comprise almost a third of this book, and while specialists on, for instance, the Hussite revolution and its aftermath may find this work's presentation of the religious diversity within the Czech lands a bit schematic, the background that Mortimer provides sets the stage for the outbreak of war in the aftermath of the Defenestration of Prague. In these early chapters, Mortimer examines all of the political crises and long-term tensions that historians such as Geoffrey Parker (The Thirty Years' War, 1984), Hugh Trevor-Roper ("The Outbreak of the Thirty Years War," Renaissance Essays, 1985), Myron Gutmann ("The Origins of the Thirty Years' War," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1988), and Nicola Sutherland ("The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Structure of European Politics," English Historical Review, 1992) have considered to be primary causes of the Thirty Years' War. For Mortimer, though, neither the immanent reoccurrence of hostilities between the Spanish and Dutch nor the simmering tensions between the Catholic League and Protestant Union in the Holy Roman Empire is a sufficient explanation for the specific circumstances in which the conflict broke out. To understand these, Mortimer forcefully argues that we must turn our attention to Bohemia itself.

Thus, Mortimer spends the last seven chapters of this book describing the dynastic struggles that preoccupied the Austrian Habsburgs in the early seventeenth century; the build-up to the Defenestration of Prague and the consequent, disastrous decision to elect Frederick of the Palatinate as the Bohemian king; the escalation of military conflict that culminated in the Czech defeat at White Mountain; and the expansion of this conflict across the empire in the following decade. Throughout this account, Mortimer's work is distinguished by his painstaking efforts to determine precisely who was involved in the key events of the Bohemian Revolt and what their motivations may have been. The result of these efforts is a meticulous narrative of events that effectively brings the reader into the assemblies and back chambers where the Winter King was chosen and wartime strategy was determined. And the main impact of this presentation is that Bohemian affairs cannot help but become central to the origins of the Thirty Years' War.

One unintended consequence of this narrative style, however, is that the larger arguments about the origins of a...