An Economist and Sunday Times Best Book of the Year

“Deserves to be hailed as a magnum opus.”
—Tom Holland, The Telegraph

“Ambitious…seeks to rehabilitate the Holy Roman Empire’s reputation by re-examining its place within the larger sweep of European history…Succeeds splendidly in rescuing the empire from its critics.”
—Wall Street Journal

Massive, ancient, and powerful, the Holy Roman Empire formed the heart of Europe from its founding by Charlemagne to its destruction by Napoleon a millennium later. An engine for inventions and ideas, with no fixed capital and no common language or culture, it derived its legitimacy from the ideal of a unified Christian civilization—though this did not prevent emperors from clashing with the pope for supremacy.

In this strikingly ambitious book, Peter H. Wilson explains how the Holy Roman Empire worked, why it was so important, and how it changed over the course of its existence. The result is a tour de force that raises countless questions about the nature of political and military power and the legacy of its offspring, from Nazi Germany to the European Union.

“Engrossing…Wilson is to be congratulated on writing the only English-language work that deals with the empire from start to finish…A book that is relevant to our own times.”
—Brendan Simms, The Times

“The culmination of a lifetime of research and thought…an astonishing scholarly achievement.”
—The Spectator

“Remarkable…Wilson has set himself a staggering task, but it is one at which he succeeds heroically.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“The scholarship of this book is breathtaking…No one interested in the history of Europe, and of the Germans in particular, can afford not to read this stupendous book.” —Simon Heffer, The Telegraph 

“[Iron and Blood’s] long view of Germany’s military history, magisterial detail and acute analysis provide a new understanding of what was once Europe’s warring heart.” —The Economist  

“Astonishingly ambitious and detailed…An absorbing overview of how slowly changing societal forces… have transformed the use of military force across modern times.” —Foreign Affairs

German military history is typically viewed as an inexorable march to the rise of Prussia and the two world wars, the road paved by militarism and the result a specifically German way of war. Looking beyond Prussia to German-speaking Europe across the last five centuries, Peter Wilson challenges this narrative. In fact, he finds little unique or preordained in German militarism or warfighting. 

Starting with the consolidation of the Holy Roman Empire, which was largely defensive in orientation, Iron and Blood shows that German participation in foreign wars was most often in partnership with allies. The primary aggressor in Central Europe was not Prussia but the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, which owed much of its strength to its ability to secure alliances. Prussia, meanwhile, invested in militarization but maintained a part-time army well into the nineteenth century. Both states, Wilson shows, exemplify the longstanding civilian element within German military power. Only after Prussia’s unexpected victory over France in 1871 did Germans and outsiders come to believe in a German gift for warfare—a special capacity for high-speed, high-intensity combat that could overcome numerical disadvantage.  

It took two world wars to expose the fallacy of German military genius. Yet even today, Wilson argues, Germany’s strategic position is misunderstood. The country now seen as a bastion of peace spends heavily on defense in comparison to its peers and is deeply invested in less kinetic contemporary forms of coercive power.

A deadly continental struggle, the Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world.

When defiant Bohemians tossed the Habsburg emperor’s envoys from the castle windows in Prague in 1618, the Holy Roman Empire struck back with a vengeance. Bohemia was ravaged by mercenary troops in the first battle of a conflagration that would engulf Europe from Spain to Sweden. The sweeping narrative encompasses dramatic events and unforgettable individuals—the sack of Magdeburg; the Dutch revolt; the Swedish militant king Gustavus Adolphus; the imperial generals, opportunistic Wallenstein and pious Tilly; and crafty diplomat Cardinal Richelieu. In a major reassessment, Wilson argues that religion was not the catalyst, but one element in a lethal stew of political, social, and dynastic forces that fed the conflict.

By war’s end a recognizably modern Europe had been created, but at what price? The Thirty Years War condemned the Germans to two centuries of internal division and international impotence and became a benchmark of brutality for centuries. As late as the 1960s, Germans placed it ahead of both world wars and the Black Death as their country’s greatest disaster.

An understanding of the Thirty Years War is essential to comprehending modern European history. Wilson’s masterful book will stand as the definitive account of this epic conflict.

For a map of Central Europe in 1618, referenced on page XVI, please visit this book’s page on the Harvard University Press website.