• DOI:10.1177/096834459800500301
• Corpus ID: 159915965

A Territorial Imperative? The Military Revolution, Strategy and Peacemaking in the Thirty Years War

@article{Croxton1998ATI,
  title={A Territorial Imperative? The Military Revolution, Strategy and Peacemaking in the Thirty Years War},
  author={Dereck Croxton},
  journal={War in History},
  year={1998},
  volume={5},
  pages={253 - 279}
}

• Dereck Croxton
• Published 1 July 1998
• History
• War in History

1he later stages of the Thirty Years War', one historian has written, 1 were not propitious to large-scale strategic designs... Campaigns became forays, [and] battles became encounters void of strategic significance.' These are not, as one might expect, the words of some recent revisionist historian attacking the concept of the 'Military Revolution', but of Michael Roberts, the very originator of that term. Even while praising Gustavus Adolphus for his innovations in all aspects of war, Roberts bemoans his 'territorial' strategy, sharply limited by logistical concerns, and laments that 'of Gustav Adolfs strategic innovations little or nothing was transmitted to his immediate posterity'.1 The 'revolution' in strategy under Gustavus, Roberts makes it clear, was both inadequate and temporary. Roberts's harsh view of early modern strategy, and of strategy in the latter half of the Thirty Years War in particular, is hardly unique. Already Clausewitz and Delbruick held similar views.2 More recently,