The Magdeburg Wedding: Siege, Fire, and the Birth of Total War, 1631 - Couverture souple

Ryan-Doyle, Seamus

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798235921764

Editeur : Silverback Books, 2026

Synopsis

The Magdeburg Wedding: Siege, Fire, and the Birth of Total War, 1631

In four catastrophic days in May 1631, an army of forty thousand men descended on the Lutheran stronghold of Magdeburg and erased it from the map. Ninety percent of its buildings burned. Twenty thousand of its people died. The German language itself was forced to invent a new word, magdeburgisieren, because no existing term could describe what happened there. Seamus Ryan-Doyle traces the full arc of this catastrophe: a proud trading city's century-long defiance of imperial Catholic authority, the constitutional fiction that finally shattered under Emperor Ferdinand II's restitutionist ambitions, the desperate six-week siege that exhausted its gunpowder and its hope, and the five-column dawn assault that broke its walls through a single unfinished moat. Drawing on eyewitness testimony from both sides of the slaughter, from a terrified clerk's son hiding in a coal shed to a wounded mercenary whose wife scavenged bandages from the burning ruins, this is narrative history at its most unflinching: a story of organized massacre beside organized mercy, of a city's destruction that paradoxically doomed the very cause it was meant to serve, and of the long, strange afterlife the catastrophe left in German memory, from Schiller and Goethe to Brecht. This is the Thirty Years' War's darkest hour, told in full.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Seamus Ryan-Doyle is an Irish historian and writer with a longstanding fascination with the religious wars that remade early modern Europe. Raised in County Clare and now based on the west coast of Ireland, he traces his interest in confessional conflict to a childhood steeped in stories of plantation, siege, and survival closer to home. He has spent years researching the Thirty Years' War's lesser-known catastrophes, drawn to the human stories obscured by grand strategic narratives. His writing combines rigorous attention to primary testimony with a commitment to narrative pace, bringing distant centuries to vivid, unsettling life for the general reader. He continues to write narrative nonfiction exploring war, faith, and catastrophe across European history.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Silverback Books
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798235921764
• Reliure: Tapa blanda
• Nombre de pages: 366
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Allemagne