This is not another attempt at a straightforward history of the conflict commonly known as the Thirty Years' War. Even from a narrow unashamedly Central European viewpoint, such an attempt would be rash; but perhaps I shall undertake it once the edition of the Documenta Bohemica Bellum Tricennale Illustrantia is completed.

I have worked on this book for nearly thirty years. The result of my labours should primarily serve future research. It should inform the reader (and the prospective historian) of the present state of our knowledge about the main theme: the interrelationships among different aspects of society, politics and ideas in a period of military and political crisis of continental dimensions. I do not pretend to have solved all the problems, because I am aware that we all exist in a three-dimensional world. We are shaped by the past and the future alike; with our ideas of the future and from our vantage point in the present we are continually reshaping our conception of the past, which also shapes us. I am glad that I can once again agree with my friend Christopher Hill about each generation's need to have history rewritten – an idea superbly expressed in his Change and Continuity in Seventeenth Century England.

Thus each of these chapters begins with a word about problems and sources. It is my belief that the historian's profession consists in the search for new problems and, if possible, the attempt to solve them.