WALLENSTEIN

Count Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Waldstein (more commonly known as Wallenstein) was the most controversial figure in the Thirty Years War, both at the time and afterwards. Reams of paper have been written about him, including an 11-act, 3-volume play by Friedrich Schiller in 1797-9 that followed on from his earlier history of the war. Schiller portrayed him as an idealistic figure, a man of destiny and genuine peace-seeker, murdered by his own officers. Others have presented him as a German or Czech nationalist, or as the last of the condottieri, the mercenary captains of mediæval Italy, who were made redundant by the emergence of the modern state.

Orphaned at the age of twelve, he eventually took over his father's modest estate in Bohemia after a conventional Protestant upbringing. He chose a military career, taking part in the latter stages of the 1593-1606 Habsburg war against the Turks, the training ground for so many of the principals in the later conflict, and converting to Catholicism as a way of getting on in Imperial service. He was fortunate to marry a rich widow, who then died young, leaving him her fortune. This he invested astutely, and he was one of the main beneficiaries of the reorganisation of property following the crushing of the Bohemian Revolt in 1620, the largest such transfer of assets in Europe until the communist takeovers after the second world war. Wallenstein carved out a 1,200 sqkm estate in north eastern Bohemia and built himself a huge palace in Prague, now the home of the Czech Senate. The profits from this and other ventures were loaned to the Emperor Ferdinand, who raised his estates to the Duchy of Friedland in 1624.

By 1625 Wallenstein was a very rich man, with military experience and growing ties to the Habsburg elite. But what catapulted him to the very first rank within the Holy Roman Empire was his offer that year to finance a complete Imperial Army at his own expense. The Bohemian Revolt, which dumped Ferdinand as King, started off as a local problem in one part of the Empire. What turned the event into a general conflict was the Bohemians' election of the Elector Palatine as his replacement in August 1619, two days before Ferdinand was himself elected Emperor in succession to his cousin Matthias. When the Elector Palatine foolishly accepted the Bohemian Crown - a move which required the Emperor's consent, which would obviously not be forthcoming - a full-blown constitutional crisis erupted. Ferdinand made the Elector an outlaw under the Imperial ban, and called on Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, at the time the richest man in Europe, to raise an army to enforce it. Although Maximilian and Ferdinand were both devout Catholics and the Elector and the Bohemians were hardline Protestants, the dispute was more legal than confessional. Maximilian and the Elector were both members of the Wittelsbach family, and Maximilian's main aim was to obtain the Electorate as a reward (which he duly got).

Wallenstein's later army offer was, therefore, enthusiastically received by Ferdinand, since it enabled him to escape from the military leverage of his nominal vassal. The Emperor could not pay Wallenstein back with money, but he could give him more titles. He was given the Duchy of Sagan in 1627; and after the Duke of Mecklenburg was punished for helping the Danish King in his war with the Empire, Wallenstein was given the duchy for life, and then, in 1629, as a hereditary possession. However, the idea of making someone of relatively low birth a full Imperial Prince was hugely controversial to both Protestants and Catholics, and made Wallenstein enemies amongst the Imperial nobility, notably Maximilian. Following backsniping, Wallenstein was obliged to resign his command in 1630, when he retired to his estates.

Two years later, he was back. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden had landed in Germany in 1630; and following his stunning victories at Breitenfeld in 1631 and the Lech in 1632, the Imperial forces were both demoralised and rudderless. Tilly, Maximilian's hitherto invincible commander for more than a dozen years, was killed at the Lech, and Gustavus had overrun most of Germany. Wallenstein took over the imperial command, and fought a draw with Gustavus at Lützen in 1632, which was costly for both sides. But since Gustavus was himself killed in the battle, the advantage seemed to swing back to the Emperor.

It is now that things started to go seriously wrong for Wallenstein. He had seen enough of war in general, and this war in particular, to know that nobody was going to win it outright. Much of Germany was already devastated; trade and agriculture were declining rapidly. Yet the longer fighting went on, the more the zealots on both sides started to gain the upper hand. Wallenstein spent most of 1633 doing not very much fighting, but instead trying to broker peace with the various enemy participants; Sweden, Saxony, France. However, his inactivity - which seemed close to betrayal - caused alarm in his masters, and Ferdinand and Maximilian decided to get rid of him. In February 1634 he was murdered by some of his own officers. The religious and national tangles caused by the war are vividly shown by the principals in this last act. Wallenstein, a Bohemian Catholic convert, was betrayed to the Austrian Catholic Emperor by his Italian Catholic subordinate Piccolomini; the deed itself was carried out by three of his officers, two Irish Catholics and one Scottish Calvinist. All were later rewarded.

Why did Wallenstein do it? Early modern history was rarely kind to "lads on the make". No sooner had they claimed the rewards of their effort than they were being attacked by nobles alarmed and resentful of the erosion of their special status; what was the point of being noble if any old riffraff could get in? Since no king or emperor could rule without the support - or, at least, tacit acquiescence - of those nobles, a former high flyer could quickly become a scapegoat for problems. As a clever man, shouldn't Wallenstein have remained living quietly on his estates?

With hindsight, yes. But that ignores the situation as it was then. The pool of European talent was limited, and Wallenstein was a big fish in that pool. Furthermore, he wasn't trying to create a dynasty; his only son had already died. The principal motive seems to have been a feeling that he was indispensable. The war had already dragged on for 15 years, and Wallenstein had convinced himself that he was the only person who could stop it. He couldn't, because the various protagonists were not prepared to compromise enough to get it stopped. It would take another 15 years, and a lot more killing, before the exhausted parties eventually managed to bring it to an end.

Walter Blotscher