But there was too much land on the market and too few possible buyers. The prospects were further darkened by a financial crisis throughout the Empire. The uncontrolled monetary system of Germany had completely broken down; the gulden, the more or less standardized coin of south Germany, had begun as early as 1619 to fluctuate in relation to the taler of the north. In the course of three years the taler reached a value of four gulden in Austria, eight at Strasbourg, ten in Ansbach and Hildesheim, twelve in Saxony and Silesia, and soared to fifteen at Nuremburg. At Ulm the municipality fixed it forcibly at eight, at Vienna the gulden sank to less than an eighth of its normal value, and at Prague the taler began to disappear altogether from circulation. In Saxony the government was losing half the normal yield on the taxes through bad money.[85]
In Prague the gravity of the situation was increased by the necessities of the government. Frederick had begun the trouble by slightly debasing the currency during his year of rule; Ferdinand’s nominee, Liechtenstein, continued the process, reduced the amount of silver in the coinage by more than seventy-five per cent and attempted to fill the imperial coffers —and his own—with the profit which he made on the mint.[86] In January 1622 Ferdinand, in hope of further gain, made a contract with a group of speculators for the establishment of a privately controlled mint in Prague. The currency was drastically debased while prices were forcibly stabilized; the plan failed utterly, for the people became suspicious and hoarded what good money they had, while in spite of the provision of the government, food alone rose to twelve times its normal price. External trade stopped altogether and for the ordinary exchanges of everyday life the people took to barter. To add to the damage done by this crazy scheme, the chief object of the contractors was rather their own enrichment than the payment of Ferdinand’s debts.
At this moment Ferdinand was besieged with demands to buy the confiscated lands. The loyal nobility and many wealthy merchants offered him what had once been fair prices in the Prague money, prices which he could not now refuse to take without repudiating his own currency. It was one thing to sell the lands and another to make use of the money; Ferdinand had accepted his own coin, but his soldiers threw it back in their officers’ faces, because the local peasantry would not take it in exchange for the necessities of life. Throughout Bohemia trade came almost to a standstill, the peasants would not supply the towns with food, the army was mutinous, the civil population starving, and certain contractors, of whom Liechtenstein was not the least, were among the richest men in Europe. At Christmas 1623, Ferdinand devaluated the money and broke the contract. By that time the greater part of the confiscated land had been sold for an average price of less than a third its normal value.[87] His first move towards financial security had been catastrophic, for not only had he lost the advantage of the confiscation, but he had completed the economic ruin of Bohemia. Wealth, which had been widely distributed among an industrious peasantry and an active urban population, had become, through political persecution and the disastrous effects of the inflation, concentrated in a few unscrupulous hands. As a source of imperial revenue Bohemia had become useless.
Politically Ferdinand had achieved one slight advantage: private fortunes had been engulfed and the ruthless confiscation of land had ruined or partly ruined almost all the municipalities:[88] whatever immediate poverty might face his government, he had at least destroyed the restless and critical merchant classes and removed the bulwark between the ruler and the people. One of the most progressive and commercialized countries in Europe had slipped back two centuries in little more than two years and the field was free for despotism.
Politically, too, the redistribution of land was successful. The leading Protestant aristocracy were replaced by men whose Catholicism was unimpeachable and whose right to the land depended on their support of the government which had given it to them. Liechtenstein himself had bought ten estates, Eggenberg eight. But there was one man who above all others had made himself known as a ready buyer. Albrecht von Waldstein, or as he was more euphoniously called Wallenstein, the military governor of Prague, had accumulated no less than sixty-six estates,[89] the most important being the province of Friedland and the town of Gitschin.
Wallenstein was forty years old in 1623; the son of a small Protestant landowner, he had been left an orphan early and educated as a Lutheran at the celebrated school of Altdorf until the authorities requested his removal, not without cause, since he had once taken part in a murderous brawl, and once nearly killed one of his servants.[90] Travel in Italy and conversion to the Catholic religion sobered his over-excitable spirits, and he settled down in his early twenties to make a career. At the imperial Court he attached himself to Ferdinand’s party when he was still only Archduke of Styria. Next he married a wealthy widow who shortly after died leaving him a rich man. The foundations of his public and private fortune thus laid, he had but to husband and increase his resources while watching his opportunities. In his financial affairs he showed a judgement and discretion which grew with his wealth, and although he was not a sympathetic landowner he was an exceptionally good one. He developed his estates to their uttermost limit, establishing industries where possible in the towns, inspecting and controlling agriculture, building storehouses for superfluous crops, exporting produce for sale, and at the same time increasing the efficiency of his people by organizing education, poor relief, medical services and provision for times of famine.[91] His capital at Gitschin was not unworthy of the state he was creating; he himself built his own palace and Church and lent money to the burghers at a moderate rate to reconstruct their houses according to his plans.[92]
Count Wallenstein’s tastes were sumptuous but sombre, and his entourage was impressive rather from the exactness with which he had everything arranged, the order and regularity of his household, than by any ostentatious expense. He was not a popular man; tall, thin, forbidding, his face in the unexpressive portraits which have survived is not prepossessing. No great master painted him[93] and the limners who attempted his saturnine features agree only in a few particulars. The irregular features, the high cheek-bones and prominent nose, the heavy jowl, the thick, out-jutting underlip—these are present more or less in all pictures. Later portraits exploited the dramatic possibilities of that strangely unsympathetic face, for when Wallenstein became great there was no detail of his conduct or appearance that did not become common property—his ungovernable temper, his disregard of human life, his unsteady nerves, his immutable chastity, his faith in astrology. As time went on, he himself cultivated the spectacular, dressed in a bizarre mixture of all European fashions and relieved his habitually dark attire with a sash or plume of unexpected and violent red. In his pale, dry face the equally vivid colour of his lips may perhaps not have been nature’s work alone.[94] But stripped of the character he later created, what was Wallenstein in 1623 but an unscrupulous and able careerist? Neither the unsteady nerves nor the blind rages to which he was subject, neither his unusual chastity nor his comparatively usual belief in astrology, are attributes of singular greatness or of peculiar mystery.
Born, like Elizabeth of England, under a conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, Wallenstein’s stars gave him a peculiar mixture of weakness and strength, vice and virtue. He was, so his horoscope informed him, a restless, exacting mind, impatient of old methods and for ever striving for the new and the untried, secretive, melancholy, suspicious, contemptuous of his fellowmen and their conventions. He would be avaricious, deceitful, greedy for power, loving no one and by no one beloved, changeable in his humours, quarrelsome, friendless, and cruel. So far the analysis of Johan Kepler from the position of the stars over Hermanice at four in the afternoon on September 14th 1583, when Wallenstein was born.[95] The estimate was searching and true enough.
Wallenstein had been in command of the local levies of Moravia when the rebellion broke out in 1618. Finding that his troops were deserting to the rebels he had, with his usual presence of mind, escaped to safety, taking with him th
e military treasury of the province, thus bringing much-needed financial help to Ferdinand and depriving the Moravian rebel army of its pay.[96] In the following year he had advanced forty thousand gulden to the Emperor from his own estates and offered to raise a thousand men in Flanders, in 1620 he had lent four times as much again, in 1621 nearly two hundred thousand gulden, and in 1623, the year in which he bought the greater number of his new estates, half a million. And these were real gulden, not the debased currency of Prague. Wallenstein was not the man to throw away his money, and every loan put the Emperor deeper into his debt, a debt for which when the time came he would exact every farthing of interest, in favour if not in money. Ferdinand’s obligations to Maximilian of Bavaria were based at least on a diplomatic treaty; these private obligations were based on nothing but a business agreement, and Wallenstein had a harder head for a deal than Ferdinand.
Already Wallenstein had a reputation for insolence and pretensions beyond his station. A Czech by birth, speaking the language fluently and allied to many of the leading families, dispossessed and otherwise, Wallenstein was influential if not popular in many sections of society. He now controlled a quarter of the land in Bohemia, was overlord of more than three hundred vassals and held in his hand more power than any of the rebel parties who had once dethroned Ferdinand. The rigid efficiency of his management together with his strict adherence to the Catholic faith were coming to be the dominant influences in the consolidation of the country.[97] Ferdinand had to conciliate him or take the risk of further trouble in Bohemia.
Meanwhile, before the end of 1623 Wallenstein had contracted a second marriage, with Isabella von Harrach, a lady who regarded him with the nearest approximation to love which we may suppose it was ever his fate to inspire,[98] and whom he treated as he had his previous wife, with faultless courtesy and respect. The importance of the marriage was not, however, in the personal contentment which it gave to either party, but in the fact that Isabella von Harrach was the daughter of one of Ferdinand’s closest advisers. In the same year Wallenstein was created Count of Friedland.[99]
This elevation was an integral part of Ferdinand’s policy. In order to curb the demands of the too numerous petty nobility of his lands, he seized upon every opportunity to replace them by a small aristocracy dependent entirely on himself. The individual power of his nominees might be greater than that of the innumerable gentry whom they superseded, but their influence as a class was conditioned by their dependence on the Crown, and it would be many years before they gained the understanding and support of their local peasantry; their estates were too far scattered, their presence too often required at Prague or Vienna. They were a governing aristocracy bound only to the Crown, not the leaders of a feudal hierarchy. Ferdinand further accentuated this separation of the nobility from the people by introducing foreigners into the conquered land, Austrians, Italians, Germans. So many of the original nobility had been tainted with rebellion that the persecution had stripped the country bare of its natural leaders and made way for the strangers. Italian and French were heard in the streets of Prague, German supplanted Czech as the official language, and on the battered ruins of the medieval Slavonic city grew up the stately palaces, the spacious courtyards, the cool loggias and the opulent baroque churches which echo the architecture of Italy.
As he changed the course and almost the whole nature of Czech culture, dammed up its natural stream and forced it into foreign channels, so Ferdinand also changed the religion of his people. Seldom was persecution more effective or reform more far-reaching, for if the Emperor and his advisers had the courage and the cruelty of their convictions, they had also the wisdom to plant again where they destroyed and to salve the scars they inflicted with balm from the same source.
Religion in Bohemia, even the Catholic religion, was closely connected with national feeling. The Utraquist King, George of Podiebrad, and the Utraquist leader, Zizka, were the two heroes of popular imagination, and among the Catholics the favourite saint was the heroic Duke Wenceslas, the ‘good King Wenceslas’ of the carol, a prince who had been canonized not by the Vatican but by the common devotion of his people. Time out of mind religious services had been held in Czech, even among the most scrupulous adherents to the old faith. The bringing of Bohemia into line with the rest of Catholic Europe entailed therefore the eradication of age-old tradition and a direct attack on Czech nationality itself. Had Ferdinand been a less devout man than in fact he was, he must have seen the importance of carrying through this reform. As it was he had his personal convictions to support him, and doubtless imagined that he was doing as well for the souls of his subjects as he was for the stability of his own government.
This double conviction gave him the strength of mind to sweep aside the protests of the more cautious Liechtenstein and give wholehearted approval to the ruthless thoroughness of Cardinal Carafa. Liechtenstein would have spared all but the Calvinists, because he feared the intervention of John George of Saxony; Carafa, on the other hand, would not permit so superficial a deviation from orthodoxy as the saying of Mass in Czech, even if the safety of the Bohemian Crown itself depended on it.[100] Politically Ferdinand did well to support this extreme view, the cautious politicians of the Empire shook their heads and warned him he would drive the Elector of Saxony to arms.[101] Ferdinand knew his Saxony; the Court of Dresden deluged him with written protests, adjured him to remember his past promises, called down the wrath of heaven on his head, overwhelmed him with recriminations, and stirred not a finger to stop him.[102]
A policy of repressive violence had lost the northern Netherlands for ever to the Catholic Church. The same mistake was not made in Bohemia; but civil and economic persecution fastened upon the Protestants like a vice from which the only means of escape was the denial of their faith. The University of Prague was given to the Jesuits in 1623, and education throughout the country placed wholly in the hands of the Church, so that the younger generation imbibed naturally the lesson which their parents were learning in a harder school.[103]
Prague itself presented few difficulties. The Archbishop made conversion the price of pardon for participation in the revolt, and this, acting upon the natural indifference of a religiously divided and cosmopolitan city, brought the greater number of citizens into the Catholic fold within little more than a year.[104] The outlying towns proved more difficult, and towards them sterner measures were used. Taxes and extraordinary levies were demanded from the Protestants, and the billeting of imperialist troops was found to be a particularly effective form of coercion unless, as sometimes happened, the inhabitants got wind of their coming, burned their houses and fled to the woods with all that they could carry.[105] Otherwise the exactions and disorders of the troops would wear down the resistance of the people in a few months. Tabor, the stronghold of Zizka, was entirely reconverted before Easter 1623; Komotau, after bearing heavy contributions for three years, broke down at a threat of occupation; at Kuttenberg the miners, a hardy and obstinate people, bore a contribution three times as large as the normal taxes for the whole of the rest of Bohemia, and suffered for three years under the quartering of troops until the greater number of the population drifted away and the mines fell into disuse through lack of workers.[106] The Catholic nobility assisted in the conversion of their villagers; the tyrannical Count Kolowrat, it was said, drove his peasants to church with blows;[107] at Gitschin, Wallenstein founded a Jesuit school to which he compelled his serfs to send their children. He built a church copied from Santiago de Compostela, and followed this up by suggesting that the duchy of Friedland be converted into a bishopric.[108] The idea was set aside by the imperial court, where Wallenstein was thought to be powerful enough without having a pocket bishopric in his control.
No measures which could serve to discourage the national as well as the heretical spirit of the Bohemians were neglected. On John Hus’s Day, hitherto a national holiday, the churches were closed; the statue of George of Podiebrad in the Prague market-place was destro
yed, and the sculptured chalice, the Bohemian symbol of reform, was erased from the façades of innumerable churches.[109] Ferdinand also procured the canonization of John of Nepomuk, a Czech priest who had been murdered by Wenceslas IV for refusing to reveal the secrets of the confessional. The move was ingenious, for the new Saint’s life-story cast a slur on the forerunners of the Hapsburg on the Bohemian throne, and among the younger generation the popularity of Nepomuk soon outstripped that of the remote Saint Wenceslas.
The chief hindrance to the conversion of Bohemia was the lack of priests for so immense a task. The Jesuits poured their crusaders into the country but could never fill the breach made by the removal of Calvinist, Lutheran and Utraquist pastors; in many cases easy-going Protestant ministers agreed to become Catholic in order to keep their cure, and it was years before the irregularities arising out of this practice could be put down. The pastors were commanded to send away their wives; many made no effort to obey this order, while others merely called their wives ‘housekeepers’ and continued to live with them, to the great scandal of the neighbourhood. In one case a Utraquist vicar persistently said he was a Catholic when interrogated, but continued to preach the tenets of the Utraquist heresy and to administer the sacrament in both kinds.[110] Carafa could fulminate in vain against such conduct; time alone and the growth of a native priesthood would ultimately cure the evil.[111] In remote districts Protestantism persisted openly for at least another generation and died hard or sometimes not at all, living on as a secret tradition among the people.[112]
The conversion of Bohemia completed its political subjection and stilled for ever the factious religious quarrels which had disturbed the country for a century past; but the forcible restoration of Church lands completed its economic ruin. The second and the third Estates of the Bohemian parliament, the small gentry and the merchants, declined. Ferdinand, after restoring the clergy to the place in the Estates which they had forfeited at the Reformation, was able to continue the appearance of representative government, in the certainty that it would mean government by his own Church and his own higher aristocracy.[113]
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