Wallenstein was one of many Bohemian noblemen who returned to the old faith in the first two decades of the century and thereby greatly improved their secular career prospects. At the height of his power as generalissimo to a zealously Catholic emperor Wallenstein was to come to be seen as the sword bearer of the Counter-Reformation, the protector of the Holy Roman Church as well as of the Holy Roman Empire, but he himself consistently denied that he was fighting a religious war. Some of his contemporaries doubted whether he was a Christian at all.
The Emperor Ferdinand II, whom he served for most of his adult life, was a sectarian zealot. As a nineteen-year-old, Archduke Ferdinand had made a pilgrimage to Loreto, and there vowed to drive all heretics from his realm. On his return to his duchy of Styria he expelled all Lutheran preachers. He prohibited Protestant worship on pain of death. He ordered the burning of ten thousand books, and gave the citizens three weeks to either go to mass or leave the country. His councillors, foreseeing economic disaster and probable civil war, begged him to reconsider but his resolution, according to a contemporary chronicle, was “as a block of marble.” “Better a desert than a country full of heretics,” he said. Thousands went into exile, the great astronomer Johannes Kepler (later Wallenstein’s protégé) among them. Some forty thousand, less stalwart or less devout, converted. Lesser lords took their cue from their ruler. Protestants told horror stories of Catholic masters using hounds to drive their vassals to mass, or holding down those who still refused to swallow the host and forcing their jaws open with pincers.
That was not Wallenstein’s way. Protestants were always welcome in his armies and were trusted with high commands. He went through the forms of attending mass and of ascribing his successes to God’s favor, but an imperial councillor alleged that he “reeks of atheism and troubles not about God.” He “often utters the most horrendous blasphemies and oaths,” reported another associate, and the Duke of Weimar rejected his offer of an alliance on the grounds that “he who does not trust in God can never be trusted by men.” He was fascinated by, and credulous of, astrology, building observatories on his estates and commissioning horoscopes which he scrutinized for clues to the future. When driven from office in 1630 he told the emperor’s messengers he had expected nothing better: he had seen that his downfall was foretold by the stars. Towards the end of his life he began (like Drake) to acquire the sinister reputation of a wizard, a dabbler in black arts. Kepler, who was one of the several astrologers who formed part of his household over the years, wrote that he was inclined “to alchemy, sorcery, incantation, communion with spirits.” Like Rodrigo Díaz, another figurehead of the Counter-Reformation, he was one whose faith in signs and omens is well attested but whose claim to be considered a good Christian is doubtful.
Religion was one of the numerous causes at issue in the Thirty Years’ War. Sectarian hostility pervaded the empire, in which each petty state had its established religion and its religious minorities, and it was complicated at every point by secular politics. The world through which Wallenstein moved was one, like Cato’s Rome, whose political institutions failed to match the actual distribution of power. The Holy Roman Emperor was nominally the ruler of all central Europe from the Baltic southward to the Alps, from the French border eastwards to the domains of the Turkish sultan. The emperor did not, supposedly, inherit his title—he was chosen by the seven electors, four of them secular rulers of states within the empire, three of them archbishops—but for nearly two centuries every emperor had been a Hapsburg. Under the wavering control of these emperors a multitude of lesser rulers held sway in states whose constitutions and whose political and religious histories were bewilderingly diverse. There were free cities administered by elected councils. There were hereditary principalities. There were archbishoprics and bishoprics, duchies, margravates, kingdoms. Each of these multifarious states had its own governmental institutions, estates or diets, oligarchic councils or autocratic ministers. Each jealously insisted on preserving its own right of self-determination (collectively known as the German liberties) from any encroachment by the centralizing power of the emperor.
A state’s religious policy was often ambivalent. In several places a Catholic prince had to tussle with a predominantly Protestant diet. And sectarian differences tangled with class conflict: the nobility was predominantly Catholic, the bourgeoisie Protestant. Each small polity was linked to others within larger, looser institutions. In the circles of the empire, established in the early sixteenth century, geographically contiguous states banded together for purposes of defense. More recently the Catholic princes had formed a league to defend their interests, and the Protestants a union to promote theirs. It would have been a bewilderingly complex situation, even had it been a fixed and self-consistent one, and it was not. Seventeenth-century states were not closed systems. Ties of kinship cut across and contradicted local political loyalties; so did religious affiliations. One man might hold several offices and contrary identities. When King Christian of Denmark led an army into the imperial territory of Pomerania, he did so, or so he claimed, not as a foreign invader but as the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, a member of the Lower Saxon Circle with a legitimate interest in events in the region. There were states, the empire itself among them, without armies. More disruptively, there were armies without states, like that of the formidably successful mercenary Count Mansfeld, armies which functioned like landless states with their own hierarchies, their own economies, their vast populations; lacking only lebensraum, they would settle on others’ territory like monstrous parasites. The empire was a labyrinth (a word which recurs in Wallenstein’s correspondence). It was a world where chronic instability lapsed repeatedly into violence on a massive scale. It was also a world which presented unlimited opportunities for a man of sufficient energy and ruthlessness, talent and luck.
It wasn’t until he was nearly forty that Wallenstein began to attract the world’s notice. In his twenties he served the emperor with modest distinction in campaigns against the Turks and the Venetians, and he married. His first wife was a widow with a large fortune and estates in Moravia (now, like Bohemia, part of the Czech Republic). Legend has it that she was old and ugly, and that she nearly killed him by secretly administering too strong a dose of a love potion, an aphrodisiac rendered necessary by her unseemly lust and lack of charms. The story sounds like misogynist tosh: she was only three years older than Wallenstein. She died five years after their marriage. A decade later he was to found a monastery in her honor, and to have her coffin reburied there, a gesture which suggests that he was at least properly appreciative of the part her fortune played in procuring him a place in the world.
He was cautious and canny and he had a sharp eye for the main chance. He attended the imperial court in Vienna, as was necessary for an ambitious man. There he conducted himself in the style of a great nobleman, dispensing bribes and rewards with notable munificence; it was recorded with respect that he never gave less than a thousand gulden. But according to Khevenhüller “when he had exhausted his store he returned home and remained there until he had amassed enough to come to court again.” So he bided his time and nurtured both his fortune and his reputation until, in 1618, heralded by the ominous appearance of a comet, the long war began.
When the representatives of the Bohemian Estates initiated hostilities by tossing Counts Martinic and Slavata into either a dungheap or the cloak of the Serene Virgin Mary, Wallenstein showed no sympathy for his compatriots’ struggle to establish their political independence and religious freedom. He was by then attached to the court of Ferdinand of Styria, who shortly thereafter became emperor. A Protestant Bohemian by birth, Wallenstein had become a Catholic Imperialist by choice. Achilles, Alcibiades, and Rodrigo Díaz all threatened to shatter the political structures within which they had grown too great. So too, much later, did Wallenstein (or so his killers believed), but for most of his active career he was to work with prodigious energy and success to build up the state he served, to make the
empire the great power it was designed to be. His detractors were to say that he did so only for his own aggrandizement, but even if Wallenstein ever did aspire to make the great political and military engine he created his own, that would not, in itself, have been monstrous. The office of emperor, after all, was an elective one. Military men, from Julius Caesar to Wallenstein’s contemporary Oliver Cromwell, have achieved ultimate power often enough. Napoleon Bonaparte, the self-made emperor who married a daughter of the imperial house of Austria, asked on St. Helena to be sent histories of the Thirty Years’ War. He must have found much to interest him in the story of Wallenstein.
In November 1618 Ferdinand, Wallenstein’s master, sent troops into Bohemia to put down the uprising. Wallenstein was at home on his wife’s estates in the adjoining state of Moravia. When the fighting spread into Moravia the following year he found himself obliged to make a hard choice. Wallenstein held a colonel’s commission in the Moravian militia. The Moravian diet sympathized with the Bohemian rebels. He did not. He contemplated mounting an imperialist coup d’état in Moravia. That proving impracticable, he resolved to defect. At the head of forty musketeers he forced his way into the treasury for the district where he was stationed and demanded its entire contents, threatening to hang the treasurer. The money was carried out and loaded onto wagons, along with all the ammunition he could seize. Wallenstein led his men through Hungary to the imperial court at Vienna. Like Drake before him he committed what its victims would see as a felonious act; and like Drake he brought enough money with him to ensure that he would be well received. Ferdinand was more scrupulous and politically less secure than Drake’s queen. He felt obliged to hand back to the Moravian authorities the wagonloads of iron-hinged chests full of coinage that Wallenstein had stolen, but he wrote privately that Wallenstein had done well.
It was Wallenstein’s first betrayal, or, viewed from the other side, his first act of distinguished loyalty. In 1619 it was impossible to be a Bohemian or Moravian subject of the Holy Roman Empire without being, from at least one point of view, a traitor. In Moravia, his country by marriage and his home for the previous ten years, and his native Bohemia alike Wallenstein was vilified. He was tried in his absence by the Moravian diet and found guilty of “vicious treason, unmindful of the dictates of honour.” He was banished, and all his estates were confiscated. Count Thurn, leader of the Bohemian rebels, called him a turncoat and a pirate: “There sits the proud beast, hath lost his honour, goods and chattels, besides his soul, and doth he not do penance is like to go to Purgatory.” To Czech patriots his offense was unforgivable. Two centuries later Frantisek Palacky, the nationalist historian, was shown a statue of Wallenstein. He gazed at it for a few moments and then turned away, muttering, “Scoundrel!”
In 1620, at the invitation of the rebellious nobility, the Protestant elector of the Palatinate, Frederick, accepted the title of king of Bohemia in defiance of the emperor. Accompanied by his wife, Elizabeth (daughter of James I of England), he established his court in Prague. His reign lasted only a few months. In November 1620 the combined armies of the emperor and the Catholic elector of Bavaria defeated the Bohemians at the battle of the White Mountain, Frederick and his family fled ignominiously, and Hapsburg rule was reestablished.
Wallenstein was not at the White Mountain but he was in Prague only days after Frederick’s defeat, ready to participate in the carve-up of Bohemia. All who had taken part in the rebellion were tried and punished. Twenty-seven were executed, their heads cut off one after another by a single swordsman in a sickening four-and-a-half-hour ceremony outside Prague’s town hall, during which Wallenstein was responsible for keeping order. Twelve of the heads were displayed above the Charles Bridge; they were to rot there for ten years. But what the emperor and his servants wanted more even than the satisfaction afforded by such gruesome spectacles was the Bohemian aristocracy’s property. A Saxon agent in Prague reported that “all they crave is money and blood.” Wallenstein was one of those responsible for wringing the maximum possible quantity of both commodities (especially money) out of the defeated rebels.
By the middle of the 1620s Wallenstein was an enormously rich man. He was an industrious and energetic manager of his own estates. When he turned his back on Moravia he temporarily lost his properties there, but he later recovered and promptly sold them. Meanwhile he had evidently found a safer place to deposit some of his valuables: in 1620 he paid for a large tract of land by selling some silver tableware he had stored in Vienna. He was not above engaging in trade: he sold quantities of Moravian wine in Prague. But there were quicker, less laborious ways of making a fortune. Wallenstein began with some assets, and Bohemia after the rebels’ defeat was a place where assets could be made to breed fast. “He often speculated,” wrote Khevenhüller, and his speculations were neither reckless nor impulsive. “He was very active and discreet and had spies everywhere.”
He also made money by literally making money. He was a member of a syndicate granted a monopoly over the purchase of silver and the right to mint coin. Under the syndicate’s control, and to its members’ handsome profit, the number of gulden made from half a pound of silver rose from nineteen to seventy-nine. The results were, predictably, disastrous. In an ever-accelerating cycle of devaluation and inflation the Bohemian economy was effectively destroyed. Savings were rendered worthless. Wage earners became destitute. Schools and universities closed. Craftsmen and tradesmen subsisted by barter. “We will not sell good meat for bad coin,” proclaimed the butchers. “It was then, for the first time,” wrote the Czech Pavel Stransky in 1633, “that we learned from experience that neither plague nor war, nor hostile foreign incursions into our land, neither pillage nor fire, could do so much harm to good people as frequent changes in the value of money.” Wallenstein, unperturbed, made his profit and established some useful contacts. One of his fellow members of the syndicate was the brilliant Belgian financier Hans de Witte, whose moneylending, banking, and dealing had brought him contacts all over Europe. De Witte soon became closely associated with Wallenstein, so closely that when Wallenstein fell from power he killed himself.
Crassus, Cato’s adversary, laid the foundations of his fortune by buying up at rock-bottom prices the confiscated property of Sulla’s victims and then converted his wealth into power by lending unrepayably vast sums of money to the most influential men in Rome. Some seventeen hundred years later in Bohemia Wallenstein followed his lead. After their victory the imperialists confiscated all the land and money of the leading Bohemian rebels. Those whose guilt was judged to be of a lesser degree were required to hand over half, a third, or a quarter of what they owned. Not, however, that they were allowed to keep the remainder. The imperial officers “bought” the rest of their possessions at prices decided by those same officers, and paid for it all in the new devalued coinage. All of these estates were then available for sale to those whom the emperor deemed worthy.
The suppression of the Bohemian rebellion had been catastrophically expensive. In 1620 Wallenstein, probably backed by de Witte, offered the emperor the loan of the colossal sum of 60,000 gulden. As security he asked for the estate of Gitschin, which comprised three towns, sixty-seven villages, four manors, thirteen farms, and numerous breweries and workshops. The emperor first demurred, then agreed. Again and again the process was repeated. As security for “loans” to the emperor, which would never be repaid, Wallenstein acquired one after another of the rebels’ confiscated estates. In February 1621 he volunteered to provide a garrison, at his own expense, for the fortress of Friedland, whose owner had fled to Poland. In June, after advancing a further 58,000 gulden to the emperor, he became Friedland’s proprietor. By 1623, whether by purchase or by accepting land as security against loans, he had made himself the owner of a quarter of all Bohemia.
As Wallenstein’s property increased so did his status. In 1622, he was appointed military governor of Prague, which made him, after the imperial viceroy, the most important man in Bohemia. He bega
n to build his vast and somber palace in the city, flattening twenty-six houses, four gardens, and a lime kiln to make way for it. He used troops to evict those who refused to move. Some of the houses were demolished with their inhabitants still inside. The palace’s public aspect is a handsome Italianate façade, boasting thirty-six high arched windows and a grand portal. Imposing as it is, this front gives no indication of the scale of the grounds and additional buildings which stretch away behind it. A complex of courtyards and enclosed gardens with stabling for three hundred horses, a walled park, and a covered way to the nearby monastery of St. Thomas, the palace was another labyrinth, at the heart of which Wallenstein lurked, insulated by the spacious grandeur with which he had surrounded himself from the clamor of the world outside.
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