Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The promised army, which Wallenstein grandly called his “armada,” was to be no piffling and ephemeral task force. There was the question of how it was to be financed. “Actions which are great in themselves,” Niccolò Machiavelli had written, “always seem to bring more glory than blame, of whatever kind they are.” Acting accordingly, Wallenstein told Ferdinand and his councillors that though he could not provide for an army of twenty thousand men, one of fifty thousand would sustain itself. The stench of sulfur was growing unmistakable. Some of the expenses Wallenstein would pay, thus placing the emperor even further in his debt, but he could not possibly pay them all. Crassus had said that no man was rich until he could afford his own army, but though Wallenstein was very rich indeed, even by Crassus’s standards, neither he, nor probably any private individual in Europe at the time, was rich enough to pay and provision fifty thousand men. What he meant by his gnomic claim was that the larger the army, the more effective an instrument of terror it would be, and the more efficiently it would be able to extort the cash and food and material it needed from the civilian populations of the emperor’s enemies and, if necessary, from the emperor’s subjects. “War,” says a character in the great dramatic trilogy Schiller based on Wallenstein’s story, “must nourish war.”

  Ferdinand wavered; Wallenstein, peremptory as ever, threatened to withdraw. “I have made the offer of myself, to serve his Majesty, and this I will most loyally carry out. But if I see that time is wilfully thrown away … then I will enter no such labyrinth where my honour must be sacrificed.” His impatience was effective. In June 1625 he was appointed overall commander of all the imperial troops and given a title appropriate to his new power, that of the Duke of Friedland (the name by which he was thenceforward normally known to his contemporaries). The vision painted on the ceiling of the great hall in Prague was to be realized. Wallenstein’s apotheosis from mortal magnate to divine (or diabolical) warlord was begun.

  He was ready. His offer had not been made impetuously or without forethought. Within a week his army numbered over twenty thousand. By summer’s end he had his fifty thousand men. It was a time when dragon’s teeth sprouted faster than wheat, when it was easier to call up an army than it was to bring in a harvest. The empire was full of unemployed foreign fighters, men from England, Scotland, and Ireland, from the plains of northern Italy, from Croatia and Hungary, men who for a variety of reasons had been unable to find a livelihood at home. There were those who descended on warring Germany in search of adventure, like the English gentleman Sir James Turner, who wrote that “a restless desire entered my mind to be if not an actor, at least a spectator of these wars.” And for each of these Hotspurs there was a host of the kind of riffraff Falstaff might have recruited, men like those in Francis Drake’s crew, the “company of desperate bankrupts that could not live in their country without the spoil of that as others had gotten by the sweat of their brows.” They changed sides frequently. Turner, who fought for Denmark and Sweden, “swallowed without chewing, in Germany, a very dangerous maxim, which military men there too much follow, which was that so we serve our master honestly, it is no matter what master we serve.” After a battle it was usual for the survivors of the defeated army to join the victor’s and fight on alongside their former adversaries. They were not idealists serving a cause, or patriots doing their duty: they were hired killers trying to save their skins and scrape together a living under any master they could find.

  The living they found in Germany was insecure. Soldiers went hungry as often as the civilian populace did. Wallenstein’s proposal, to create and keep in being—year in, year out—an army substantial enough to deter or otherwise to meet any uprising or attack was startlingly novel. The usual practice was to demobilize an army as soon as the immediate danger was past, or at the end of the summer’s campaigning season, whichever was the sooner, leaving the countryside aswarm with men, all of them violent by profession and by practice and with no legitimate way of getting a livelihood. A soldier’s life was a harsh one, and likely to be short. There were no medical corps, no field hospitals. When he fought the Swedes before Nuremberg Wallenstein rode through the lines tossing gold coins to the wounded so that they might buy themselves food once they had been, as they inevitably would be, abandoned. King Gustavus II Adolphus, marching back over the battlefield weeks later, was sickened to see those who had survived so long “famished and untended, crawling among the bodies of dead men and beasts.” But, grim though the soldiers’ life might be, it offered at least a chance of survival. As the wars lasted longer and spread wider, eroding the structures of civilian life, the indigenous population joined the ranks of the homeless mercenaries. A peasant who had lost his crops, his hut, his horse to looters had little choice but to try fighting himself. Throughout the Thirty Years’ War, whatever else may have been in short supply—whether hard cash or horses, bread or iron—there was never any scarcity of food for powder.

  Five years later those who clamored for Wallenstein’s dismissal were to accuse him of having burdened the empire with an army of monstrous magnitude, and at a time, moreover, when the emperor had no need of it. But although there was not exactly a war on, there were enemies to confront. The Protestant princes of the Lower Saxon Circle, restive under their Catholic emperor, had called upon King Christian of Denmark to act as their commander in chief. Other powers—England, Sweden, Holland, and France—had encouraged him to accept and to play the part aggressively. By the time Wallenstein was ready to march the northern reaches of the empire were full of Danish troops. There was an ever-present possibility that Bethlen Gabor, the prince of Transylvania, might strike towards Vienna from the southeast. There was also an army led by Ernst von Mansfeld moving eastward into the empire from the Netherlands. Count Mansfeld was a mercenary warlord, a latter-day Cid, who was accustomed to place his army at the disposal of the highest bidder. On this occasion his sponsors were the Dutch and the English, each of whom had reasons for wishing to undermine Hapsburg power.

  Wallenstein was the imperial general, but he was not operating alone.

  He was working in alliance with Maximilian, elector of Bavaria, who had subdued Bohemia for the emperor. For the rest of Wallenstein’s life Maximilian was to be a major character in his story, as colleague and rival, political ally and private enemy. A nobleman and hereditary ruler, he was one who, unlike the new general, had been born great. He was the Emperor Ferdinand’s brother-in-law and senior by five years and, like Ferdinand, he was a fervid Catholic. He wore a hair shirt beneath his robes of state and had made a vow, written in his own blood, to dedicate his life to the service of the Virgin Mary. But besides being the most potent of the Catholic imperialists he was also, and always primarily, archduke of Bavaria, more concerned to protect his own territory than the Hapsburg hereditary lands around Vienna, and more interested in the aggrandizement of his own dynasty than the protection of Ferdinand’s. His interests did not exactly coincide with those of the emperor; they were often directly in conflict with those of the emperor’s new commander in chief, who was in the process of usurping Maximilian’s own role—one fruitful in both wealth and honor—as the emperor’s military protector.

  It was an age when crowned kings still led their armies into battle, but Maximilian, like Ferdinand, preferred to delegate. His commander in chief was General Johann Tserclaes von Tilly, sixty-six years old in 1625 and as full of battle honors as he was of years. Tilly and Wallenstein cooperated tolerably well, though Tilly knew and resented the fact that his junior associate outshone and outmaneuvered him. Thrasybulus to Wallenstein’s Alcibiades, he bitterly observed how the other was celebrated for victories he himself had made possible: “No matter how hard I labour they let me gnaw a few bones while others [meaning Wallenstein] pass through the door pushed open by me and enjoy the meat.” Wallenstein, blithely condescending, habitually referred to Tilly as “the good old man.”

  In October 1625 the two generals met, only to separate again in search of ter
ritory in which their armies could wait for spring. As Wallenstein’s troops—followed, as all contemporary armies were, by a train of women and children and sutlers and servants which doubled its size—moved northward, the chief magistrate of a town they passed wrote, “God help the place where they should lay their winter quarters!”

  A seventeenth-century army on the march was a terrifying phenomenon, and not only to its ostensible enemies. Armies carried disease with them—typhus, bubonic plague, something deadly known as “the Hungarian sickness.” Pursuing Count Mansfeld once, in three weeks Wallenstein lost three-quarters of the twenty thousand men with whom he set out to exposure or sickness. How many of the civilian population perished infected by them we will never know. And not all of the killing of civilians was done involuntarily. The official documents, as well as the pamphlets and news sheets of the time, are full of accounts of violent robberies perpetrated by soldiery. An Englishman who served Mansfeld recorded starkly, after taking a town, “we entered killing man, woman and child: the execution continued the space of two hours, the pillaging two days.” In 1632 a Scottish mercenary gave a graphic account of relations between the armies and the peasants over whose land they marched: “The boors cruelly used our soldiers that went aside to plunder in cutting off their noses and ears, hands and feet, pulling out their eyes, with sundry other cruelties which they used, being justly repaid by the soldiers in the burning of many dorps [villages] on the march, also leaving the boors dead where they were found.”

  Wallenstein, ever pragmatic, did his best to prevent his men destroying the civilian economy on which he depended for their sustenance. But harsh as his discipline was—on his first long march in 1625 he had fifteen men hanged in his presence one morning for looting—he couldn’t alter the habitual behavior of the troops. And though indiscriminate pillage was a wasteful stupidity he attempted to control, organized extortion was his usual practice. This much was normal: in the past those noblemen who had raised troops for the emperor had been permitted to cover their expenses by plundering their enemies. But the size of Wallenstein’s army meant that the emperor’s loyal subjects, as well as his vanquished enemies, had to help house, feed, and pay for it. The levies Wallenstein exacted from the inhabitants of the districts in which he quartered his troops on occasion rose as high as 24 percent of all their assets, with ferocious penalties for nonpayment.

  In 1625 he marched into the archbishoprics of Halberstadt and Magdeburg, declaring that he would harm neither the people nor their rulers so long as his men could be provided with food and shelter. The threat was effective. His men accommodated, Wallenstein established his court in the castle at Halberstadt, protected by the two hundred lancers of his private bodyguard, and prepared for spring.

  There, as everywhere he went, he worked. He was a warrior but he was also, always, an administrator. A Bavarian agent who observed him closely (he was always surrounded by spies) called him “il grand economo.” In his own person he combined the roles of commander in chief, quartermaster, and supplier. He had brought to the war all the backup provided by his enormous, prodigiously well-run estates. The army needed beer, flour, boots, muskets: at Gitschin he had breweries, farms, mills, tanneries, mines, and foundries ready to provide them. His detractors, from his day to this, have accused him of corruption, but those who suspect him of making money on the side overlook the fact that, so absolute was his monopoly, there was no “side” that was outside its compass. As general, he was paying himself, as supplier, to equip and provision his own army (the cost, at some notional future date, to be refunded by the emperor). He had made of himself a one-man military-industrial complex.

  In 1626 he defeated Count Mansfeld at Dessau and chased his surviving troops through Hungary into Croatia, but it was Tilly who had the more glorious victory, slaughtering the armies of King Christian of Denmark and his allies at Lutter. An agent reported to the elector of Bavaria, Tilly’s master, that Wallenstein, on receiving the news of his colleague’s triumph, had thrown a wineglass across the room in rage. True or not, the story reflects the popular impression that the allied generals were in competition, and that Tilly was winning. Wallenstein answered carping criticism bluntly—“Had I served God as well, I would assuredly be the foremost saint in Heaven”—but at the imperial court there were voices asking whether the comparatively modest achievements of the Duke of Friedland had been worth the honors heaped upon him—not to mention the expense of his monstrous armada.

  It was too late, though, to think of getting rid of him. A spirit may be conjured up but it cannot so readily be persuaded to return to the hellish regions from which it came, for it could not render the extraordinary service for which it has been summoned if it didn’t have powers far exceeding those of its mortal master. No one, not even the Emperor Ferdinand, would ever again feel safely able to deny Wallenstein his will. He was not yet suspected of planning to use his soldiers against his empire, but they were nonetheless a constant and appalling threat to the community they ostensibly served.

  An army of mercenaries could never be trusted not to turn on its own masters. In the first year of Wallenstein’s command the Venetian ambassador in Vienna reported that the army’s “loyalty is in doubt… there is fear of mutiny and joinder with the enemy.” These were fears which Wallenstein deliberately fostered. Over the next few years he was repeatedly to proffer his resignation when crossed—perhaps sincerely, but also as a reminder of how irreplaceable he was—and in doing so he was apt to hint darkly at how his removal would increase the danger posed by his troops. “One must avoid casting the men deliberately into despair, for by the God to whom I pray, they will grow mutinous.”

  Nominally the emperor’s officers and men alike were, in fact, Wallenstein’s. “They are as strangers on the soil they tread,” says an officer in Schiller’s Wallenstein, making the valid point that mercenary troops, many of them foreigners, with no sentimental or political motive for devotion to emperor or empire, owed their loyalty only to the commander in chief. Wallenstein’s officers were bound to him financially. The army was held together not only by chains of command but by a great web of financial credit at the center of which sat the commander in chief. Each colonel had raised troops at his own expense on the understanding that he would eventually be recompensed; the guarantor of that debt was Wallenstein. Besides he had a knack of binding them to him emotionally by alternately intimidating and indulging them. He could be munificent. After a successful raid he rewarded one of his colonels with four thousand crowns and a horse. The colonel, a reckless gambler, promptly lost it all at cards. Before he could rise from the table Wallenstein’s page handed him a purse containing another small fortune. But he could also be terrible. From time to time he would let loose his fury and rage at his officers in front of their men. Once, when he rode into a town at the head of troops to find that the provisions he ordered had not been delivered, he yelled abuse at the quartermasters responsible while all his officers stood by and the townspeople ran up to find out what the commotion was about. Exonerating documents were timidly offered him; he tore them up. He raved; he was beside himself. According to one of the shocked and humiliated quartermasters he called them “mean curs, sluggards, brutes and rascals, and continued so until at last he himself wearied.” Afterwards one of his highest-ranking officers contacted the offended men, not exactly to apologize, but to advise them to forget the incident. Those around him accepted that Wallenstein’s fury was like a rocket’s exhaust, and enduring it was the price allies and associates had to pay for the privilege of proximity to his stupendous energy.

  Backed by his tens of thousands of armed men, his position assured by the fear that without him they might prove uncontrollable, Wallenstein’s position seemed unassailable. “His armies flourished,” wrote Schiller, “while all the states through which they passed withered. What cared he for the detestation of the people and the complaints of princes? His army adored him, and the very enormity of his guilt enabled him to bid defi
ance to its consequences.” He was the lion tamer who cannot be dispensed with for fear of the lion. When, pursuing Mansfeld southward, he had sent to the emperor demanding pay for his troops, warning ominously that without it they might “take a different direction of their own,” the Venetian envoy observed: “These are demands which would cost any other prince his head, but Wallenstein is feared because he commands a large army.”

  In the next year those voices grumbling against him were stilled, at least for a time. 1627 was Wallenstein’s annus mirabilis, the year when he marched from victory to victory, sweeping northwards through the empire, driving the emperor’s enemies before him. His confidence was superb, his strategy audacious, his will adamantine. Triumphantly he vindicated the claims he had made to Ferdinand and his councillors and the demands he had made on the exchequer. He was inexorable, tremendous. It was this year’s campaign which won him the reputation for invincibility, omnipotence even, which led his contemporaries to believe that he, and he alone, could defeat the empire’s most formidable attacker. At the head of an army forty thousand strong he drove the Danes and their allies out of Silesia. He joined forces once again with Tilly but, the latter having been wounded, Wallenstein was left in undisputed command. He drove on northward, cities and fortresses falling like overripe fruit to him and his lieutenants, through Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Holstein, Jutland. Finally he overran the Danish peninsula itself. Christian, a king without a country now, fled to the islands. The abbot of Kremsmünster spoke for the majority when he wrote that Wallenstein’s “martial progress, amazing in so short a time, is so great that all are taken aback and say ‘Quid est hoc?’ What is this?”