Portrait of Wallenstein by Anthony Van Dyck, 1629

Also known as Albrecht von Waldstein. Duke of Friedland and Mecklenburg, Prince of Sagan. He made his name as a mercenary in Habsburg service. Although he was a Czech he is remembered by German nationalists as ‘‘Der Friedlander.’’ From first to last, in two spectacularly lucrative marriages and in his inspired mercenary commands, Wallenstein was motivated by exceptional ambition for power, titles, and estates. He achieved all three beyond any man of his age, only to lose it all in blood and betrayal. An orphan at 10, he was raised by his uncles and educated by the Jesuits, under whose tutelage he nominally adhered to Catholicism. His 1607 marriage gave him great wealth. When his first wife died he married again, gaining even more lands. He first took a command in 1617 when he raised 200 horse to aid Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, later Ferdinand II, in a minor dispute with Venice. This led to his appointment as head of the militia of Moravia. When the Thirty Years’ War broke out, he spurned the entreaties of Bohemian Protestants to join them. Instead, he tried to raise militia from his considerable estates to serve Ferdinand. When this failed he was expelled from Bohemia and forfeited his lands to the rebels.

Wallenstein went to Vienna to offer his services to Ferdinand, now Holy Roman Emperor. He captured a Bohemian Wagenburg (a rare military feat) during a skirmish at Rablat, compelling Count Matthias von Thurn and the Bohemian army to abandon its assault on Vienna. He then held a key bridge to allow a retreating Imperial army to cross to safety. He played no role, however, at the fight that followed at the White Mountain (November 8, 1620), outside Prague. After that decisive defeat of the Bohemian rebels Wallenstein not only recovered all his estates, he added to them greatly by buying at cut-rate prices the lands of Protestant nobles executed or exiled by Ferdinand. His estates were so extensive Ferdinand designated them the ‘‘Principality of Friedland’’ and made Wallenstein a prince. In 1621 and 1623 he raised armies to block the claims of Bethlen Gabor to the Hungarian throne. For these services he was created ‘‘Duke of Friedland’’ by Ferdinand and given the right to mint coin.

In 1625 Wallenstein was given command of all Imperial armies. At the peak of his power he commanded forces in excess of 100,000 men. To finance this army he devised a system of contributions that made his army more effective but so scarred the face of Europe that marauding became irrevocably attached to his reputation, and he became the most hated man in the Empire. Along with Johan Tilly, general of the German Catholic League, Wallenstein campaigned brilliantly in behalf of Imperial and Catholic authority, although he was himself an agnostic mystic from Bohemia with a penchant for astrology. He governed his lands and appointed officers with broad indifference to religion. That appeared to fanatic Catholics around Ferdinand to be religious tolerance, which for such men was little better than heresy itself. For fanatics of the Counter-Reformation indifference to religion was Wallenstein’s mortal sin, as it would in time prove his mortal doom. Always, his central ambition was power, wealth, and personal aggrandizement, not occurring advantage to his paymaster in the great confessional and constitutional war. As his ends nonetheless merged with Ferdinand’s on most days before 1634, both men were content for Wallenstein to exercise Imperial command with great latitude as to strategy and financing.

Wallenstein began at Dessau Bridge (April 25, 1626) where he bested Graf von Mansfeld. Together with Tilly he beat the Danes at Lutter-am-Barenberg (August 17/27, 1626).He drove Hungary out of the war in 1627, then linked with Tilly again to push Christian IV of Denmark out of Germany in 1628. He next sent Tilly to watch the Dutch frontier while he occupied Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, and Pomerania. He asked for and was given title to the whole of Mecklenburg. In these lands he was tasked to impose the terms of the Edict of Restitution (March 28, 1629), which earned him the lasting animosity of Protestant princes. In accord with the new Baltic policy of Olivares, Wallenstein invested Straslund and began building a Baltic fleet that could contain Denmark and threaten the Hanse and Sweden. All that accomplished was permanent alienation of the whole of northern Europe.

As for Vienna, Wallenstein’s unquenchable ambition, constant intrigue, military and financial independence, unique ability to raise armies in short order, and irreligious nature, posed a real threat to the interests and policies of the Habsburgs. When Ferdinand tried to send Wallenstein and 50,000 troops to intervene in behalf of Spain in the War of the Mantuan Succession (1627–1631), the German princes refused to pay. Instead they demanded a reduction of the Imperial Army by two-thirds (to 40,000 men) and that Wallenstein be dismissed. Since recent military success made it seem that Ferdinand would have no more need of his Bohemian general, he sacked Wallenstein on August 13, 1630. That weakened Ferdinand just as the threat of launching an Imperial navy into the Baltic, and offers of French gold, provoked Gustavus Adolphus to enter the German war.

Wallenstein retired to his estates and waited. He was recalled after the Imperial and Catholic League armies were routed by Gustavus at First Breitenfeld (1631). With Vienna threatened, Wallenstein negotiated exceptional terms of pay and command, extracting huge concessions from Ferdinand. He was reinstated in fact in December 1631 and formally confirmed in April 1632. His extraordinary power and ambition, combined with Ferdinand’s debilitating political and military weakness, would prove to be Wallenstein’s undoing. For the moment, however, his eye was on the great champion of Protestantism descending from the north with a powerful Lutheran army. Blind with ambition, Wallenstein did not appreciate the envy and malice of Catholic nobles to his strategic rear, who were already planning his demise.

To stop Gustavus from marauding over Bavaria and divert him from advancing on Vienna, Wallenstein did an exceptional thing: instead of moving into Bavaria to seek battle he maneuvered against the weaker member of the Swedish alliance, the Saxon Army, then active in Bohemia. That left the road to Vienna open to Gustavus but placed Wallenstein’s force behind the Swedes, cutting their lines of communication and supply should they continue south even as he chased the Saxons from continuing their destructive chevauchée through Bohemia. After coercing Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria, to join his forces to the Imperial Army, Wallenstein moved farther north into Saxony itself. This forced Gustavus to fall back to the crucial crossroads town of Nuremberg. Instead of fighting, Wallenstein dug in parallel to the Swedish lines, then deployed his superb Austrian and Balkan light horse to harry their foraging parties in a low-level strategy of attrition. Within two weeks Gustavus was provoked into making a rare mistake: an ill-conceived frontal attack that was fairly easily repulsed, and which cost the great Swede more in reputation than in military losses. As Wallenstein put it: ‘‘The King has blunted his horns.’’ In a vain effort to lure Wallenstein out of his fortified defenses, Gustavus moved back to Bavaria. In a master stroke of war-of-maneuver, Wallenstein turned north into Saxony, once more checking the southern advance of the Swedish Army by compelling it to follow him northward away from the core Habsburg lands and capital, to waste instead Protestant Saxony. There followed an extraordinary set of marches and countermarches by the two main armies, as well as several smaller and allied forces. The campaign saw a small action at Alte Feste (1632) before culminating in the one near-decisive battle of the Thirty Years’ War at Lützen (1632). Wallenstein was badly beaten by Gustavus: he lost his artillery, baggage train, and thousands of men. But the great Swedish general died of multiple wounds received while leading a cavalry charge into the Imperial flank. This one death nearly counterbalanced thousands of Imperial dead and almost made Lützen an Imperial victory.

Wallenstein rebuilt the Imperial Army in 1632–1633, adopting as many of the Swedish reforms as his troops could absorb, notably returning to a shock role for cavalry, thinning infantry ranks, adding lighter field artillery, and filling out the ranks of the tercios with more musketeers. While Wallenstein skirmished and maneuvered, he also intrigued with Catholic and Protestant powers alike to hire out his services and army. More crucially, he plotted to forge an alliance that might force Ferdinand to make a peace that took no cognisance of the Emperor’s Catholic crusade and personal sense of religious mission. To his later admirers, Wallenstein was readying to end the war by creating a unified and tolerant Germany. Or perhaps he really sought the symbols as well as the substance of power for himself, as emperor? In any case, spies informed Ferdinand of the general’s secret talks and he determined to finish Wallenstein for good. Reinforcing the decision was the fact that Spain was readying to enter the German war but would not accept Wallenstein’s core demand that he alone have supreme command of all Catholic troops.

In January 1634, Ferdinand secretly removed Wallenstein from office, declared him outlaw and traitor, condemned his hiring of Protestant officers, and ordered his arrest pending a planned judicial murder. Wallenstein learned of the secret orders and fled toward the Protestant lines. He sent word ahead to ask for sanctuary, but was refused. Escorted by a troop of Irish dragoons whose commander, Colonel Butler, was in secret contact with agents from Ferdinand’s court, on February 24 Wallenstein’s small party reached the fortress of Eger. It was held by two Scottish officers who had served him for years, Colonel Gordon and Major (later Field Marshal), Walter Leslie. That night, Butler drew the Scots into the conspiracy. The next evening, after dining with their victims, the dragoons slew Wallenstein’s close companions. Butler, Gordon, and Leslie, and a French mercenary captain, Devereux, entered Wallenstein’s bedchamber. Devereux struck the first blow with a halberd; the others joined in, hacking Wallenstein to death with their swords. Ferdinand III replaced him in nominal command of all Habsburg forces.

Suggested Reading: Golo Mann, Wallenstein (1976).