Albrecht von Wallenstein

Albrecht von Wallenstein, a Bohemian nobleman of modest means, became the most powerful soldier of the Thirty Years' War by raising and financing whole armies for the Habsburg emperor Ferdinand II. He grew immensely rich on confiscated land, became Duke of Friedland and Mecklenburg, and twice commanded the imperial forces. Suspected of plotting with the emperor's enemies, he was murdered by his own officers in 1634.

Wallenstein, in Czech Valdštejn, was born on 24 September 1583 at Heřmanice in Bohemia, into a poor Protestant branch of an old Czech noble family. Orphaned as a boy, he was schooled by the Bohemian Brethren and at Goldberg in Silesia, then studied at the Protestant university of Altdorf, and at Bologna and Padua. From 1604 to 1606 he served in the emperor's army in Hungary against the Ottomans and Hungarian rebels. In 1606 he became a Catholic, perhaps influenced by the Jesuits at Olomouc and by the knowledge that Protestants were being shut out of high office. His marriage in 1609 to a rich older widow brought him her Moravian estates when she died in 1614.

When the Bohemian estates rose against the Habsburgs in 1618, Wallenstein stayed loyal. He marched his Moravian regiment to Vienna, carrying off the province's treasury, and fought against the rebels and their allies. After the Protestant defeat at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, he acquired great tracts of confiscated Protestant land, which he formed into the territory of Friedland in northern Bohemia. He became an imperial count palatine in 1622, a prince in 1623 and Duke of Friedland in 1625.

In 1625 Wallenstein offered to raise an entire army for Ferdinand on the principle that war should feed itself. Commissioned that July, he soon had some 30,000 and then 50,000 men. In April 1626 he beat the Protestant commander Ernst von Mansfeld at Dessau Bridge, then cleared Silesia, burning many towns. Fighting alongside the Catholic League's general Tilly against Christian IV of Denmark, he was rewarded with the duchies of Mecklenburg, whose dukes were expelled, an elevation that scandalised the princes of the empire. Calling himself admiral of the Baltic, he failed to take the port of Stralsund in 1628, but helped knock Denmark out of the war.

His wealth, ambition and the exactions of his troops made enemies among Catholics and Protestants alike. In August 1630 the emperor, urged on by his counsellors, dismissed him, and he retired to his capital at Jičín. Then King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden entered the war, crushed Tilly at Breitenfeld in 1631 and pushed into southern Germany. Ferdinand recalled Wallenstein, who raised a new army within weeks, expelled the Saxons from Bohemia and repulsed Gustavus at the Alte Veste near Nuremberg in 1632. At Lützen in November 1632 Wallenstein was forced to withdraw, but the Swedish king was killed in the fighting.

In 1633 Wallenstein campaigned hesitantly and opened secret talks with Saxony, Brandenburg, Sweden and France, apparently hoping to impose a peace on his own terms; how far he intended to betray the emperor is still unclear. Vienna became convinced of his treason. On 24 January 1634 Ferdinand secretly removed him from command, and on 18 February a public patent accused him of high treason. Losing the support of his army, and so crippled by a painful illness that he had to travel by litter, Wallenstein fled towards the Swedes. At Eger (Cheb), on 25 February 1634, Irish and Scottish officers of his garrison killed his closest supporters at a banquet, and an Irish captain, Walter Devereux, ran him through with a spear in his bedroom. The emperor rewarded the killers.

Wallenstein's palace in Prague, built between 1623 and 1630, still stands. Friedrich Schiller made him the hero of a trilogy of plays, and historians continue to argue over whether he was a traitor, a would-be peacemaker or simply a brilliant war entrepreneur. Johannes Kepler cast his horoscope.

Our 1600 and 1650 maps show the Holy Roman Empire, including Bohemia, in which Wallenstein made his fortune, before and after the war.