At this juncture it is pertinent to introduce three characters whose role in the Thirty Years War was central: Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly (1559–1632), Ernst Graf von Mansfeldt (1580–1626), and a man born poor but who rose to be Duke Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein of Friedland and Mecklenburg (1583–1634). These were the generals – the generals-for-hire, free-lancer generals, mercenary leaders of armies – who, on commission from the princes they served, raised armies and conducted campaigns, paid for by various monarchs and states as the occasions of the latter two demanded. They were in effect what Italians called Condottieri – condittiero literally means ‘contractor’ but came to have its specifically military meaning as applied in the Italian Renaissance style of war to the likes of Federigo da Montefeltro and Sigismondo Malatesta. Another name for them in Italy was capitani di venture, ‘venture captains’. The English called them ‘Mercenary Captains’. Whereas Tilly and Mansfeldt began their participation in the Thirty Years War as counts (‘graf’ means ‘count’), Wallenstein – immortalised by Friedrich Schiller in his trilogy of plays about the great general’s fall and death – became a duke as a result of his achievements, raised to dizzying heights by the Holy Roman Emperor until he was second only to the Emperor himself: and thus an object of resentment and opposition among all others, even though they were putatively allies.
Mansfeldt was the general on the Protestant side. Born a Catholic, he had for a time been in the Imperial military service, but he came to resent the treatment he received at the hands of Archduke Leopold, son of Emperor Ferdinand II, during the War of Jülich Succession, and therefore defected to the Protestant cause.
Tilly was a successful servant to Ferdinand II and the Catholic League in the war. He was born in Walloon Brabant, was educated by Jesuits and learned his military trade in the effective Spanish style. This was the tercio system, in which infantry units consisted of one-third pikemen, one-third swordsmen and one-third musketeers. More important than the configuration of these units was the fact that experienced soldiers were encouraged to remain in service, making the resulting force a professional one. The tercio system, which achieved much success right up to the mid-seventeenth century, had been devised by the great Spanish general Gonzalo de Córdoba at the end of the fifteenth century, who also introduced the colunella or cavalry unit, from which the word ‘colonel’ originates, denoting the leader of such a column.
Tilly was a formidable general, and along with Wallenstein dominated the first fourteen years of the Thirty Years War. But he is also a controversial figure: did he order the massacre of Magdeburg in 1630? Did he encourage it, or even just not discourage it? The fact that it happened is a stain on his reputation.
Wallenstein was a phenomenon, by any measure. He was born into a poor Protestant family in Bohemia, but converted to Catholicism under the influence of Jesuits while studying at Olomouc University. After a spectacular rise to fame, titles and fortune, he was twice ordered by the Emperor to retire to his estates in Bohemia. Necessity forced the Emperor to recall him after the first episode, but having been prompted to suspicion of Wallenstein by the jealousy of the latter’s rivals, Ferdinand II at last recognised that he had invited a cuckoo into his nest. Wallenstein took his army with him into retirement, which made Ferdinand II suspect him of treason. He was indeed meditating treason, as Schiller in his trilogy shows; he was negotiating with the Emperor’s enemies, the Swedes, with a view to joining them. He was assassinated on the night of 25 February 1634 with the Emperor’s knowledge and approval: reminiscently of England’s King Henry II and Becket, the Emperor must at very least have said aloud, to suitable persons, something like ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent general?’
Schiller completed his trilogy of plays about the great general in 1799. It is loosely based on what happened to Wallenstein in the final months of his life. The drama is one of betrayal and loyalty, and in investigating the fate of a man who rose from nothing to vertiginous heights, it offers the parallel of another man who did likewise but with more restraint, thereby keeping the gains he made: this was the rise to a princedom of the man who orchestrated Wallenstein’s murder, Octavio Piccolomini.
Tilly’s victory at the Battle of the White Mountain and the flight of Frederick V saw the end of the Bohemian phase of the Thirty Years War and the beginning of the Palatinate phase, in which Frederick attempted to defend his hold on his ancestral territories with the help of Dutch money and an army raised by Mansfeldt.
As Frederick fled from Prague he tried to rally the Moravians, Lusatians and Silesians to his cause, while simultaneously negotiating with Ferdinand II in an effort to fend off further hostilities and to keep his title in the Rhinelands. Both efforts failed; as he travelled westwards he stopped in Brandenburg to ask for its Elector’s help. The Elector said he would give it if James I of England did likewise; but James refused, so Frederick had to resort to his Orange relatives in the United Provinces for help and sanctuary. Ferdinand II issued a ban on Frederick, making him an outlaw in the Empire. This gave the leaders of the rest of the Protestant Union – of which Frederick was the nominal head – cause for hesitation, for at the conventions held by their leaders at Worms in the autumn of 1620 and again at Heilbronn in February 1621 there was much reluctance to give Frederick the military support he requested.
While Frederick scrabbled for help, the Upper Palatinate fell to Tilly without any fighting, and only the intervention of the winter of 1621–2 prevented the Lower Palatinate falling into his hands likewise. Frederick’s general, Mansfeldt, was able to avoid engagement with Tilly, instead raising the Spanish siege of Frankenthal and then moving into winter quarters in Alsace.
In 1622 Frederick gathered three armies – Mansfeldt’s forces, the army of Margrave Georg of Baden-Durlach, and the army of Christian of Brunswick – and resumed his efforts. Both of these Protestant princes, Georg and Christian, felt that their fates were too entangled with Frederick’s not to support him. While Christian’s army was in Westphalia, looting the bishoprics of Münster and Paderborn, Mansfeldt and Georg joined forces at Wiesloch in April 1622 and there defeated a well-organised Spanish force. They then separated and marched north to join Christian’s forces. Georg’s army was surprised by Imperial and Spanish troops while trying to cross the River Neckar, and was cut to shreds; Christian’s forces nearly met the same fate on the banks of the Main before he could combine with Mansfeldt’s troops.
The defeat of Georg’s army seems to have been the last straw for Frederick, even though several of his former cities had remained loyal to him – chief among them Heidelberg, Mannheim and Frankenthal – and were continuing their resistance.1 In July 1622 he declared that he would disband his own forces and retire from the fray. This left the armies of Mansfeldt and Christian without a leader or a cause, and so they decided to offer their services directly to the United Provinces, which still had a lively interest in preventing the Rhinelands from falling into Catholic hands. Together Mansfeldt and Christian fought their way through a Spanish blockade at Fleurus, leaving many corpses and one of Christian’s own limbs on the field of battle, and raised the Spanish siege of Bergen-op-Zoom. A grateful United Provinces accordingly gave them a warm welcome.
The only hope for the Protestant cause at this juncture seemed to be James I of England. But James had conceived a grand design of marrying his son Charles to the Infanta of Spain, and was keen to find a diplomatic means out of the debacle caused by Frederick’s Bohemian adventure. While negotiations between London and Madrid continued through 1623 – they were held in the Spanish Netherlands – the Emperor took unilateral action: he declared that Frederick’s lands in the Palatinate were forfeit, and bestowed them on Maximilian of Bavaria.
This action galvanised the Protestants again. Mansfeldt and one-armed Christian now formed an alliance with Count Thurn of Bohemia and Bethlen Gábor, Prince of Transylvania and briefly King of Hungary. Their four respective armies marched from the north, east and south of the compass towards Bohemia, between them appearing to offer a formidable challenge to Ferdinand. But they were not a match for the wiles of Tilly. He manoeuvred his forces into Christian’s path before the Brunswicker could combine with his allies, and his experienced troops easily defeated Christian’s recruits, chasing them to Stadtlohn and there annihilating them. This marked the bloody and decisive end of the Palatinate phase of the war.
Once again, while an anxious Europe watched the fate of Frederick unfold, sailors and the sea were busy helping to change history far away. Events that had taken place some years before were now accelerating both change and conflict in other regions. One such was the Caribbean. A band of shipwrecked English sailors had been washed up on the pleasant shores of Bermuda in 1609, and when their reports of the place reached England a decision to colonise the island was taken, and a group of settlers arrived in 1612. This was the first English post in the Caribbean, whose largest islands – Cuba, Hispaniola and San Salvador – had already been in Spanish hands for a century.
Thirty years later disputes over religious matters within the Bermudan colony prompted a number of the colonists to leave and plant themselves in the Bahamas, then uninhabited because the Spanish had long since transported all the native inhabitants (the Arawaks) into slavery in the mines of Hispaniola.
Before this, however, the fact that there were uncolonised islands in the Caribbean set off a race between the English and French to take as many of them as they could. The English occupied St Kitts in 1623, Barbados in 1627, and by 1636 they were in possession of Antigua, Nevis and Montserrat. Meanwhile the French succeeded in getting a toe on another shore of St Kitts in 1627, and they occupied Dominica in 1632 and Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1635.
The process of colonising the islands was cumulative; having a port on one island served as a base for establishing occupancy of the next on the list. More than that, it provided a means of capturing some of the existing Spanish possessions; in 1655 England took Jamaica from the Spanish, and in 1664 France wrested half of Hispaniola from them, the half now known as Haiti.
The Spanish had sought to mine gold in their Caribbean possessions, but the islands yielded relatively little of the stuff in comparison to the immense wealth extractable from Mexico and Peru, so the islands became staging posts for their galleons rather than centres of economic activity themselves. In the English and French possessions matters were different; the settlers engaged in agriculture, starting with tobacco but soon diversifying into the highly lucrative sugar business. Because the original populations had been wiped out by labouring as slaves (and by European illnesses from which they had no immunity), African slaves were required; by the mid-seventeenth century Jamaica was the largest slave market in the West Indies.
With several major powers grabbing at opportunities in the region, it is no surprise that it quickly became a theatre of almost constant war. It had been a focus of piracy for many decades already; English pirates had preyed on the big Spanish bullion galleons with the sanction of the English government since Elizabethan times. The Caribbean quarrels went on until the Napoleonic Wars a century and a half later, but they paid for themselves, as did the less frequent quarrels in the East, because both the West and East Indies offered lucrative resources for the English, Dutch and French nations whose sailors and merchants took their opportunities there.
Back in Europe the failure of Frederick and the Dutch-sponsored armies to contain Habsburg power, and the latter’s consequent approach towards the northern and wholly Protestant reaches of the Empire, now brought more actors into play. It was not only Protestants who were concerned; Cardinal Richelieu had been appointed to the Royal Council of France in April 1624, and was vigorously opposed to further extensions of Habsburg influence. James I had at last given up the idea of a Spanish alliance, and had entered into treaty arrangements with the Dutch and French against Spain. James commissioned Mansfeldt to raise a new army, and invited him to London, where he was fêted as a hero. But disagreements among the new set of allies about how his army should be used – was it to recover the Lower Palatinate as the English desired? was it to relieve the siege of Breda as the Dutch desired? how was it to do anything if it was not to cross French territory, as Richelieu refused to let it do? – resulted in it dissolving away through lack of supplies and activity: the soldiers just went home.
The need to muster opposition to the Empire was however still pressing, so James I in concert with the Elector of Brandenburg resolved to bring in the Danes and Swedes, an unlikely idea at first given the bitter and long-standing hostility between these two northern states. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden agreed to join the alliance if his terms for doing so were met: he said he would raise an army of 50,000 men, a third of whom must be paid for by England – the money to be supplied up front – plus the cession to the Crown of Sweden of a port on the Baltic coast and another on the North Sea coast.
These exorbitant terms made England and the other allies turn to Denmark, whose King, Christian IV, proposed more modest terms. Gustavus Adolphus promptly refused to take any further part, and made preparations instead for a war on Poland.
Christian IV was not only King of Denmark but also Duke of Holstein and ruler of other territories in northern Germany, so he was greatly interested in halting further northward extensions of the Emperor’s writ. Denmark was a wealthy state, mainly because of revenues from the tolls imposed on shipping in the Baltic. Christian accordingly had means as well as motive. The rulers of the Lower Saxon Circle states, which was his sphere of interest, rallied to him – only two dukes and the Hanseatic towns were persuaded by Ferdinand II to remain neutral.
In response to the gathering of forces under Christian, Maximilian of Bavaria commissioned Wallenstein to raise an army, and asked Tilly to join his forces with Wallenstein’s. As Tilly’s troops marched north-west towards the Lower Saxon Circle they left a swathe of destruction and terror behind them, presaging the horrors of the Sack of Magdeburg a few years later.
While Wallenstein and Tilly arranged themselves in winter quarters as 1625 passed into 1626, the English, Dutch and Danes signed a treaty at The Hague. Its terms were that Christian IV was to maintain an army of 30,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry, and the English and Dutch were to pay him monthly subsidies of 300,000 and 50,000 florins respectively. (In the event Charles I of England, newly crowned but already at odds with his Parliament, never sent Christian the promised sums.) As a final touch, Christian IV agreed with Bethlen Gábor that his Transylvanian troops would make a diversionary attack into Silesia and Moravia.
Whatever hopes these dispositions raised in the breasts of the anti-Habsburg allies, they were not realised; the campaigning season of 1626 went badly. Mansfeldt was heavily defeated by Wallenstein at the Bridge of Dessau, Christian IV was even more decisively beaten by Tilly at Lutter-am-Bamberg. Temporary relief came from Gábor’s diversionary activities; Mansfeldt managed to muster a remnant force and to join Gábor, and their combined forces captured Silesia. But their victory was short lived. Gábor’s paymasters were the Ottomans, who just at that point were defeated by Persia at a battle outside Baghdad and ceased to be able to send him money. Mansfeldt, en route to seek new financial support from Venice, fell ill and died at Sarajevo.
As a result the Protestant alliance was in disarray. Wallenstein had been pursuing the combined forces of Gábor and Mansfeldt, but because they were now leaderless in one case and moneyless in both cases, the soldiers melted away, and there was no one for him to fight. In France Richelieu was dealing with the Huguenots, England was distracted by its internal troubles, and the Dutch were not prepared to throw good money after bad, so Christian IV was in a parlous state. Wallenstein and Tilly joined forces and inflicted a massive defeat on his army at the Battle of Grossenbrode in September 1627. Christian fled, taking refuge in his Danish islands, knowing that because Ferdinand II had no naval forces he would not be pursued there. But neither was there anything further that Christian IV could offer the Protestant cause against the Emperor and the Catholic League.
The Protestant cause now seemed hopeless. Wallenstein had reached the zenith of his power and fame; he had a huge army – he claimed it was 100,000 strong, and he and his soldiery could help themselves to whatever they liked wherever they went. He had now reached the point at which he was second only to the Emperor in standing. The Emperor showered titles of high nobility on him: he was invested with the dignities of Prince of Golgau and (what was in fact more substantial in terms of wealth and influence) Duke of Mecklenburg.
With the predictable elements of any tragic fiction, Wallenstein’s dizzy ascent and consequent behaviour turned people against him. Rulers of other imperial states complained to the Emperor about him. They began to ask for a share of the spoils of his victories. They also began to demand that the lands he had wrested from Protestant rulers should be returned to the Catholic faith.
Wallenstein was meanwhile meditating the construction of a navy so that he could pursue Christian IV to the Danish islands. In this he was supported by the Spanish Habsburgs, who persuaded Ferdinand II to declare Wallenstein ‘Admiral of the Baltic’. The aim of course was to make the Baltic a Spanish pond for Habsburg trade. Overtures to the Hanseatic cities, and what proved to be half-hearted attempts to build an Imperial fleet, at last persuaded the Danes and Swedes that they had a common interest; they might be at odds over which of them controlled the Baltic, but they were united in not wanting anyone else to be party to that quarrel.
This at last gave Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus the opportunity he was waiting for. In August 1628 a combined Danish–Swedish force defeated Wallenstein’s forces besieging Stralsund and forced them to retreat. By raising this siege Gustavus Adolphus achieved his first foothold on the southern shore of the Baltic. His victory over Wallenstein meant that the latter had to abandon efforts to conquer the Baltic Sea. But Wallenstein’s formidable land power remained. When Christian IV, emboldened by the success at Stralsund, quitted his islands, gathered fresh forces and marched them south from the mouth of the Oder, he thought that he was in pursuit of a beaten enemy. He was soon disabused; on encountering Wallenstein’s well-prepared dispositions he was again soundly beaten.
That was the last straw for Christian. He initiated peace negotiations with Ferdinand II, and in the event escaped relatively lightly, though losing all his north German possessions. The English and Dutch, now keen for the Swedes to take the lead in the struggle, set to work to help Gustavus Adolphus make peace with his cousin King Sigismund of Poland so that he could devote all his attention to Wallenstein. It was at this juncture, the high point of Catholic successes in the war to date, that Ferdinand II fatefully allowed himself to be persuaded into his greatest mistake: the issuing of the Edict of Restitution on 6 March 1629.