From Bohemia to the Thirty Years War 235Palatinate. By then it was late in the year, and the armies were severely
depleted by campaigning, epidemics and desertion, so that although
Tilly occupied much of the territory he was unable to take the princi-
pal fortified cities of Heidelberg and Mannheim, while across the Rhine
the fortress of Frankenthal continued to hold out as the last point of
resistance to the Spanish occupiers. Thus the conquest of the Palatinate
could not be completed in 1621, and there was scope for new contenders
to take the field when campaigning resumed in the spring of 1622.
Bethlen Gabor again
The war during the first two and a half years, 1618 to 1620, had been
essentially confined to the territory between Prague and Vienna, prin-
cipally southern Bohemia and Lower Austria, although overlapping at
times into Moravia and Upper Austria. Apart from the late invasion
of the western Palatinate the only significant exception arose from the
involvement of Bethlen Gabor, but this took the war east into Hungary
rather than west into Germany. Bethlen’s participation had nothing to
do with the supposed causes of war in Germany, as secularised church
lands were not an issue for him and he was not a member of the Imperial
Reichstag, while neither his own lands nor any of those to which he seri-
ously aspired lay within the Empire. Instead his issue was with Habsburg
overlordship of Hungary, where his ambition was to carve out as much
of their territory as possible for himself, and perhaps even to secure the
crown. In this he was following in the footsteps of his Transylvanian
predecessor Stefan Bocskay in the first decade of the century, while his
own successor Georg Rákóczi did the same in the following decades.
Whatever personal or religious sympathies the Calvinist Bethlen may
have had with the Bohemians, the main basis of his affiliation was that
‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, and he was equally ready to ally him-
self with the Muslim Ottomans. Hence he and his successor joined the
anti-Habsburg party whenever it suited them during the Thirty Years
War, and when it did not they abandoned their allies and made peace
with the emperor until the next time. Bethlen’s problem was that he
was not strong enough to succeed against the Habsburgs on his own, so
that he could only realistically pursue his ambitions when they already
faced another opponent. He also needed an ally for the practical mil-
itary reason that his armies were predominantly light cavalry, which
he could raise in large numbers, although many of them only for a
few months after the harvest each year, but he lacked the infantry and
artillery necessary to capture cities or fortified positions.