244 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
but useful number of professional soldiers, supported by a large militia,
and in 1621 he decided to take advantage of the focus of attention on
the Palatine question to invade and seize the neighbouring county of
Waldeck, also Lutheran, of which he claimed overlordship. The count
was well connected and Moritz quickly found himself isolated even
among the Protestants, a Hofrat judgement against him followed, and
he abandoned Waldeck early in the following year. That was not the end,
however, as a further judgement followed, this time awarding Marburg
to Ludwig, and as soon as Tilly could spare troops in 1623 he moved
against Moritz to enforce the restitution.^29
By the spring of 1622 there were five armies involved in the main
conflict in Germany, Tilly’s League army and the remaining Spanish
occupying force commanded by Córdoba on the Imperialist side, and
Mansfeld, Christian of Brunswick and Georg of Baden-Durlach on behalf
of Friedrich of the Palatinate. None, however, were fighting about the
issues which had caused so much inter-confessional tension in the
Empire in the pre-war years.
The Palatinate had been at the forefront in the earlier confrontations
in the Reichstag and over the Imperial courts, but Friedrich had taken up
arms not for these reasons, but because his acceptance of the Bohemian
crown made him a party to the war which was already under way as a
result of the revolt. By 1622 his objective had narrowed to recovering
his original possessions, and most of the limited financial support he
received from abroad, including from his relatives James I of England
and Christian IV of Denmark, was likewise intended purely for this pur-
pose. His Dutch backers had their own concerns, and their assistance
was designed mainly to keep the conflict going in Germany in order to
tie down the Spanish forces, and to prevent them from being returned
to the war in the Netherlands.
Mansfeld was by this stage essentially a mercenary. Emperor Matthias
had placed him under the Imperial ban at an early stage of the war in
Bohemia, thus ensuring that he had to go on fighting as much for his
own self-preservation as for any other reason. His army was his only
principality, so that he had to find employment and pay for it wher-
ever he could, and although he was firmly anti-Habsburg there is no
indication that he was concerned about wider political issues. Christian
of Brunswick was eccentric and enigmatic, but it seems more logical
to take his self-confessed and essentially non-political motivations at
face value, rather than postulating a new-found enthusiasm for the old
concerns. Only for Georg of Baden-Durlach may these have retained
a lingering significance, but it would be surprising if he alone of the