From Bohemia to the Thirty Years War 245principal members of the Union had felt strongly enough about them
to raise an army and take it into battle, had he not also had significant
territorial and personal interests to protect. It is worth adding that none
of the property issues previously mentioned, Baden-Baden, Marburg or
Waldeck, concerned secularised church lands.
The pre-war disputes were certainly a factor in the League’s original
decision to raise an army, as they were in the Union’s parallel action,
but for both sides the motivation was specifically defensive, in case
the other should take advantage of the instability created by the war
in Bohemia to initiate some form of attack. The League as a whole,
and all but a very few of its individual members, had no intention
of going on the offensive, and that remained the case even after the
defeat of the revolt. The League involvement in that campaign had
been justified as a duty to support the emperor, a duty which had
conveniently coincided with Maximilian’s personal interests. By 1622
Maximilian was the League’s dominant personality, its military com-
mander, and its principal paymaster, to the extent that the League
army increasingly resembled his private army, and commentators both
at the time and since have often referred to it loosely as the Bavarian
army, and to Tilly as the Bavarian general. The League army’s initial
move into Germany in 1621 was intended solely to capture and occupy
the remainder of the Palatinate, ostensibly as an enforcement of the
Imperial ban on Friedrich, but equally certainly with the intention of
securing Maximilian’s own prospective interest in the territory. The
intervention of Christian of Brunswick and Georg of Baden-Durlach,
added to Mansfeld’s continuing involvement, meant that the League
army had to fight for the next two years, but this stemmed originally
from the Bohemian revolt and Friedrich’s participation in it, rather than
being in pursuit of objectives deriving from the earlier inter-confessional
dissension in the Empire.
Spain had at first been very reluctant to become involved in the cam-
paign against the Bohemians, but had been persuaded that the revolt
presented not only a wider threat to Habsburg interests but also a poten-
tially serious diversion from the war then shortly to be resumed in
the Netherlands. Thus they had sent a modest number of troops from
Italy to Bohemia, and had also eventually been induced to support
Maximilian’s invasion by the diversionary attack on the Palatinate. Nev-
ertheless the Spanish too had interests of their own, principally strategic.
A French resurgence posed a threat to the overland route to supply
the Spanish Netherlands from Italy, both via the original Spanish Road
close to French borders and by the newer alternative route through the