90 Wallenstein
too headed towards Hungary, but taking a shorter, more westerly route
in an effort to catch up with Mansfeld.^12
This was exactly what Christian and his allies had intended, but the
outcome was not what they had hoped. Once Wallenstein was out of
the way Christian in turn broke camp, heading south towards the rich
and undefended territories of central Germany. Tilly followed, and
only then did Christian learn that Wallenstein had left a substantial
part of his army to bolster Tilly’s strength.^13 Anxious and probably now
outnumbered, Christian wanted neither to confront Tilly nor to be cut
off by him, so he turned and hastily tried to retrace his steps. Too late.
With Tilly in hot pursuit Christian was eventually obliged to turn and
fight, and on 26 August 1626 he was heavily defeated at the battle of
Lutter, an event which he recorded in his personal diary only with the
terse entry: ‘Fought with the enemy and lost. The same day I went to
Wolfenbüttel.’^14 Like Mansfeld a few months earlier, though, he was
down but not out.
Wallenstein made rapid progress, marching his men as hard as they
could go into Moravia. On the other hand Mansfeld had come almost
to a standstill waiting for Bethlen, whose troops were part-timers, farm-
ers who brought in the harvest before reporting for military duties, so
that he had been late off the mark and was still making his way across
Hungary. Moreover his army was weaker than he had expected, as the
Ottoman sultan had his own problems and did not want to be involved
in the war with the emperor, so that Bethlen had been able to secure
help only from a few local lords. A period followed in which four armies,
those of Wallenstein, Mansfeld, Johann Ernst and Bethlen, marched
hither and thither, trying either to find or to avoid one another. All were
suffering from shortage of supplies and the hardships of long forced
marches, so that illness, deaths and desertion were rapidly eroding their
numbers. At one point Wallenstein and Mansfeld were not far apart, but
after Dessau Mansfeld had learned to treat his opponent with more care,
and he had no intention of trying the issue without his ally, instead
moving smartly away. At another stage Mansfeld considered breaking
off the campaign entirely and marching his army across Bohemia and
Germany to regroup over the winter in Alsace. That plan was rejected by
his own officers, as well as by Johann Ernst, who insisted that his orders
from Christian were to join up with Bethlen.^15
Wallenstein too was looking for Bethlen, the most important of
the enemies, and when he received word of his approach he moved
cautiously into Hungary in preparation for a decisive engagement. On
30 September his vanguard made contact with Bethlen’s outriders, and