100 Wallenstein
idea of a new crusade which lingered on in some European circles, while
there is no doubt that Wallenstein would have preferred war elsewhere
to continuing conflict in the Empire. He also believed that the Turkish
occupation of the Balkans presented a long-term strategic threat to the
Habsburg lands of Austria and Hungary, which indeed it did and con-
tinued to do for the rest of the century and beyond. ‘I rate this task as
highly’, he wrote to Arnim, ‘as anything else in the world.’ Nevertheless
his proposition cannot be taken at face value, as some historians have
been inclined to do.^33 Wallenstein was prone to introducing into his
prolific correspondence ideas which appealed to him conceptually, but
this did not mean that he viewed them as current practical courses of
action. It is also noteworthy that his subsequent returns to the subject
were at times when he was trying to avoid some other military com-
mitment of which he disapproved, notably sending troops to Italy in
1629–30. He had no wish to campaign in the Danish islands in 1628,
and he may have hoped that the idea of a campaign against the Turks
would appeal to the ultra-Catholic Ferdinand on religious as well as
strategic grounds, thus inclining him more to a peace settlement with
Denmark. Moreover Wallenstein continued to fear an attack on the
Empire by Sweden, as he repeatedly stressed, and this in itself makes it
unlikely that he was seriously contemplating the early despatch of his
army to the most distant corner of Europe.
Other strange things went on during that winter and the spring of
- Wallenstein even had exploratory contacts with Gustavus to see
if there was any basis for an accommodation between Sweden and the
Empire. Arnim was probably the instigator and certainly the princi-
pal line of communication, but it is unlikely that either side had any
serious intentions or expectations.^34 Elsewhere Maximilian of Bavaria
was organising intrigue and espionage with contacts in Vienna and in
Wallenstein’s own circle, arising from which he received two further
alarming memoranda about the general’s character and intentions,
from the same probable source but in even more lurid terms than that
describing the Bruck conference.^35 With these he frightened both him-
self and his fellow Catholic League princes, but with Wallenstein’s stock
standing high after the successes of 1627 they could make little progress
towards their objective of having him removed from his command
and his army all but disbanded. Meanwhile a little local difficulty was
gradually developing into one of those curious incidents, like the War
of Jenkins’ Ear or the Agadir Crisis, which achieve a fame both at the
time and in subsequent histories which is out of all proportion to their
actual significance.