At the Parting of the Ways 111The Edict of Restitution
After defeating Christian of Denmark at Wolgast in September 1628 it
might have been expected that Wallenstein and his vast Imperial army,
said to number 150,000 men, would have had little to do, and indeed
there were voices enough in the Empire loudly expressing this opinion
and calling for drastic reductions in the number of troops. Emperor
Ferdinand was deaf to them, as he had plans of his own in Germany for
which the army would be needed, while his Spanish cousins were bus-
ily embroiling him in their problems in Holland and Italy. Wallenstein
was convinced that the principal danger was Swedish intervention, so
he stepped up his help to Poland in order to keep Gustavus tied down
there. Hence 1629 was to be a busy and eventful year.
The emperor had already shown that his response to military suc-
cess was to exploit it to the full rather than to seek reconciliation. In
Bohemia the political side of this had been the wave of expropriations
which provided him both with money and with a purged and renewed
aristocracy upon which he could depend. For Ferdinand, however, reli-
gion was more important than politics, and he had used this position
of strength to drive through a wholesale recatholicisation reminiscent
of his early days in Styria, and with the same consequence of large-scale
emigration as ordinary people were forced to choose between their
Protestant religion and their homeland.
Success in the Danish war provided an opportunity to implement
another measure which had long been an objective for the Catholic
church in the Empire, and which the three ecclesiastical electors, sup-
ported by Maximilian of Bavaria, pressed upon Ferdinand. This was the
recovery of church lands which had been secularised and transferred
into Protestant ownership over the past three-quarters of a century,
specifically since 1552, the base date agreed at the peace of Augsburg of
1555, which had established an uneasy modus vivendi between Catholic
and Protestant territories in the Empire following the Reformation.
Secularisations had nevertheless continued, affecting some 500 mon-
asteries, convents and other foundations, as well as a dozen entire
bishoprics. This involved extensive areas of land and their populations,
together with commensurately large revenues, much of which passed
into the hands of Protestant rulers, particularly in north and central
Germany. Technically illegal though these secularisations may have
been, most had occurred long enough ago to seem hallowed by time.
Some of the properties had been sold or had been passed on through
inheritance, perhaps several times, while the monks, nuns and clergy in