118 Wallenstein
who if not as absolute as they became a century later nevertheless had
few constraints on their authority within their own realms. In the army
too his word was law. Regiments moved on his command, and only
on his command, officers were appointed, promoted, cashiered and on
occasions executed, campaigns were begun and ended, quarters taken
up or left, supplies and equipment purchased, contributions demanded
and extracted, cities besieged or left in peace, all on the strength of his
orders. Small wonder that ordinary people and even other princes were
inclined to see him as omnipotent, and to attribute all that happened,
good and bad – but especially the bad – to his favour or malevolence.
Nevertheless there were constraints, even in the army. Discipline is a
case in point. Wallenstein, like Gustavus Adolphus, sought to maintain
good order, and in particular to protect the peasantry and towns men
from the worst excesses of the soldiery, whose collective inclina-
tion towards theft, rape and violence was notorious. Both generals
issued streams of ever sterner orders prohibiting such behaviour, and
both had frequent exemplary punishments and executions of offenders
carried out. Partly this was because both saw that war brought enough
suffering with it, unavoidably in their view, without it being unneces-
sarily increased by licentious troops. Partly it may have been the natu-
ral antipathy of professional military officers to disorder in the ranks.
Certainly both generals recognised that their armies had to live off the
country and the local economy, and that this would not long be pos-
sible if their soldiers stole the seed corn, the draught animals and the
breeding livestock, drove the peasantry from the land and disrupted
the business of the towns. Nevertheless all these things happened fre-
quently and on a large scale, as numerous eyewitness accounts testify,
and if the horrors may often have been embroidered in the telling the
reality was certainly terrible enough.^23 The mechanisms and resources
of military discipline were simply insufficient to exercise effective con-
trol over a rootless and footloose soldiery, largely divorced from the
civilising influences of society, and who were often unpaid, hungry, and
with hungry dependents to provide for. Most of their officers were little
better, at best adventurers and at worst out-and-out scoundrels, more
interested in what they themselves could steal than in preventing theft
by their men. The further from headquarters the less effective were the
generals’ orders in this respect, but despite their own endeavours they
inevitably bore much of the odium.
Although it may seem an obvious point it is worth mentioning that
in time of war the freedom of action of the supreme commander is also
limited by the enemy. In particular the movement and stationing of