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A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery

inside an Enigma

(Churchill)

An enigma, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘a puzzling
thing or person; a riddle or paradox’. Whether viewed through the
eyes of seventeenth-century contemporaries or modern historians,
Wallenstein fits this definition. A minor Bohemian nobleman who
within the space of a few years became a prince and one of the great-
est landowners of his age; a military entrepreneur who twice saved the
Holy Roman Emperor from disaster with armies he raised, financed
and led, but was then twice dismissed; an able general who rescued the
Empire from Swedish invaders, but was accused of planning to defect
to the self-same Swedes; the emperor’s commander-in-chief, but assas-
sinated on the emperor’s orders; a successful soldier who fell because he
tried too hard to make peace; Wallenstein was all these things.
Widely believed to have been insatiably ambitious, Wallenstein was
nevertheless content to languish in obscurity on his country estates
until the age of 35, when the rebellion of 1618 which started the Thirty
Years War turned Bohemia upside down, and with it his own life. As a
Catholic he remained loyal to Emperor Ferdinand II rather than siding
with the mainly Protestant Bohemian rebels, losing his lands as a result
and enlisting as a colonel in the Imperial army. Three years later he was
the military commander of Bohemia, and within five one of the richest
men in the Empire. Despite the defeat of the rebellion the war widened
and turned against the emperor, and in 1625 Ferdinand had neither
the men nor the money to match the armies of the Protestant king of
Denmark and his allies. Wallenstein came to the rescue, volunteering
to raise and finance an army, with which he led the Imperialist side to
victory in the campaigns of the following three years. By 1629 he was a
prince, possessor of three duchies, and commander-in-chief of the larg-
est army seen in Europe since Roman times, and he was reputed to be so