2 Wallenstein
powerful that even the emperor hesitated to cross him. This power was
an illusion, as Ferdinand exploited the military and political advantage
which Wallenstein had won for him to pursue policies of which the
latter strongly disapproved, notably militant counter-Reformation and
entanglement in the wars of the Spanish branch of his Habsburg family.
With no immediate external threat facing the Empire Wallenstein came
under pressure, and in 1630 his enemies among the Catholic princes
coerced the emperor into dismissing him and dismembering his army.
Their timing was spectacularly bad, dropping their defences and
dispensing with their champion just as a new and more formidable
enemy appeared, in the person of Gustavus Adolphus, the warlike king
of Sweden, who invaded north Germany in the same year. Within
fifteen months Gustavus had gathered Saxony and Brandenburg as allies,
routed the remaining Catholic army, and advanced to Frankfurt, Mainz
and the Rhine, from where he was threatening to over-run Bavaria and
the emperor’s own Austrian territories. Desperately Ferdinand appealed to
Wallenstein to resume the command and to raise a new army, which
the general, already ill and old before his time, reluctantly agreed to do,
accomplishing this seemingly impossible task in less than six months.
Even so Gustavus had taken Munich and ravaged Bavaria before his
preparations were complete. In mid-1632 Wallenstein moved south,
trapping Gustavus in Nuremberg, where he kept him besieged for two
months while the king waited for reinforcements. In the engagement
which followed the Swedes suffered a tactical rather than a decisive
defeat, but Gustavus’s wider plans were left in tatters, and when
Wallenstein moved against the king’s Saxon ally he had to hasten
northwards to the rescue. The armies met at Lützen, near Leipzig, where
the resulting battle, the longest and hardest fought of the Thirty Years
War, was effectively a draw, although Gustavus himself was killed.
With the Swedish threat neutralised for a time, Wallenstein devoted
most of 1633 to a series of attempts to make peace with Saxony and
Brandenburg, negotiations which were mainly conducted during
prolonged truces. His efforts were unsuccessful, and when hostilities
were resumed in the late autumn Wallenstein first recaptured the
Habsburg territory of Silesia from the Swedes, but then failed to react
in time to prevent them from advancing once more into Bavaria and
taking the fortress city of Regensburg. Although of no great military
significance this setback enabled Wallenstein’s enemies to mount a
new political campaign against him. Rumours were spread that he had
ulterior motives for his peace initiatives, and that they concealed other
potentially treasonable contacts with the Swedes and their French allies.