No Great Expectations 9resulting in a large fine and a larger compensation settlement. As for
the rest, he was part of a gang of students, allegedly one of the ringlead-
ers, who mobbed an academic’s house one night and broke the door
and windows. He was there, too, on the evening when an argument
between some students and a junior militia officer led to weapons being
drawn and to a brawl in which the latter was killed, although not by
Wallenstein, and a little later he himself stabbed a fellow student in the
foot. Along the way he spent a couple of nights in the local jail, and
in due course he was put under house arrest by the academy pending
expulsion. Through a letter to the Nuremberg authorities into which he
carefully dropped the names of two of his relatives who were Imperial
privy councillors Wallenstein avoided this disgrace, and he was instead
allowed to leave of his own accord, at least for public purposes.
After his untimely departure from Altdorf he went off on the grand
tour, taking in France and particularly Italy, where he stayed long
enough to gain a good grasp of the language and reportedly including a
period of residence in the university city of Padua, before heading home
to Hermanitz in 1602. By this time he was probably around 5 ft 8 in.
tall (171–172 cm according to a twentieth-century examination of his
remains), while a portrait suggests that as a young man he was slim
and good looking, with a high forehead, dark eyes and dark hair, which
he wore short, and he had grown a beard in the fashionable Spanish
style. In addition to his native Czech he spoke German and Italian flu-
ently, and he could read Spanish well, French competently and Latin
adequately.^7
Early manhood
What Wallenstein did between 1602 and 1604 is unknown, although
his earliest biographers state that he found a place at the lowest level
in the court hierarchy of the margrave of Burgau at Innsbruck.^8 While
this is not improbable it is also not confirmed, but in 1604, at the age
of twenty, he became a soldier. This might suggest military inclinations
foreshadowing his subsequent career, but more prosaically he may simply
have been casting around for a start in life at a time when a regiment for
one of the recurrent episodes of war against the Turks on the Hungarian
frontier was being raised by the Bohemian Estates (an assembly with
taxation powers and administrative functions, supposedly represent-
ing the main social groups – nobility, clergy, townsmen and perhaps
other commoners – but in practice dominated by the aristocracy).
No doubt his name and contacts helped, as he immediately became