250 Wallenstein
Wallenstein’s offer to raise his first army is likewise more convincingly
explained as a response to the threat to his new possessions and status
than as a matter of ambition. He was already among the super-rich and
he had no need to become a large-scale military entrepreneur in order to
add to his wealth. Indeed it was more a case of hazarding a large propor-
tion of what he had. Nor had he shown any previous sign of wanting
to be a general for its own sake, while his subsequent conduct clearly
suggests that he found it more of a burden than a benefit in practice.
His lands were at serious risk if the war went against the emperor, but
no-one else was willing or able to finance an army. Again he chose to act
rather than to take his chance on events. His elevation to the status of
duke may have been a reward but was also a practical step to avoid the
anomalous position of the new commander being outranked socially by
a number of his own officers, or by Maximilian, his effective opposite
number controlling the Catholic League army.
Despite the fears and claims of his enemies there is no evidence that
Wallenstein either wished to or did exercise any significant political
influence in his capacity as generalissimo. On the contrary, his lack of
such influence is clearly shown by his unavailing opposition during his
first command to the Edict of Restitution and the Imperial involvement
in the Mantuan war in Italy, and during his second to Feria’s Spanish
expedition aimed mainly at French interests on Germany’s south-
western borders. As for wider political ambitions, Maximilian’s fears
were as fanciful as the later interpretation of historians of a national-
ist turn of mind, optimistically supported at most by a few throwaway
lines in Wallenstein’s correspondence, that he aimed at establishing a
centralised power base for the emperor. The general’s ‘great idea’, main-
tained one such, was that ‘the unity of the Empire should stand above
the individual princes’, so that had he been successful Germany might
have emerged as a nation state centuries earlier than was actually the
case.^14 The concept is anachronistic and Wallenstein was an unlikely
proponent, as a supporter of the established order and an opponent of
revolution, even from above, quite apart from the fact that as duke of
Mecklenburg he had himself become one of the self-same individual
princes.
His acquisition of Mecklenburg was mainly opportunist, both in that
it was available and as it was the only such asset on offer worth even a
fraction of the emperor’s outstanding debts to his general. Again there
was probably an element of social aspiration, but this is likely to have
been secondary rather than an example of overweening ambition. Later
examples of Wallenstein’s supposed ambition, including the ambition