Richer Than All His Tribe 37provided under the ‘laws of war’ both as a punishment for those who
had held out pointlessly and as a recompense for the soldiers who had
risked their lives in the assault. Senior officers of the day were certainly
not above looting personally, in addition to which they often had a
share of what was taken by their men. They also commonly bought
valuable items from the finders for a fraction of their true worth, cash
being what the soldiers really required. This booty not infrequently
changed hands as a result of the fortunes of war, and whether in a skir-
mish or a full battle the baggage train of the losers, as well as any valu-
ables about the persons of prisoners or the dead, were the first targets
of the victors.
Officers had opportunities to extort semi-legitimate payments in
cash or valuables from civilians. Safe conduct was one. Salva guardi was
another, a payment for exempting or protecting a property from looting,
increased if a guard was posted to enforce the arrangement. Exemption
from billeting likewise had its price. Then there was Brandschatzung,
a payment for not burning down a property, theoretically only in
circumstances where the archaic laws of war would otherwise have
allowed it but often more generally applied. These and other payments
could relate to an individual or a single property, but they could also
cover entire villages or towns, in which case the sums involved were
considerable. Technically much of the proceeds should have been paid
into the official military treasury, and there were cases in the Thirty
Years War where officers were disciplined or even executed for failing
to do so, but these were only the most flagrant examples involving par-
ticularly large sums. Most of the rest found its way into private pockets,
and this was generally regarded not as an abuse but as a perk of the job.
Prudent officers transferred their gains to places of safety as often as cir-
cumstances permitted, and although it is difficult to quantify them it is
known that amounts could be substantial. In the 1630s Sydnam Poyntz,
an English junior cavalry officer in Imperial service, recorded having
3000 pounds sterling accumulated from booty with him in the field, an
enormous sum at the time, while Augustin Fritsch, then a major in the
Bavarian army, noted losing 5000 Reichstaler in cash and a whole sack-
ful of silverware when he was on the losing side at a battle.^3
Hence Wallenstein had considerable scope to rebuild his finances
during the Bohemian campaigns of 1619–21. This is important, as in
order to take advantage of the opportunities which subsequently pre-
sented themselves he needed a substantial sum of money as his stake
and starting point. The collapse of the revolt after the battle of the
White Mountain, followed by the restoration of Habsburg authority in