42 Wallenstein
everything was confiscated, and the owners were entitled only to mon-
etary compensation for the balance. The scale was staggering, affecting
around a thousand families, two-thirds of them in Bohemia and one-
third in Moravia, while half of Bohemia’s total land area, or even more
according to some estimates, changed hands as a result.^10
The emperor’s financial needs could not await the outcome of the
court’s work. One quick expedient was to raise loans secured on pro-
spectively forfeit properties, the revenues from which would provide
for interest to the lender until such time as the transaction could be con-
verted into a direct sale. Wallenstein was one of the first to come
forward, and early in 1621 two loans were negotiated, for 60,000 and
50,000 gulden respectively – although all these figures should be regarded
as indicative rather than precise – each secured on estates from the
Smirˇický holdings. The specification of these particular properties as
security was no coincidence, given Wallenstein’s separate potential
claim on them, as it ensured that they could not be pledged or sold to
anyone else. His third loan, in June 1621 and for a further 58,000 gul-
den, was secured on the estates of Friedland and Reichenberg (Liberec),
not Smirˇický lands but like them north-east of Prague in the area in
which Wallenstein aimed to build up his holdings.^11 Thus in the space
of a few months, long before the minting consortium, Wallenstein had
advanced the emperor 168,000 gulden, either in cash or by converting
into secured loans some of the amounts due to him for the costs and
services of his Imperial regiments.
The Smirˇický saga is not so easily summarised but is important, firstly
because of its size, and secondly because Wallenstein had a legitimate
personal interest in the inheritance, albeit only because of the remark-
able circumstances both within the family and in Bohemia following
suppression of the revolt. The total value of the properties has been
estimated at around two million gulden. More significant is that they
were reputedly worth four or five times Wallenstein’s Moravian estates,
which had themselves sufficed to make him one of that territory’s rich-
est men. Adding even part of the Smirˇický lands would have moved
him into a higher league, but by the end of 1622, in his capacity as
guardian and sole heir to their mentally incapable owner, he controlled
well over half of them.
The story starts much earlier.^12 The Smirˇický family property, with
its main seat at Gitschin, comprised some seventeen estates to the
north and east of Prague. Most of these were freely transferable by sale
or inheritance, but some were subject to an entail which prevented
this and passed ownership to the senior member of the family for the