62 Wallenstein
such evidence as there is supports neither the theory that Senno was
paid to spy on Wallenstein nor the contention that he was a central
influence on his policy and actions in the latter years of his career. The
official Imperial enquiry came to the same conclusion, as after some
fifteen months under investigation he was released on the grounds that
‘nothing suspicious’ had been established against him.^21
Astrology was only one aspect of a broad spectrum of seventeenth-
century belief in the supernatural, ranging from extremes of religion to
outright superstition. Its most sinister manifestation was the wave of
witch-hunting which spread across Europe and to the New World, the
Salem witch trials in the 1690s being the best known but by no means
the worst example. A Thirty Years War soldier recorded in his diary that
in the Westphalian town of Lippstadt there were ‘evil people. I saw
seven of them burned. Among them was a pretty young girl of eighteen,
but even so she was burned.’ A nun likewise recorded that in Bamberg
between 1627 and 1631 ‘several hundred people were tried and burned,
among them many attractive and well-to-do young men and women’.
Also among them was her own father, who had previously several times
been mayor of the city. Kepler’s mother was imprisoned and put on trial
for witchcraft, but she was one of the fortunate few who secured an
acquittal. Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, a Catholic zealot, criticised
Wallenstein’s interest in ‘fraudulent astrology’ but nevertheless believed
in witchcraft, as did his brother, the elector and archbishop of Cologne,
and there were many witchcraft trials in their territories whereas the
supposedly superstitious Wallenstein did not permit them in his.^22
Magic in various forms was readily accepted. A highly educated
German lawyer entered into his diary a report of a Swedish raid under
cover of a fog which had been conjured up by one of their soldiers.
A monk told of soldiers looting his monastery church but being awed
by a picture of the Virgin apparently crying. A soldier recorded visiting
a chapel to see a miraculous candle given by the Virgin Mary in the
Middle Ages: ‘It has, so they say, already been burning for three hundred
years and the same candle hasn’t burned out yet.’^23 Omens were fre-
quently to be seen, and Protestant pastors were no less credulous than
laymen or their Catholic counterparts. Cheaply printed almanacs – the
poor man’s horoscope – circulated widely, as did pamphlets about
portentous comets, unusual bright stars and other phenomena in the
night sky, all of which were thought sure to have earthly significance.
The modern world is not exempt. Almanacs are still published and
sold, and many popular newspapers print daily horoscopes. A twenty-
first-century British national lottery winner told the press: ‘I should