120 Chapter Fourexpel the English from the land (1453), a German emperor could also
attempt, by leading a crusade either against the Turks or, alternatively,
against heretics within the Germanies.
But crusading against the Turks ran into what proved to be insuper
able geographic obstacles. Since 1526 Hungary and Croatia had be
come disputed borderlands between the Ottoman and Hapsburg em
pires. Raiding and counter-raiding devastated the landscape, making
maintenance of large held armies in the border region exceedingly
difficult for either of the protagonists. As a result, building and then
garrisoning a few cannon-proof forts was all the Hapsburg authorities
were able to accomplish.
The alternative of turning imperial forces against German princes
who had departed from the Catholic fold became more attractive as
the vigor of a reformed Catholicism took hold north of the Alps.
Accordingly, when Ferdinand II ascended the imperial throne in
1619, he precipitated a general war by deciding to bring Bohemia
(where a Calvinist king had been elected in 1618) back to Catholic and
Hapsburg obedience. His initial successes provoked a series of inter
ventions from outside: Danish, Swedish, and eventually French. On
the Catholic side, the Spaniards renewed their war with the Dutch in
1621 and with France in 1622 and sought to use their imperial posi
tion in Italy to connect all the different fronts of the war into a single,
coherent Catholic counteroffensive.
The eventual outcome was stalemate in the Germanies and a peace
of exhaustion (Westphalia, 1648). Before that result was attained,
however, some new refinements in the art of war achieved definition;
and the Germanies as a whole experienced the brutality of large-scale
commercialized violence.
Three significant efforts at drastic reorganization for war came to
the fore during the struggle. The first of these was the remarkable
military entrepreneurship of Albrecht von Wallenstein. Starting as a
petty nobleman of Bohemia, Wallenstein made soldiering into a vast
speculative business. High risks were matched by extraordinary
windfall profits, at least in the short run, for Wallenstein became pro
prietor of enormous estates in Bohemia (briefly also in Mecklenburg)
and attained quasi-independent political power. But when he died in
1634 at the hands of assassins, all the lands and offices he had ac
cumulated were confiscated. Nevertheless, for a decade Wallenstein
bestrode the Germanies like a colossus, nominally a mere contractor
serving the emperor but in fact almost a sovereign in his own right
by virtue of the size of the military forces he commanded and sup