Advances in Europe’s Art of War, 1600–1750 121plied by improved taxation, outright plunder, and massive market
transactions.
Wallenstein’s business dealings were exceedingly complex. He
bought products from his estates in Bohemia in his capacity as army
commander at prices fixed by himself, for example, and organized
arms production on those same estates with the help of capital scraped
together by a Flemish businessman and speculator named Hans De-
Witte. DeWitte’s relation to Wallenstein was like Wallenstein’s rela
tion to the emperor. Each depended on his superior for the chance to
engage in really big business. Yet in executing commissions and
fulfilling contracts on a heroic scale, both Wallenstein and DeWitte
pursued their own self-interest with flamboyant disregard of older
standards of morality and propriety. What worked was all they cared
about. Neither birth nor religion nor any of the traditional virtues
governed their choice of associates and subordinates. Obedience and
effectiveness in accomplishing assigned tasks was what Wallenstein
and his financial counterpart demanded and got from those who
served them. The result was an army of quite exceptional efficiency
that for the most part lived off the country it operated in and exhibited
no scruples in doing so. A more complete and grandiose merger of
private commercial and military enterprise had never been seen
before—nor since.
Other military middlemen played lesser roles in the Thirty Years
War, but only Wallenstein succeeded in raising an army on his per
sonal account that numbered over 50,000 men at its peak. He did so
by commissioning lesser officers to form companies and regiments in
the way reigning monarchs had long been accustomed to do. Towards
the end of his career, Wallenstein toyed with the idea of using his army
to coerce the emperor into dismissing a “Spanish" party that had
gathered at court. The leading spirits of that faction vehemently dis
trusted the Bohemian adventurer, whose commercial virtuosity and
religious ambiguity were utterly alien to their own aristocratic and
Catholic ideals. It was they who arranged Wallenstein’s assassination.
The emperor endorsed the act only subsequently.
Ever since the sudden denouement of 1634, German nationalists
have wondered what might have happened had Wallenstein prevailed.
The logic of his position perhaps required him to imitate the usurpa
tion that Sforza had carried through in Milan in 1450. Sforza had
successfully melded the administration of his military following into
that of the Milanese state and made Milan into a great power for the
ensuing fifty years. Wallenstein’s military command structure might