(^122) Chapter Four
perhaps have become the chrysalis of a new German state, greater
even than the mighty kingdom of France that emerged from the Thirty
Years War as hegemon of western Europe. But in fact, by 1634,
Wallenstein was much enfeebled by chronic illness. Perhaps, too, even
his bold entrepreneurial spirit quailed before the sacred aura that still
clung to the person of the Holy Roman Emperor of the German
Nation.
At any rate, the military-commercial empire he had constructed
around himself collapsed. Lesser enterprisers divided his role in the
imperial camp; and by the end of the war widespread devastation of
some of the most fertile parts of Germany compelled armies to shrink
to about half the size of those that had marched under Wallenstein’s
command at the peak of his power.^3
The second remarkable power structure of the Thirty Years War
was that created by the Swedish king, Gustav Adolf (r. 1611–32).
What Bohemia had been for Wallenstein, Sweden was for him—a sort
of personal property from which manpower and supplies could be
channeled towards the war in Germany. Gustav Adolf did declare that
his war would have to feed itself,^4 but he relied on public authority to
conscript his soldiery from Swedish fields and forests and benefited
from the fact that Swedish iron production began to boom in the
162Os, when Louis de Geer, a native of Liège and resident of
Holland, dispatched Walloon ironworkers to Sweden to introduce
newfangled blast furnaces to that remote land.^5
De Geer did in Sweden what Wallenstein’s agent, DeWitte, had
done in Bohemia. Each of them operated on a grand scale to import
new financial and technical methods into formerly backward parts of
Europe—backward at least by comparison to the standard set by the
Low Countries. But in other respects they were quite different. De
Geer remained domiciled in Holland and prospered as an inter
national financier and entrepreneur, dependent on Gustav Adolf only
for legal permission to do business in Sweden. He worked within the
relatively well-defined moral and legal framework of Dutch business
- On Wallenstein see Golo Mann, Wallenstein (Frankfurt am Main, 1971); Francis
Watson, Wallenstein: Soldier under Saturn (New York, 1938); G. Livet, La Guerre de
Trente Ans (Paris, 1963); Redlich, The German Military Enterpriser, 1:229–336; Fritz
Redlich, “Plan tor the Establishment of a War Industry in the Imperial Dominion during
the Thirty Years War,” Business History Review 38 (1964): 123–26. - Bellum se ipse alet is the Latin phrase attributed to the Swedish king. Cf. Michael
Roberts, Essays in Swedish History (Minneapolis, 1967), p. 73. - Eli Heckscher, “Un grand chapitre de l’histoire de fer: le monopole suédois,”
Annales d'histoire économique et sociale 4 (1932): 127–39.