242 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
are few indications. He was from north Germany, a region which was
principally Lutheran, and where not only his own but almost all the
ruling dynasties other than Brandenburg had resisted the efforts of the
Protestant Union to recruit them. During the religious and political dis-
putes earlier in the century his family had been far more inclined to
the moderate group led by Saxony than to the militant line espoused by
the Palatinate and its Calvinist supporters. Christian’s father, although
a Lutheran and the ruling duke, nevertheless made a career in the ser-
vice of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, where he became director of the
privy council, and after his death in 1613 his wife, Christian’s mother,
reportedly assured Johann Georg that Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel ‘would
not diverge by so much as a finger’s breadth from the political maxims
of Saxony, and above all not from the sworn opposition to the Union’.^26
For Christian himself there is only the negative information that there
is no record of any particular political interest or activity during the four
years in which he had already been administrator of the bishopric. Nor
was his position there under any apparent threat, as Halberstadt was
covered by the guarantee given in the Mühlhausen declaration of March
1620, that the Catholic party would not try to recover such secularised
properties by force. Christian may possibly have had territorial designs
on the nearby bishopric of Paderborn, and it is noteworthy that one of
his first military exploits was to raid it, thereby supplementing the lim-
ited resources of his own lands, together with money loaned to him by
his mother and the funds advanced by the Dutch, in order to finance his
army. Eccentric though he was, by late 1621 he had a significant force in
service, albeit the number of men was more impressive than their qual-
ity and experience as soldiers, or than their organisation, discipline and
weaponry.
Margrave Georg Friedrich of Baden-Durlach was an entirely different
character. Approaching fifty and with some twenty years’ experience
as a ruling prince, he had been one of the most committed members
of the Protestant Union, as well as of a forerunner alliance for mutual
defence formed with Württemberg and Pfalz-Neuburg in 1605. Less cau-
tious than his neighbour, the duke of the larger and richer Württemberg,
he was also one of the very few Union members to support Friedrich’s
acceptance of the Bohemian crown, and this, together with his own
fervent Protestant, albeit Lutheran, faith, made him one of the more
likely continuing adherents to the Palatine cause. Even so he had more
personal considerations, foremost among them the Spanish army of
occupation in the Palatinate, virtually on his doorstep, and the possi-
bility that if he remained unarmed and undefended after the demise of