Once More unto the Breach 147of Saxony, but his army was not able to stand its ground at Breitenfeld,
even with Swedish support. Some of Gustavus’s protégés became
outstanding generals, but they never faced the challenge of building
an army in the 50,000 to 100,000 man class. Perhaps they could have
done it. The one sure fact is that Wallenstein did. Twice.
Towards confrontation
The central contest of 1632 pitted Gustavus Adolphus against first Tilly
and then Wallenstein, but as the campaigning season approached the
latter could not focus his attention solely on the king and his army
around Mainz. Many more forces and theatres of war were involved.
Gustavus had so many men that he was able to detach units to operate
independently across Germany, and indeed he was obliged to do so,
as no one area could for long feed the number of mouths, human and
equine, involved when all were together. By this time he had no fewer
than six such subsidiary forces, several of them armies in their own
right, two relatively close by in Franconia and Hesse, and the others
further north near Weimar and Magdeburg, as well as in Mecklenburg
and Lower Saxony. Moreover several of the Protestant princes who
had declared for him had raised armies of their own, which although
smaller were still militarily significant. To add to Wallenstein’s problems
the French sent troops into Alsace, an Imperial territory, the Dutch were
steadily gaining the upper hand in the Netherlands, and in Transylvania
the new ruler, Georg Rákóczi, showed ominous signs of having inher-
ited not only Bethlen Gabor’s principality but also his anti-Habsburg
warlike inclinations. Closer to home the Saxon army continued to
occupy northern Bohemia and might resume its advance should the
opportunity present itself.
To counter and contain these threats Wallenstein too had a number
of subsidiary forces, the remaining parts of the old Imperial army, in
addition to the new one he was raising in southern Bohemia. Even
the former Catholic League army, now essentially a Bavarian force,
was in two parts, as while Tilly was rebuilding in the south his deputy,
Count Gottfried Pappenheim, had remained in northern Germany
after Breitenfeld, where he was engaged in a hit-and-run contest with
Swedish and allied units. It was the commander-in-chief’s job to evalu-
ate and prioritise the multiple calls on his army’s resources, and to
judge what steps to take in the light of the overall strategic situation.
Maximilian behaved in 1632 as though Bavaria were the only theatre of
war. Wallenstein could not afford to do likewise.