A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery inside an Enigma 5intended to provide a modern interpretation for the English-speaking
reader. In Germany the Thirty Years War is still regarded as one of the
most important events in the nation’s history, and Wallenstein is well
known as one of its leading figures. There have been literally dozens
of serious biographies and major studies from the late 1700s onwards,
as well as large numbers of articles, pamphlets, plays and novels about
Wallenstein. This is not the case in the English-speaking world, in
which the Thirty Years War is seen as one major European war among
many, and one in which England, though a participant, played a sup-
porting rather than a central role, notwithstanding which many English
and even more Scottish and Irish soldiers served in the armies of the
principal combatants.
There have only been three biographies of Wallenstein published in
English, one in 1837, one in 1938, and one in 1976, the last a translation
of Golo Mann’s truly magnum opus, some 900 pages of main text. The
first two were reprinted as military historical studies in the 1960s, but
none are now available. There is thus a need for an up-to-date academic
study, but this book is also directed towards readers who are not necessar-
ily familiar with seventeenth-century European history, the Thirty Years
War or Wallenstein himself. Mann’s level of detail would be inappropri-
ate, and a more selective approach has necessarily been adopted. Hence
some topics have had to be largely omitted, such as Wallenstein’s striking
success as a progressive and economically effective landowner, while it
has been possible to do no more than touch upon his innovative and
widely copied methods of military organisation and financing (although
the latter subject is more fully discussed in Mortimer, Contributions,
listed in the bibliography.)
The modern German biographies of Wallenstein noted in the bibliog-
raphy have been valuable reference works in locating the sources and
compiling the core information upon which this account is based. Those
apart, the author’s principal debt is to the dedicated nineteenth-century
and early twentieth-century historians, mainly German and Czech, who
painstakingly located, transcribed and published volume after volume
of relevant letters and documents from archives spread across half of
Europe. Without such essential groundwork broader historical analysis
would be very much more difficult, and often impossible.