Richer Than All His Tribe 47and a half million gulden to be provided by Wallenstein and unnamed
associates.^21 It seems a safe assumption that these correspond to the
item from the catalogue of Wallenstein’s papers mentioned at the begin-
ning of this chapter, Liechtenstein’s receipt of 13 January 1623 for a
loan of three and a half million Rhine gulden provided by Wallenstein
against the security of expropriated estates. Although Wallenstein
acted as principal, the great majority of this huge sum of money will
have been provided by bankers and other lenders, the equivalent of a
modern loan consortium, with separate agreements passing on to them
rights in respect of the emperor’s debt and the properties on which it
was secured. However Wallenstein’s own estates will certainly also have
been put up as collateral for their loan.
This was a remarkably shrewd move. The favour in which Wallenstein
was already held at court must have been further enhanced by his part
in providing so much cash at so critical a time, and this in turn must
have worked to his advantage in his property dealings. No official
would have allowed the sale of an estate in the area of Bohemia in
which Wallenstein was known to be interested without it having been
offered to him, and few would have been prepared to challenge his
bid provided that it was within reasonable range of the assessed value.
Moreover a sale to him freed the exchequer of one major problem, that
of gauging whether a bidder could in fact raise the cash, and if so how
long it would take. A cosy relationship of mutual advantage probably
developed between the responsible officials and Wallenstein’s agents, as
one purchase followed another and the transactions became an estab-
lished routine.
From a late-nineteenth-century study of Wallenstein’s property deal-
ings it can be calculated that from 1622 to the end of his life in 1634 he
spent seven million gulden on purchases from the exchequer and private
landowners. However he also made sales to the value of four million, so
that his net investment was three million. Two-thirds of these purchases
and sales took place in the first three years, 1622 to 1624, the years of
the great confiscations, during which his net outlay was almost two
million gulden.^22 While these figures need to be treated as no more
than indicative, the general pattern of the business is thus relatively
easy to follow. Until mid-1622 Wallenstein was probably lending and
spending from his own resources, up to his purchase of Friedland and
Reichenberg. In the autumn of that year he put together a very large line
of credit and negotiated with Liechtenstein the terms of the three and
a half million Rhine gulden loan to the emperor which was made in
January 1623. Purchases thereafter may initially have taken up most