Below you will find another fantastic article from Clio’s Board Games, this time discussing the fall of Albrecht von Wallenstein through the lens of boardgames. You can also find this article on Clio’s blog. The previous articles in this series can be found here, here, and here. Enjoy! -Rachel
Part 4: Fall
Our fourth and final post in the Wallenstein series! As biographies go, this one ends with the death of the protagonist… before we take a look at the world he left behind, and round it out with a little overview of how contemporaries and later historians saw Wallenstein. Let’s go!
Wallenstein’s Death
As we have seen in the last post, Wallenstein had contrived to make many enemies. His only supporter, Emperor Ferdinand, feared to be upstaged by the seemingly all-powerful general. The news in late 1633 – Wallenstein treating with the Swedes, Wallenstein letting Thurn go free, Wallenstein not defending Regensburg and Bavaria, Wallenstein refusing to support the Spanish mission to the Netherlands – mixed with their tendentious interpretations by the Bavarian and Spanish parties at court convinced the emperor that Wallenstein planned betrayal. To forestall this, the Imperial War Council secretly decided to relieve Wallenstein of his command on December 31, 1633.
Wallenstein and his intimates did not know about the dismissal, but they sensed the shifting wind. His brother-in-law Adam Erdmann, Count Trčka, and his marshal Christian von Ilow had Wallenstein’s officers sign a statement of loyalty to their commander in his winter quarters at Plzeň on January 12. They hoped that this show of unity in the army would remind the emperor that he needed his general. The opposite was the case: Ferdinand took it as another sign of treason.
When Wallenstein had been dismissed in 1630, it had caused both the emperor and the electors immense anxiety about his possible reaction. He had taken it meekly then, but what would he do now? As the emperor and his advisors had resolved that Wallenstein was a traitor, they expected the worst – insubordination, rebellion, joining his army with the Swedes. That needed to be forestalled. A secret court found Wallenstein guilty of treason on January 24, 1634. The court reached out to three of Wallenstein’s officers which they deemed reliable – Wallenstein’s second-in-command, Matthias Gallas, the commander of the embattled left wing at Lützen, Ottavio Piccolomini, and the tenacious defender of Dessau Bridge, Johann von Aldringen. To them, they gave the delicate task of delivering Wallenstein to Vienna – dead or alive.
The three executors of the imperial sentence faced a daunting task. Wallenstein was popular with the common soldiers whose pay was guaranteed by their general, not by the emperor whose coffers were notoriously empty and whose will to pay the army notoriously limited. The officers seemed more promising, as they were honor-bound to the emperor, but they had also sworn loyalty to their commander. Gallas got in touch with those they deemed reliable and instructed them not to follow any orders from Wallenstein, Trčka, or Ilow.
By that time, Wallenstein’s health had deteriorated even more. He was barely able to leave his bed and sometimes could not even sign documents. All the while, he waited for a reply from Hans Georg von Arnim on the potential peace with the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg.
Trčka acted on Wallenstein’s behalf in the day-to-day affairs, confident in his command over the soldiers. Only deep into February did it dawn on him and Wallenstein’s other intimates that imperial agents were prising the army away from them – officer by officer, regiment by regiment.
Nothing was left to Wallenstein but flight. On February 23, he and those faithful to him made away to Cheb, accompanied by a few regiments of loyal troops. They had been joined by the regiment of Colonel Walter Butler on the way and counted on the garrison of Cheb under the command of John Gordon. Both Butler and Gordon had been contacted by the three conspirators who urged them not to obey Wallenstein. For the time being, Butler and Gordon prevaricated.
As Cheb is in the northwestern corner of Bohemia, Wallenstein could easily leave Bohemia for Saxony or be joined by Swedish forces. That put time pressure on Butler and Gordon. If Wallenstein fled, they would be held responsible. If they arrested him, he would be freed again if the Swedish arrived. Thus, they resolved to murder him and his associates.
Gordon invited Trčka, Ilow, and a few more Wallenstein intimates for dinner up in Cheb’s castle on February 25th – together with Wallenstein, who declined on grounds of his constant bad health. Gordon and Butler, both present at dinner, had a group of soldiers commanded by captain Walter Devereux come in, declare for the emperor, and murder Wallenstein’s associates. With all of them dead, Devereux took his small group down to Wallenstein’s residence in the town. They found Wallenstein in bed already. As he got up, Devereux stabbed him to death.
Wallenstein’s death is handled in a rather detached manner in Cuius Regio (Francisco Gradaille, GMT Games, forthcoming): Like every other leader, Wallenstein has an initial and a last year of service (1625 and 1634, in his case). In the leader deployment phase before the campaigns of 1635, the player will have to remove Wallenstein. Death – be that from plague, battle, or murder – is inevitable and pre-ordained.
The Catholic player in Thirty Years War: Europe in Agony, 1618—1648 has more freedom. As we have discussed in the last two instalments of the series, Wallenstein can be dismissed and recalled in the game. And if he proves to be too influential (and comes close to the threshold at which his influence would give the Protestants a Major Victory), he can also be assassinated (and thus be removed from the game permanently). There is, however, no inevitability of Wallenstein’s death: As his influence is only raised from recruiting troops, taking cities, and successfully attacking with him, the Catholic player can just forgo those, not use Wallenstein anymore and let him live out his old age in peace. Somehow, this never occurred to the historical Ferdinand II. Implicitly, the game’s treatment of Wallenstein’s assassination posits that the active threat which Wallenstein posed in Ferdinand’s view was nothing but a fabrication of the emperor’s paranoia, and that the emperor remained firmly in command at all times.
Twilight of the Thirty Years’ War
Wallenstein had grown rich on land which had been taken from those the emperor had declared rebels. He ended up on the other side of this bargain. His estates in Bohemia and Silesia were seized (Mecklenburg was lost to the Swedes anyway). A good deal went as spoils to all the officers involved in the conspiracy against him. Gallas, Piccolomini, and Aldringen became great magnates, and those on the lower rungs of the plot did not go unrewarded either, down to an additional month’s pay for all the soldiers in the garrison of Cheb whose only contribution had been to stand by idly while Wallenstein was murdered. The rest of Wallenstein’s estates were sold by the emperor to fix some of his short-term financial problems. Wallenstein’s widow Isabelle kept nothing. Only when she pleaded mercy (instead of justice) from the emperor did she receive a small estate to live on.
Wallenstein had died when the war had already been raging for sixteen years. It would last another fourteen before peace was finally made in 1648. Any time Emperor Ferdinand II had been in a position of strength, he had not made concessions to form a lasting peace, but instead increased his demands, prompting the interventions of first Denmark, then Sweden, and finally France (shortly after Wallenstein’s death).
Ferdinand II died in 1637. At the time of peace, the new emperor Ferdinand III was mostly ruined. Protestantism survived, protected by German princes and foreign powers. Sweden controlled the Baltic Sea. Any hopes of imperial hegemony in the empire or of Habsburg hegemony in Europe were dashed. After Spain had conceded Dutch independence, it fought on against France, and lost that war, too, along with its European primacy.
Afterlife
Wallenstein remained fascinating to his contemporaries after his death, and would continue for centuries. Assessments close to his own time hewed closely to the religious beliefs of the writer: Catholics tended to see Wallenstein as a traitor (following the official account of the emperor), Protestants made him into a Machiavellian mercenary leader, often contrasted with the heroic “Lion from the North” Gustavus Adolphus.
Later treatments focused on individual aspects such as Wallenstein’s purported dependence on astrology. You will have noticed that this is the first time since our first post that astrology is mentioned – because there is no evidence that Wallenstein was more interested in it than his contemporaries, let alone that he made decisions based on horoscopes. The speculations on this issue are based in the accounts of those who bore witness against Wallenstein shortly before and after his death, taking pains to stress anything which might indicate that Wallenstein was anything but a devout Catholic. The idea of Wallenstein, the Star-Seeker, is particularly prevalent in the German mind, as playwright Friedrich Schiller dedicated a trilogy of plays to Wallenstein’s last weeks – and presents the general as an indecisive fatalist, done in by his own passivity as well as the cabals of those around him. That’s (masterful) fiction – but it hews close enough to history (Schiller had taught history at the University of Jena and even written a major book on the Thirty Years’ War) to influence anyone whose first contact with Wallenstein was through Schiller’s plays.
By the time document-based historiography had been firmly established in the 19th century, pre-established views on Wallenstein had become so solidified that historians still argued within their confines – mostly on the matter if Wallenstein had, in fact, betrayed the emperor. Slowly, the view that he had not gained ground.
Interpretations of Wallenstein in the 19th and 20th century often were inspired by current politics: Catholic German nationalists hailed Wallenstein as a proto-Greater German unifier. Czech historians like Josef Pekař adopted their compatriot as a proto-nationalist transcending the multi-national Habsburg Empire. Hellmut Diwald saw in Wallenstein the necessary authoritarian answer to overcome foreign domination of Germany (and subsequently plunged himself into New Right revisionism).
When stories of “Great Men” had decidedly fallen out of favor in academic history, Golo Mann revived the genre with his biography of Wallenstein, testing the limits of academic writing with his literary ambitions. His book dispelled some of the myths around Wallenstein and retained others.
Currently, Wallenstein’s heritage as a Bohemian, a nobleman, a (converted) Catholic, and a magnate have received more attention. History is never completed, but only enriched with more perspectives. Wallenstein’s life and its subsequent interpretations are thus also lessons in historiography.
Games Referenced
Cuius Regio (Francisco Gradaille, GMT Games, forthcoming)
Thirty Years War: Europe in Agony, 1618—1648 (David A. Fox/Michael Welker, GMT Games)
Further Reading
A recent biography which succeeds at dispelling the Wallenstein myth is Mortimer, Geoff: Wallenstein. The Enigma of the Thirty Years’ War, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2010.
For an older, more encompassing biography with literary aspirations, see Mann, Golo: Wallenstein. His Life Narrated, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, New York City, NY 1976.
On the reception of Wallenstein and his changing image from his contemporaries all the way through the 20th century, see Bahlcke, Joachim/Kampmann, Christoph: Wallensteinbilder im Widerstreit: Eine historische Symbolfigur in Geschichtsschreibung und Literatur vom 17. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert [Conflicting Conceptions of Wallenstein: A Symbolic Figure from History in Historiography and Literature from the 17th to the 20th Century], Böhlau, Cologne/Weimar/Vienna 2011 [in German].
For a short introduction to the Thirty Years’ War, see Schmidt, Georg: Der Dreißigjährige Krieg [The Thirty Years’ War], C.H. Beck, Munich 2010 [in German].
A magisterial monography on the entire war is Wilson, Peter H.: Europe’s Tragedy. A New History of the Thirty Years’ War, Penguin, London 2009.
Author: Clios Board Games
