Albrecht von Wallenstein

Albrecht von Wallenstein raised armies on credit, made a war pay for itself, and was murdered by the emperor he had won it for. He was born into minor Bohemian Protestant gentry, was orphaned young, converted to Catholicism, and married a wealthy elderly widow whose estates he inherited within five years. The Bohemian revolt made him rich beyond that. He backed the emperor, and when the defeated Protestant nobility were dispossessed after the White Mountain he bought their confiscated land with debased currency he had helped a consortium to mint, assembling a private principality in northern Bohemia that he ran as a manufacturing estate for his own army. His offer to Ferdinand II in 1625 was an army of tens of thousands raised at his own expense, on the understanding that it would live off the territory it occupied through systematic contributions. That system is the reason the war lasted thirty years. An army that funds itself does not need a treasury to authorise it, and it ruins the country it stands in whether that country is enemy or friend. He beat the Danes, was given the duchy of Mecklenburg over its hereditary rulers, and was dismissed in 1630 when the imperial princes demanded it. He was recalled after Sweden invaded, fought Gustavus Adolphus at Lützen in 1632, and opened his own negotiations with the enemy afterwards. Ferdinand declared him a traitor and had him killed at Eger in February 1634 by officers of his own army. Schiller made a trilogy of it, and the question of whether he was planning treason or defending himself has not been settled.

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