III. The Danish interval
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Albrecht von Wallenstein
(1583-1634) |
1625-29
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Christian IV as a young man |
Christian IV of Denmark was wealthy,
a committed Protestant, and worried that the German Protestants might
turn for aid to Denmark's enemy, Sweden. In December 1625 he allied
with England, obtained promises of support from France and from German
Protestants, and landed an army in Brunswick. |
 | Most of the help that
Christian IV had hoped for never materialized. The English and Dutch
attacked Spain, not the Emperor; and the Lutheran Princes proved
broken reeds. Count Mansfeld did try to join forces with Bethlen Gabor,
but was defeated by a new Imperial army of whose existence Christian knew
nothing, commanded by
Albrecht
Wenzel Eusebius von Waldstein (Albert of Wallenstein) 1583-1634.
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Christian's army was defeated
by Tilly at Lutter (August 1626). When Wallenstein's army joined up
with Tilly's in September 1627, the overwhelmed Danish army collapsed.
Imperial troops occupied the Danish peninsula, and Christian
fled to the Danish capital of Copenhagen, on the island of
Zeeland. |
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In
May 1629, Ferdinand granted Christian IV moderate terms at the Peace
of Lübeck provided
that he withdraw entirely from the War; the Danes recovered their mainland
territories. |
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The Dutch were also defeated and in 1625 lost
Breda to the Spanish. |
| [In 1637 the Dutch retook Breda -
5,000 pioneers dug a series of earth walls and trenches to protect
the attacking army, which fired 23,000 cannon balls at the
fortress. Even so, it still required six months to bring the
Spanish garrison to its knees.] |
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Ferdinand II punished Bohemia
for its rebellion: he forcibly imposed Catholicism, seized land, and
debased the coinage.
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A thaler (precursor of the
dollar) of Ferdinand II, Prague mint |
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Albrecht von Wallenstein and other
speculators profited by grants or purchases of confiscated land, but
most Bohemians suffered.
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Wallenstein was made Duke of Friedland in 1625. By 1630, he commanded
an army of 150,000 men. He was an effective and ruthless military
commander, capable of organizing the supply of the army with food
supplies from his own lands in Bohemia, and equally capable of
letting it "live off the land" when he needed the locals
terrorized. Wallenstein was no Catholic crusader and hoped for a
Germany that was obedient to the Emperor but also tolerant. |
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Tensions
began to develop amongst the victorious Catholic forces; Maximilian of
Bavaria was suspicious of Hapsburg ambitions, and
the Catholic Princes of
Germany resented the cost and disruption of Wallenstein's massive
army. Eventually (September 1630), Ferdinand gave in to the pressure
and dismissed Wallenstein.
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France had played little part
in the war, although it had spent much of the 1620s scheming to turn
Maximilian of Bavaria against the Hapsburgs. But in 1628 a crisis over
succession to the Dukedoms of
Mantua and Montferrat brought France and the Empire into open conflict.
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The war over the Mantuan succession
In December 1627, Duke Vincent III of Mantua died without
children. Charles Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers, a French aristocrat related to
the Mantuan dukes, arrived
in Mantua in January 1628 and proclaimed himself ruler. The
Spanish refused to accept this and sent an army from Milan into
Montferrat. This
became bogged down in a long siege at Casale, and Spain was forced
to ask help from the Emperor. In February 1629, Louis XIII sent
his own army into Italy. |
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Mantua mattered to both the
Spanish and the Austrian Hapsburgs because of its strategic position
on the flank of Milan. Control of the "Spanish Road" - linking
Milan to the Netherlands - was vital to the Spanish if they were to be able to
supply their army in the Netherlands.
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28 March 1629, the Edict of
Restitution was promulgated throughout Germany. Purportedly a
conservative attempt to restore the settlement reached in the 1555
Peace of Augsburg, this was in fact a radical attack on Protestantism.
By seizing all church land secularized since 1552, by attacking all
Calvinists, and by allowing Catholic ecclesiastical rulers to enforce
uniformity, the Edict pushed many previously undecided Lutheran
princes into opposition to the Emperor.
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Sensing Imperial weakness, the
Dutch began to attack Hapsburg forces in the Low Countries and
Northwestern Germany.
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