Albrecht von Wallenstein

14 September 1583, Heřmanice (near Jaroměř) – 25 February 1634, Cheb

Albrecht von Wallenstein was a son of the aristocrat Vilém of Wallenstein and Markéta of Smiřice. He was raised as member of the Unity of the Brethren and in 1599 he enrolled in the Protestant academy in Altdorf near Nuremberg. Only a year later, however, he was expelled because of his short temper and violent behaviour but, on the other hand, he found good use for these characteristics in the Habsburg army, with which he fought in Hungary in 1604–1606. His conversion to Catholicism open new doors for him in the imperial service and his profitable marriage to Lucretia Nešková of Landek provided him with a large estate in Moravia.

The ambitious, capable, but also ruthless Wallenstein definitively won the favour of the Habsburg court during the Bohemian Revolt, when as a commander of one of the Moravian regiments defected in April 1619 to the imperial side with the treasure of the Moravian estates. After the Battle of White Mountain, using financial machinations and buying cheaply property confiscated from the rebels made him one of the wealthiest men in the country. The estates that he acquired in north-eastern Bohemia he united into the Principality of Friedland (later Duchy of Friedland), which had its centre in Jičín. At its peak, Friedland was an autonomous enclave within the Habsburg Monarchy.

In 1625, Albrecht von Wallenstein was appointed commander-in-chief of the imperial armies. He and his army, which he himself recruited for Ferdinand II and to a great extent also paid, achieved many victories in the war with Denmark and in 1629 he forced it to negotiate peace with the Habsburgs. In the meantime, he also came into possession of the Duchy of Żagań and the Duchy of Magdeburg, which made him one of the most prominent aristocrats of the Holy Roman Empire. His exceptional wealth and power, however, also earned him a lot of enemies, led by the Bavarian Prince-Elector Maximilian I, who caused Albrecht to lose his command. A series of crushing defeats inflicted on the Catholic armies by the Swedes and the Saxon incursion into Bohemia, however, forced Emperor Ferdinand II to call the Duke of Friedland back into service only 16 months later. Wallenstein again managed to reorganise the decimated imperial army and in 1632 defeat the Swedes in the Battle of Lützen, in which the Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus also fell. His victory in the Battle of Stínava drove the enemy away from Silesia as well. This, however, was the last success of the increasingly mentally and physically ill army leader. The emperor relieved Wallenstein of command in January 1634 because of alleged high treason and on 25 February of the same year Wallenstein was murdered in Cheb. Albrecht von Wallenstein’s dramatic life and fate already fascinated his contemporaries and became a rewarding topic for a number of excellent literary and art works. In the German-speaking area, the dramatist Friedrich Schiller (the Wallenstein trilogy) and the foremost representative of German Modernism Alfred Döblin wrote about him. The most significant Czech contributions are the novel The Descent of the Idol (Bloudění) from the Larger Wallenstein Trilogy (Větší Valdštejnská trilogie) and the collection of short stories Requiem (Rekviem) from the Smaller Wallenstein Trilogy (Menší Valdštejnská trilogie) by Jaroslav Durych.