In November, 1620, Tilly had, at the head of a powerful army, won a decisive victory over the army of the Protestant Union by the battle of White Mountain; then, having restored Bohemia and Moravia to the rule of the Emperor, the victorious general quickly marched to the Palatinate, where the cause of the Protestants was at that time supreme. But he was defeated there by the Protestant army under Mansfeld and the Margrave of Baden; and at that time Protestantism might have been triumphantly established in western and northern Germany at least, had not the two victorious Protestant generals made the mistake of separating their armies,--a mistake which proved fatal to both of them. Tilly was not slow to see the advantage which he gained by this dismemberment of the army which had so signally defeated him at Wiesloch; he rallied his forces and defeated first the Margrave of Baden at Wimpfen, and shortly afterwards Mansfeld and the Duke of Brunswick at Höchst. Then the Protestant armies crossed the frontier of the Netherlands in the hope of receiving assistance from England.
In the meantime the German Emperor, emboldened by the successes of Tilly, strained every nerve to reëstablish Catholicism and stamp out Protestantism in the Empire. The excessive zeal which he displayed in accomplishing this purpose, and the terrible work of destruction which Tilly and his lieutenants were carrying on in all those districts of the Empire which were unfortunate enough to fall under their sway, were, however, the means of setting Protestantism on its feet again, of reviving the waning hopes of the German Protestant princes, and of arousing a powerful interest in their behalf among their neighbors. The most important accession which the cause of Protestantism had at that time was that of King Christian the Fourth of Denmark, who joined the Protestants with a large army and took supreme command in northern Germany.
Such were the conditions in Germany at the moment when the man who is the subject of this chapter appeared on the stage as principal actor in the terrible war of thirty years. This man, one of the most remarkable men of the seventeenth century, and one of the most eminent generals in German history was Wallenstein. For seven years he was the greatest man of the war, eclipsing the fame of Tilly himself, filling the minds of enemies and friends, and finally that of the Emperor himself, with vague fears and apprehensions of his treason and unbridled ambition. But in the flower of his age his life was cut short by the hands of assassins.