Wallenstein, or more correctly WALDSTEIN, ALBRECHT WENZEL EUSEBIUS VON, Duke of Friedland, Sagan, and Mecklenburg, the most remarkable of the imperial generals in the Thirty Years' War, was born at Hermanic in Bohemia on 14th September 1583. His parents were of Czech blood, of noble rank, and Protestants, and took their name from the castle of Waldstein near Turnau. After their death the education of the boy, then fourteen, was entrusted by a Catholic uncle to the Jesuits at Olmütz. Thence he passed to the university of Altdorf; and whilst making the grand tour he spent some time studying at Padua and Bologna. Having tried his sword in battle against the Turks, he took the first step on the ladder of ambition by marrying a Bohemian widow of vast expectations. At her death (1614) he added her estates to those he had inherited from his uncle. This enabled him to raise troops to assist the Archduke Ferdinand against Venice; and he still further ingratiated himself with his future emperor through his marriage with a daughter of Count Harrach, Ferdinand's favourite. When in 1618 the Bohemians took up arms against the emperor, Count von Waldstein (to which dignity he had meanwhile been advanced) raised troops at his own cost, and led them against his countrymen. The Bohemians humiliated, Waldstein contrived to possess himself, by means the reverse of honourable, of huge slices of their confiscated estates, and in 1623 gratified another of his ambitions by inducing Ferdinand to make him ruler of the new principality of Friedland in Mecklenburg. Two years later, the emperor being hard pressed by the Protestant princes, and having no army save the troops of the Catholic League, which he could not direct as he chose, Wallenstein offered to raise and equip for his imperial master's service 20,000 men at his own expense on condition that he was given a free hand in the hostile provinces. Ferdinand jumped at the offer, and on 25th July 1625 named the wealthy Bohemian magnate general-in-chief of all the imperial armies and conferred upon him absolute authority in the field. Wallenstein at once marched for the Elbe, and in the following spring defeated the emperor's bitter foe, Count von Mansfeld, at Dessau; in the autumn he chased him through Silesia and Hungary, and held him and his ally, Bethlen Gabor of Transylvania, in check, until Mansfeld's death and a truce with Bethlen freed Ferdinand from both these enemies. In the following year (1627) Wallenstein, co-operating with Tilly, won the Jutland peninsula and the Mecklenburg duchies from the Danes and the Protestant princes. At this time and during the next few months the emperor not only sold Wallenstein the dukedom of Sagan (in Silesia), but created Friedland a hereditary duchy, invested him with the duchy of Mecklenburg, and appointed him general of the Baltic and the North Sea.
Two objects which hovered before Wallenstein's mind at this period indicate the grandiose and wide-reaching character of his ideas: (1) the emperor should be made a despotic sovereign and head of a resuscitated empire of Byzantium, his power resting on strong and well-disciplined armies levied entirely in his own interest; (2) the power of the maritime Protestant nations of the north—Sweden, the Netherlands, England—should be broken, and the imperial sway be supreme at sea as well as on land. The latter of these ambitious dreams, which he attempted to realise by subduing Pomerania, was thwarted by the Swedish fleet and the heroic resistance of Stralsund, which, defying all Wallenstein's desperate efforts, had the honour of being the first to withstand successfully the man who believed that the stars were guiding his destiny to the loftiest heights of earthly glory. To his insatiable and unscrupulous ambition, and his greed of power, Wallenstein added an arrogance of manner, an overweening self-assurance, an arbitrary and wilful tone of behaviour, that gave the bitterest offence to Ferdinand's allies, the old princes of the empire. They, when Gustavus Adolphus invaded northern Germany, and the emperor was compelled to seek their aid against him, seized upon the opportunity to insist upon the dismissal of the 'upstart' Friedland. Contrary to Ferdinand's fears, Wallenstein quietly resigned (1630) his command and retired to Gitschin, the capital of his principality. But the inability of the Duke of Bavaria and his colleagues to check the progress of the invincible 'Snow-king' and his sheepskin-clad legions soon convinced the emperor that nothing could save him except the military genius of the man whom he had affronted. The Swedes, the Saxons, the Brandenburgers were closing in upon him; his allies were powerless to stand against them; and in the end of 1631 Ferdinand restored Wallenstein to the supreme command. But the proud and haughty duke only consented to resume action on his own terms, which practically made him absolute disposer of the military resources of the empire and supreme arbiter of peace and war. Having driven the Saxons out of Bohemia, he marched against the Swedes in Bavaria; he repulsed the desperate attempt of Gustavus Adolphus to storm his entrenched camp near Nuremberg (3d September 1632), but failed to get the better of the Swedish king at Lützen (q. v.), though his loss of the victory was more than outbalanced by the death of the mainstay of the Protestant cause.
Wallenstein's relations to the emperor, and his policy and aims, during this second investment with the supreme command were entirely different from those which had characterised his first tenure of the office. When Gustavus fell he knew perfectly well that his influence was paramount to decide the destinies not only of Ferdinand, but of the princes of the empire; he seems, therefore, to have resolved upon dictating peace to all the combatants alike, in the hope both of preserving his position as a prince of the empire and of founding a ruling (ducal or royal) dynasty. But circumstances and his own character were too strong for him. His innate love of intrigue, the ineradicable suspicion and irresolution of his nature, his impatience, his scornful pride, his instinctive predilection for mystery and crooked dealing, combined with the sudden fluctuations of circumstance, entangled him in such a complicated web of intrigue that the snarer was taken in his own toils. He sought to sow disunion amongst the Protestant princes as well as amongst the chiefs of the Catholic League; he negotiated at one and the same time with Armin, the Saxon general, with the Swedes, with the French, with the Bohemian exiles, and hoodwinked them all and the emperor to boot; he coquetted with such bribes as the duchy of Franconia, the royal crown of Bohemia; he pretended a sincere desire to restore peace to distracted Ger- many; but over and above all these objects, real and professed, he aimed at keeping always a secure retreat open for himself, whatever might be the outcome of events. At length his enemies at court, pointing to his culpable inactivity after Lützen, and his open and secret negotiations with Swedes and Saxons, convinced Ferdinand that the all too powerful general was meditating treachery; and indeed in a conference with Armin, near Schweidnitz on 16th August 1633, Wallenstein had proposed to join the Saxons and Swedes in assailing the empire, though owing to the mistrust of Armin and of Oxenstjerna nothing came of the proposal. A month after Christmas the emperor, who had secretly won over certain of Wallenstein's officers, deposed the duke from his command and named General Gallas his successor, and in less than another month proclaimed Wallenstein a traitor, and released his officers from their oath of obedience to him. Wallenstein, thinking to find support in Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar (then on the Upper Danube), hastened to Eger in the mountains of western Bohemia. But some amongst his train were traitors, notably the Irishmen Butler and Devercux, and the Scotchmen Gordon and Lesley. These men, after killing his most faithful adherents, slew Wallenstein himself as he was retiring to rest on the evening of 25th February 1634.
Tall, spare but muscular, with a yellow skin, a thin beard, and glittering eyes that made men tremble, Wallenstein was stern of countenance and cold in demeanour, of nutting activity and a lover of order, moderation, and thrift. Such were the contradictions of his strangely complex character that he was both avaricious of wealth and lavish in expenditure, obstinate yet irresolute, in general sparing of words, though on occasion rash and bold of speech, yet always cautious to a degree against committing himself in writing, unnaturally tolerant of religious opinions, yet a firm believer in the quackeries of astrology, impatient of control, jealous of his authority, proud and domineering, yet a far-reaching and sagacious statesman, a man consumed by the most insatiable ambition, but capable at the same time of dreaming the grandest and remotest of ideals. As a recruiter and organiser of armies, a general who could not only maintain the strictest discipline, but make himself beloved of his soldiers, and lead them to certain victory, he stands almost unrivalled. Too great for a subject, he was not great enough, or at least, consistently bold enough, to usurp the throne of a ruler; his ambition and untiring energy came to naught because he lacked resolution to fit them together for controlling the circumstances over which destiny made him master.
See Lives by Ranke (4th ed. 1880), Förster (1834), Aretin (1846), Hurter (1855), and others; monographs by Irmer (1888-89), Gädeke (1885), and Hildebrand (1885); Förster's edition of Wallenstein's Letters (3 vols. 1828-29); and Schiller's trilogy of plays; besides other works cited at THIRTY YEARS' WAR and in Schmid's Die Wallenstein-Litteratur (1878).