The Generalissimo's Fortune

The Generalissimo's Fortune: Life, Career, Assassination, and Aftermath of Albrecht von Wallenstein

In the winter of 1583, a boy was born into a minor, impoverished Bohemian family with nothing to recommend him but a name. By the time an assassin's blade found him in his nightshirt fifty years later, he had built an army larger than most kingdoms could field, a duchy carved from confiscated land and industrial ambition, and a position of power so vast it made him, in every practical sense, a second sovereign inside the Holy Roman Empire.

The Generalissimo's Fortune traces the extraordinary and ultimately fatal rise of Albrecht von Wallenstein, orphan, astrologer, financier, warlord, through calculated conversion, a fortune-bringing marriage, a catastrophic currency scheme that built his fortune on the ruin of thousands, and a military-financial machine decades ahead of its time. It follows him through triumph at Dessau Bridge, humiliation at Regensburg, an emperor's desperate recall, and a final year of secret diplomacy whose true purpose remains genuinely uncertain even now, before the night at Eger Castle when the men he trusted most turned on him.

This is the story of how one man's genius for building unaccountable power forced Europe to invent the modern state army, and why even his own emperor could not, in the end, afford to let him live.