The Thirty Years' War - James Aitken Wylie

Other parties came forward to urge the same
demand on Ferdinand. These were the princes of
Germany, to whom the army of Wallenstein had
become a terror, a scourge, and a destruction. We
can imagine, or rather we cannot imagine, the state
of that land with an assemblage of banditti, now
swollen to somewhere about 100,000, [6] roaming
over it, reaping the harvest of its fields, gathering
the spoil of its cities, torturing the inhabitants to
compel them to disclose their treasures, causing
whole villages on the line of their march, or in the
neighborhood of their encampment, to disappear,
and leaving their occupants to find a home in the
woods. The position of the princes was no longer
endurable. It did not matter much whether they
were with or against Ferdinand. The ruffians
assembled under Wallenstein selected as the scene
of their encampment not the most heterodox, but
the most fertile province, and carried away the
cattle, the gold, and the goods which it contained,
without stopping to inquire whether the owner was
a Romanist or a Protestant. "Brandenburg
estimated its losses at 20,000,000, Pomerania at
10,000,000, Hesse-Cassel at 7,000,000 of dollars,
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