Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/289

 THE ERA OF THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR 277 house of Russia died out. Sweden and Poland both involved themselves in the Russian dynastic struggle which inevitably followed. In the result Russia made cessions of territory both to Sweden and to Poland, but remained independent under the dynasty of the Romanoffs whom she chose herself; while Sigismund and Gustavus Adolphus were left to battle with each other for territories on the Baltic. As concerns Hungary we have to remark that the country had now fallen practically into three divisions : one under the control of Austria : another under Turkish „ . . Hungary, dominion; while the third, Transylvania, was really an independent principality ruled by Bethlen Gabor. The aggressive movement of Turkey had ceased towards the end of the sixteenth century, some time after the Turkish fleets had been defeated in the famous battle of Lepanto in 1572; so that there was no immediate pressure from that quarter to hamper the emperor in the German Thirty Years' War to which we can now revert. In 1626 Christian of Denmark came forward as a prince of the empire to head the Protestant resistance to the Catholic advance. His intervention proved futile. The 3. Germany Imperial armies were successful on all hands, but ** d the War - the Imperial policy itself had changed. In the earlier stage of the war Ferdinand had in effect been in the hands of the Catholic princes headed by Maximilian of Bavaria, who had reaped most of the fruits of victory. The successful General Tilly was the instrument of Maximilian rather than of Ferdinand, and Catholic domination was the object in view. But in this second stage there was a new Imperial army in the field, raised by the energy of the Bohemian Wallenstein. It was Wallenstein, not Tilly, who swept down resistance, and Wallenstein's object was to make the emperor personally supreme, a project which was no more to the taste of the Catholic princes than to that of the Protestants; while all German nobility was offended by the rise to power of a Bohemian upstart. The issue was no longer single and direct, when the Catholics found themselves labouring in the cause of a universal Hapsburg domination.