wild-robber
system, quickly wasted the most fertile countries.

Great care was therefore taken that no such embarrassment should arise.
Neither the Emperor nor the Princes of the Empire were in a condition
to maintain forty thousand men out of their income even for three
months. The regular revenue of the sovereign was much less than now,
and the maintenance of an army far more costly. The greater part of the
revenue was derived from tithes in kind, which in time of war was
insecure and difficult to realize. The finances of the parties engaged
in this war were even at the commencement of it in a most lamentable
state.

In the winter of 1619 and 1620, half the Bohemian army died of hunger
and cold, from the want of pay and a commissariat; in September 1620,
more than four and a half million of gulden of pay was owing to the
troops, and there were endless mutinies, and the King Palatine
Frederick could not aid his Protestant allies with subsidies. The
Emperor was then not in much better condition, but he soon afterwards
obtained Spanish subsidies. When the Elector of Saxony, whose finances
were better regulated, first hired fifteen hundred men in December,
1619, he could not pay them regularly. What was granted by the estates
in war taxes, and the so-called voluntary contributions of the opulent,
did not go far; loans even in the first year of the war were very
difficult to realize; they were attempted with the banking-houses of
southern Germany, and also in Hamburg, but seldom with success. City
communities were considered safer debtors than the great princes. There
were dealings about the smallest sums even with private individuals.
Saxony in 1621, hoped to get from fifty to sixty thousand guldens from
the Fuggers, and endeavoured in vain to borrow thirty and seventy
thousand gulden from capitalists. Maximilian of Bavaria, and the
League, made a great loan for the war of one million two hundred
thousand gulden at twelve per cent, from the merchants in Genoa, for
this the Fuggers became responsible, and the salt trade of Augsburg was
given to them for their security. Just one hundred years before, this
said banking-house had taken an important share in the election of the
Emperor Charles V., and now it helped to secure the victory of the
Roman Catholic party; for the Bohemian war was decided even more by the
want of money than by the battle of the Weissen-Berge. Thus the war
began with the governments being in a genera