Gustavus replied: "If France withdraws her alliance, I shall secure that of the Turks, who are no worse allies than the papists, with their idolatry. At all events I know that I can rely on the help of Almighty God, who has sent me into Germany." The plan was to keep him inactive till Maximilian had brought together his army.
When Tilly died, the Emperor, Ferdinand II., was at his wits' end, and had appealed to the disgraced Wallenstein to save him. Wallenstein made the most severe demands, to which the Emperor was obliged to agree. Immediately Wallenstein stamped his foot, and the robber bands of all Europe appeared again from Italy, from England and Scotland and from Poland. From every German State men flocked to the banner of the arch robber of the middle ages.
The articles of Znaim, in which Wallenstein agrees to take command, are unique on the page of history. They were completed in April, 1632. In this writing the Emperor agreed that no army, except that under Wallenstein, could be introduced into Germany. He alone possessed the power of confiscation and pardon. He could create a new class of princes to rule over States, princes who received and held power only under him. His power was purely military, but by these papers the Emperor practically put the power out of his own hands.
Wallenstein immediately drove the Saxons from Bohemia, offered to revoke the Edict of Restitution for John George of Saxony, that weak prince who was now wavering between his sworn allegiance to Gustavus and Wallenstein. At his side now appeared an army of sixty thousand skilled troops, the mercenaries who were promised large pay and all the loot they could gather.
Wallenstein offered John George of Saxony such terms of peace that Gustavus feared his adherence to the Protestant cause. Gustavus knew that, had Tilly offered the same to the Elector of Saxony, the latter would never have united his fortunes to those of the Protestant States. Such an alliance was a heart-breaking care to the king of Sweden.
In spite of Richelieu's messenger, the king pressed on into Bavaria, a country so hostilely Catholic that to kill a Protestant was considered by the Bavarians to be doing God a service. Gustavus had, up to this time, been welcomed even in the most Catholic State, because he treated the citizens better by far than their own army had done, but in Bavaria he met a different spirit. The priests had stirred them to great bitterness. He was called by them the Antichrist, and in their public prayers they asked God to deliver them from "the Swedish devil." If a Swedish soldier fell into the hands of the peasants he was tortured and mutilated, which greatly exasperated the army and made it difficult for the king to keep his men from retaliating in kind, and, indeed, to keep them from laying waste the entire country.