Many surprising lacunae blur our view of the early modern Habsburg monarchy. The lack of conventional biographical studies on monarchs, ministers, and generals is no doubt one of the most embarrassing deficits. A young Austrian scholar has now ventured a closer look at the life and times of Matthias Gallas (1588–1647), commander in chief of the imperial army during the second half of the Thirty Years' War.

Rebitsch's choice may seem daring at first glance, as Gallas has gone down in history as an incompetent vacillator and drunkard who ruined several of the emperor's armies placed under his command, thereby jeopardizing the military survival of the Habsburg monarchy. Yet, on closer inspection, the luckless general who earned an unflattering reputation as “Heerverderber” may serve as a prism for a badly needed investigation into the Austrian Habsburgs' military policy in the post-Wallenstein era.

Gallas, an Italian nobleman from the prince-bishopric of Trent at the southernmost border of the Holy Roman Empire, began his military career in the armed forces of the Catholic League. In Habsburg service from 1629, he besieged and took Mantua in 1630. The ensuing “sacco di Mantova” established not only his reputation as a competent military leader but also laid the foundations of his private fortune. A favorite of the imperial generalissimo, Albrecht von Wallenstein, Gallas became his second-in-command (Generalleutnant) in 1633 but cooperated in his patron's elimination in early 1634. He profited greatly from Wallenstein's overthrow, receiving large parts of the lands that the generalissimo had possessed in northeastern Bohemia, most notably Friedland. Also in 1634, together with the future emperor Ferdinand III, Gallas managed to inflict a crushing defeat of the Swedes at Nördlingen. This sensational victory seems to have won him the monarch's eternal gratitude and helped the general to survive a series of bitter reverses without falling in utter disgrace.

Woefully unsuccessful against the French in Burgundy in 1636, Gallas failed even more pitifully in two disastrous campaigns against the Swedes, in 1637–38 in Mecklenburg and Pomerania against Banér and again in 1644 against Torstensson in Holstein. And yet, apart from a short period of forced retirement (1639–43), Gallas remained at the head of the imperial war machinery and died commander in chief in 1647, the victim of gout and his doctors.

Rebitsch, without denying that the overly cautious Gallas was certainly no military genius, makes it clear that much of his bad name in the historiography is due to enemy propaganda and defamation. What the Habsburgs were deliberately looking for after the Wallenstein trauma—and eventually found in Matthias Gallas—was an experienced and tractable condottiere with limited ambition.

It is surprising that the massive source material that Rebitsch was able to unearth in several European archives, ranging from Vienna to Rome and including the rich Clam-Gallas family archives in the Czech Republic, has not really allowed the author to draw a more vivid and more intimate portrait of his “antihero.” Virtually nothing is known about Gallas's first thirty years. But even at the zenith of Gallas's career, we learn very little about his character, his private life, or anything else beyond the military operations he planned and commanded. Occasional digressions—for example, on the usual looting and sacking practices of the Thirty Years' War and on the early history of the highest echelons of the imperial military staff—are useful for the general readership with which the author seems to flirt.

Overall, Rebitsch's Gallas is less a biographical case study than a campaign narrative from an Austrian perspective. This is no small achievement, to be clear, even if the lack of maps makes the text less helpful. Together with Lothar Höbelt's eagerly awaited study on Ferdinand III and the final stages of the Thirty Years' War, this book—strangely published in a series dedicated to the period of Charles V—will no doubt serve as an indispensable building block for the definitive military history, still to be written, of the human disaster that struck Europe between 1618 and 1648.