His route lay by the Aisch and Windsheim toward Neustadt, where he halted five days to refresh his troops, and also to be near to Nuremberg in case the enemy should make an attempt upon the town.  But Wallenstein, as exhausted as himself, had only awaited the retreat of the Swedes to commence his own.  Five days afterward he broke up his camp at Zirndorf and set it on fire.  A hundred columns of smoke, rising from all the burning villages in the neighborhood, announced his retreat and showed the city the fate it had escaped.  His march, which was directed on Forchheim, was marked by the most frightful ravages; but he was too far advanced to be overtaken by the king.  The latter now divided his army, which the exhausted country was unable to support, and leaving one division to protect Franconia, with the other he prosecuted in person his conquests in Bavaria.  In the mean time, the imperial Bavarian army had marched into the Bishopric of Bamberg, where the Duke of Friedland a second time mustered his troops.  He found this force, which so lately had amounted to 60,000 men, diminished by the sword, desertion, and disease, to about 24,000, and of these a fourth were Bavarians.  Thus had the encampments before Nuremberg weakened both parties more than two great battles would have done, apparently without advancing the termination of the war, or satisfying, by any decisive result, the expectations of Europe.  The king’s conquests in Bavaria, were, it is true, checked for a time by this diversion before Nuremberg, and Austria itself secured against the danger of immediate invasion; but by the retreat of the king from that city, he was again left at full liberty to make Bavaria the seat of war.  Indifferent toward the fate of that country, and weary of the restraint which his union with the Elector imposed upon him, the Duke of Friedland eagerly seized the opportunity of separating from this burdensome associate, and prosecuting, with renewed earnestness, his favorite plans.  Still adhering to his purpose of detaching Saxony from its Swedish alliance, he selected that country for his winter quarters, hoping by his destructive presence to force the Elector the more readily into his views.

No conjuncture could be more favorable for his designs.  The Saxons had invaded Silesia, where, reinforced by troops from Brandenburg and Sweden, they had gained several advantages over the Emperor’s troops.  Silesia would be saved by a diversion against the Elector in his own territories, and the attempt was the more easy as Saxony, left undefended during the war in Silesia, lay open on every side to attack.  The pretext of rescuing from the enemy a hereditary dominion of Austria would silence the remonstrances of the Elector of Bavaria, and, under the mask of a patriotic zeal for the Emperor’s interests, Maximilian might be sacrificed without much difficulty.  By giving up the rich country of Bavaria to the Swedes, he hoped to be left unmolested by them in his enterprise against