military entrepreneur. He participated in the revolt against the Austrians in the Prättigau (1622), and in the invasion of the Valtellina by a French army (1624), but the peace made (1626) between France and Spain left the Valtellina in the hands of the pope, and so thwarted the Republic's hopes of regaining the territory. Jenatsch, however, thrived in the military life, and rose rapidly through the ranks to major, and later colonel of his own regiment. Jenatsch killed his colonel, Giacomo Ruinelli, in a duel in 1626 in Chur, but was cleared of murder charges by a city court. He turned to military recruiting, and as Spanish and Austrian influence grew in the Grisons, eventually raised a company for service with the Venetians (1629-1630). He was briefly imprisoned in Venice after an incident of insubordination, and later claimed that reading the Church Fathers while jailed had contributed to his later religious conversion. In 1631 he was recruited for the French campaign designed by Richelieu to drive the Spaniards out of the Valtellina, which after several years of delay, led to the successful campaign of Henri, duc de Rohan (1635). But Jenatsch, along with the military and political leadership of the Republic, soon saw that the French were as unwilling as the Spaniards to restore the Grisons' lordship over the Valtellina. Conversion to Catholicism In 1635, Jenatsch made public his conversion to Roman Catholicism (though his family declined to follow suit), and became one leader of a secret alliance, the Kettenbund, which included both Catholic and Protestant leaders in the Grisons, that negotiated secretly with the Spaniards and Austrians. The Kettenbund launched a strike in 1637 that resulted in the expulsion of Rohan and the French from the Grisons. During the next two years, Jenatsch pushed forward the negotiations with Spain and Austria for the return of the Valtellina under Grisons sovereignty, as well as seeking a noble title for himself. He also became one of the most powerful men in the region, taking the pivotal governorship of Chiavenna for himself, and mixing in the tangled affairs of the Planta clan. Death On 24 January 1639 Jenatsch was assassinated in Chur by a band of men whose leader was costumed as a bear, as it was Carnival. Although the murderers remained anonymous and were never captured or tried, the most likely culprit was Rudolf von Planta, son of the murdered Pompeius,