Entrance into the Thirty Years’ War

The motives prompting his intervention have long been a subject of historical controversy. An older generation of historians saw him, as his contemporaries did, simply as the Protestant Hero, the “Lion of the North”; later, he was viewed as having been moved by purely political considerations; and in recent days he has been characterized as an economic imperialist who sought to remedy Sweden’s poverty by seizing control of the whole Baltic coastline, and thus to monopolize trade between Russia and western Europe. It is also possible that he sought security from dangers which seemed to threaten the Swedish state and the Swedish church; that he considered his actions essentially defensive; and that he had no precise long-range plans, either economic or political, when he landed on German soil.

He had, however, an army of unusual quality, fighting in a style new to Germany, and he combined tactical innovations with a grander concept of strategy than Europe had seen for many years. By reducing the size of the tactical unit, by opposing a flexible linear formation to the cumbrous massive formations of his opponents, by solving (at least for his time) the perennial problem of combining infantry and cavalry, missile weapons and shock, and, lastly, by producing the first easily maneuverable light artillery, he completed the transformation of the art of war begun by the Dutch commander Maurice of Nassau, prince of Orange, earlier in the century. The vastness of his operations in Germany initiated a permanent increase in the size of European armies. The whole process had profound social effects on the history of Europe.

Gustavus landed in Germany without allies. Whatever the feelings of the Protestant populations, the Protestant princes resented Swedish interference, and the refusal of George William of Brandenburg to cooperate with the Swedes thwarted Gustavus’s attempts to save Magdeburg from capture and sack at the hands of Tilly’s armies. In September John George of Saxony, provoked by violations of his neutrality, formally allied himself with Sweden. In September 1631, at Breitenfeld, the Swedish-Saxon forces shattered Tilly’s army in a battle that was a landmark in the art of war and a turning point in the history of Germany. In the ensuing months Gustavus swept triumphantly through central Germany, systematically consolidating his base areas as he advanced; by Christmas he had established himself at Mainz. It seemed that the fate of Germany lay in his hands.

These developments forced Gustavus to reassess the limited and vague plans with which he had embarked on the expedition. In 1630 he had defined his aims as security and indemnity, the indemnity to be a cash payment to cover his war expenses, the security to be provided by a permanent Swedish alliance with Pomerania. By the close of 1631, with most of northern and central Germany under his control and the liberation of the southern German Protestant states already in prospect, his plans had broadened. He had always insisted that the German Protestant princes must work for their own salvation, and he saw the best hope for their future preservation in the creation of a comprehensive, permanent Corpus Evangelicorum (or Protestant league). His experience of the feckless and selfish German princes convinced him that such a league could be effective only if it were organized and directed by himself, and military necessity in any case demanded a unified command that could not be directed by anyone other than himself. Security, then, was to be achieved by a Protestant league of which he would be patron, military director, and political head. For indemnity he no longer claimed monetary compensation but large territorial cessions, particularly, the transference of Pomerania to Sweden. Thus, the old security had become the new indemnity. Many Germans feared, and some Swedish diplomats now believed, that a final settlement must probably entail the deposition of the German emperor Ferdinand II and the election of Gustavus as emperor in his place. It was a solution he must certainly have contemplated, but there is no firm evidence of his attitude; probably he considered it only as a last resort. Certainly it would have alienated those German allies who had no wish to exchange a Habsburg domination for a Swedish one. They already resented Gustavus’s dictatorial methods as well as the Swedish army’s practice of making war support war. A Swedish administration was being organized in the occupied areas; Gustavus rewarded his generals and supporters by conferring the conquered lands on them; in some of the treaties he concluded with German princes there was more than a hint that he regarded them as his feudal inferiors. In October 1632 he did, indeed, lay the basis for a league of Protestant princes; but it was confined mainly to southern Germany, where the peril from a Catholic reaction was greatest, and the two greatest Protestant states—Saxony and Brandenburg—never became part of it.

Last phase of Gustavus’s campaign

The prospect of success depended upon the outcome of the campaign of 1632, which was designed to cripple Bavaria as a preliminary to the conquest of Vienna in 1633. Up to a point, it was highly successful. The brilliant crossing of the Lech River in Bavaria, in the face of Tilly’s armies, opened the way to the occupation of Munich. In this crisis, Wallenstein, whom the emperor had dismissed from his service in 1630, was recalled to lead the imperial armies. His threat to Nürnberg forced Gustavus to leave Bavaria in order to relieve the city. His attack on Wallenstein’s entrenchments on the Alte Veste—an operation that probably no other contemporary commander would have attempted—was unsuccessful, and for the next few weeks there followed a tense war of maneuver that ended when Gustavus fell upon Wallenstein’s army at Lützen (November 6, 1632) as it was dispersing to winter quarters. Morning mist robbed Gustavus of the advantage of surprise and gave Wallenstein time to reunite his forces. The fight raged fiercely all day, but when night fell the Swedes had won an important victory. It was, however, dearly bought, for while leading a cavalry charge Gustavus became separated from his men and perished in the melee.

Legacy

His death came at a moment when it had already begun to appear that the victory he believed to be essential to the stability of Germany and the security of Sweden might be more difficult to achieve than he had imagined. But he had lived long enough to deflect the course of German history. His intervention in the Thirty Years’ War, at a moment when the armies of the Habsburg emperor and the German princes of the Catholic League controlled almost the whole of Germany, ensured the survival of German Protestantism against the onslaughts of the Counter-Reformation. The consequences, for Germany and for Europe, extended far beyond the religious field. By supporting the German princes against the emperor, Gustavus Adolphus defeated the attempts of the Habsburgs to make their imperial authority a reality and thus played a part in delaying the emergence of a united Germany until the 19th century. As a military commander, he was responsible for military innovations that marked an epoch in the history of the art of war. But from the point of view of his own country, these achievements were less significant than his domestic labours—his extraordinarily wide-ranging creative work in the fields of administrative organization, economic development, and education.