The Thirty Years War

by C. V. Wedgwood

  Ferdinand may have realized this. More probably, he failed to understand the power and prestige of Gustavus and took the Leipzig manifesto for the habitual impotent demonstration with which John George had been saving his face since the beginning of the war.[37] But whether he realized the danger before him or not, he could only have given one answer. He was not a politician but the leader of a Crusade, and he could as easily deny Christ as abandon the Edict of Restitution.

  On April 4th 1631, John George dispatched the manifesto to the Emperor, accompanied by a personal appeal.[38] Before he could answer, the Swedish danger had drawn a decisive step nearer. Marching up the Oder, the King drove back the imperialist troops—Wallenstein’s army, but without Wallenstein—into the strong city of Frankfort. The Swedes carried it by assault on April 13th, replenishing their own dwindling stores from the sack of the town and scattering, killing or capturing the remnant of eight regiments.[39]

  Four days later, Ferdinand returned an inconclusive answer to the Leipzig protest. He had presumably as yet no news of the fall of Frankfort-on-the-Oder, for a little later he moderated his tactics and sent an ambassador to Saxony with a message of conciliation—but he would not withdraw the Edict of Restitution. And on May 14th he changed again from conciliation to command, and issued an order forbidding all his loyal subjects to assist in any way the recruiting operations of the Protestant princes.[40] He had burnt his own and the Elector of Saxony’s boats.

  Meanwhile the King of Sweden made good his position in north Germany. His troops had overrun Pomerania, seizing Greifswald and Demmin, so that he now held the hinterland of the Baltic coast from Stralsund to Stettin, and the line of the Oder for eighty miles from its mouth. He had encircled the whole province of Brandenburg on its northern and eastern frontiers. The Dukes of Mecklenburg were preparing to reconquer their land with Swedish arms from the sea, Magdeburg was his ally already, he had but to make sure of Brandenburg, and the whole north-eastern block of the Empire was his, with the lower waters of the Elbe and Oder, the highways into the heart of Ferdinand’s country.

  The Elector of Brandenburg was surely the unluckiest man in Germany, for the spring of 1631 found him again the chosen victim of both Emperor and invader. Both saw that they must put an immediate stop to his activities on behalf of the constitutionalist party, the Emperor to frighten the King of Sweden by occupying Brandenburg, the King to rob John George of his best supporter and force each of the constitutionalist champions, singly, to accept his alliance.

  Gustavus was in the better position, for unexpected disaster had befallen Tilly in the winter. It had come upon him through the man he had superseded. Wallenstein knew from the stars that he would be recalled, but he was not so simple as to leave the matter entirely to the stars, and he had taken certain measures to prove himself indispensable. Quartered in Mecklenburg and the Oder valley, Tilly’s troops relied on supplies from the well-stocked granaries of Friedland and Sagan as well as from Mecklenburg itself. But these were all Wallenstein’s lands, and while he had fed the army admirably when it was his, he saw no reason to feed it now that it was another’s. He refused all provisions from Friedland except such as were paid for in money, which meant virtually that he refused provisions altogether; he gave as little as possible from Sagan, and profited by the shortage to let the prices of his corn rise; even in Mecklenburg he privately instructed his officials to make the quartering of the troops as difficult as possible.[41] The hungry soldiers deserted to join Arnim’s newly-recruited troops, the horses died and the army which had been Wallenstein’s creation melted before the eyes of his successor. ‘All the days of my life’, wrote Tilly, ‘I have never seen an army so lacking in everything at one and the same time from the most important to the least; no draft horses, no officers, no cannon in a condition to be used, no powder, no ammunition, no picks or shovels, no money and no food.’[42] In vain he appealed for help; Wallenstein would not and Ferdinand could not give it.

  In this desperate state, Tilly yielded to his lieutenant Pappenheim’s insistence and set his hopes on the reduction of Magdeburg. Strategically the most important point on the Elbe, he believed it also to be well stocked with provisions. He made one sharp attempt to strike between Gustavus on the Oder and his base on the Baltic seaboard, carried Neubrandenburg with horrible slaughter,[43] but fell back because his men had not the stamina to go farther, and in April 1631 joined Pappenheim at the siege of Magdeburg with the greater number of his forces.

  At Magdeburg itself the situation was complicated by the unwillingness of the citizens to be made martyrs. Some of the municipality displayed a more heroic spirit and gave what help they could to Dietrich von Falkenberg, the Hessian soldier whom Gustavus had dispatched to organize the defence. But the people in general made perpetual difficulties and supplied the necessary stores so unwillingly that Falkenberg’s hungry cavalry mutinied and were with difficulty brought to order.[44] ‘There is little wisdom here’, he wrote to the King, ‘we live from day to day.’ The King’s attempt to draw Tilly off by his attack on Frankfort-on-the-Oder[45] failed. By May 1631 the besiegers were on the alert within speaking distance of the defenders on the walls, and the leading burghers of Magdeburg were clamouring for surrender by treaty lest the city should fall by assault and be put to sack.[46]

  Protestant Europe looked to the King of Sweden. Broadsheets poured from the press, exhorting Magdeburg to stand firm, abjuring the maiden city to deny access to the elderly wooer who pressed her so hard.[47] Nothing lay between the rescuer and his objective but a hundred and fifty miles of ill-defended country and the decisions of the Leipzig Conference. Between Magdeburg and her saviour the Electors of Brandenburg and Saxony interposed the enigma of their policy. Gustavus had appealed to them, when they were in session at Leipzig, to enter into alliance with him and march to the rescue of Magdeburg, an offer which they had received with indifference.[48] Once before, the King of Sweden had burst out furiously against the German rulers. ‘They know not whether they would be Lutheran or Popish, imperialist or German, slave or free’, he had raged.[49] But he did them wrong, for they knew one thing very certainly, that they did not want the interference of the King of Sweden. Without the alliance of the two Protestant Electors, Gustavus dared not move: the peasants of Brandenburg had fled before his advance; the local authorities, knowing their Elector’s policy, had not been friendly, and Gustavus’s troops, on short rations both for men and horses, were gravely weakened.[50] Without help from Arnim it would be difficult to relieve Magdeburg, and far from helping him, the two Electors seemed inclined to hinder. It was conceivable that, should he advance across Brandenburg, the army supported by the Leipzig Convention would fall on his rear and try to force him out of Germany.

  At the end of April, Gustavus informed Falkenberg that he must hold out another two months,[51] early in May he struck at the Elector of Brandenburg, seized his fortress of Spandau and frightened him into a provisional treaty of alliance.[52] The first step, the separation of the Protestant allies, was accomplished. John George, without the assurance of whose friendship Gustavus dared not make towards the Elbe, remained alone. But before he could be forced to terms, all Europe echoed to the catastrophe of Magdeburg.

  Rumour gave the King of Sweden credit for moving faster than he did, and fear of his arrival drove the besiegers to desperate efforts.[53] In the exhausted condition of the Catholic army, failure to take Magdeburg would mean certain destruction; if the troops turned eastwards they would meet Gustavus, southwards Arnim, northwards Wallenstein’s inhospitable Mecklenburg where they could not live.

  For two days from May 17th 1631, the city was stormed in vain, until the burghers implored Falkenberg to make terms, fearing the plunder which must follow a fighting conquest. The commander stood firm, convinced, it would seem, in the strength of his defences. On the 20th, between six and seven on a windy morning, the storm began again, for Pappenheim, fearing Tilly’s hesitancy, had led his men to the assault without orders.[54]
The defenders were taken at a disadvantage, and after a frantic resistance in which Falkenberg himself was killed, the attackers forced an entrance on two sides, and Magdeburg had fallen.

  Drunk with victory, the troops defied all efforts to control them. Pappenheim himself only by force rescued the wounded Administrator, Christian William, from the rough hands of his plundering captors,[55] and Tilly, riding among the tumult, was seen unhandily nursing a baby which he had plucked, living, from the arms of its dead mother. Seeing the prior of a local monastery, the general shouted to him to herd the women and children into the cathedral, the one sanctuary which he could guard against his troops. The dauntless old monk, defenceless in his white habit, did what he could and managed to lead about six hundred to safety.[56]

  Pappenheim had fired one of the gates during the assault, and a strong wind blew the acrid fumes of gunpowder across the town, but towards midday, flames suddenly shot up at almost the same moment in twenty different places. There was no time for Tilly and Pappenheim to ask whence came the fire; staring in consternation, they rallied their drunken, disorderly, exhausted men to fight it. The wind was too strong, and in a few minutes the city was a furnace, the wooden houses crashing to their foundations in columns of smoke and flame. The cry was now to save the army, and the imperialist officers struggled in vain to drive their men into the open. Rapidly whole quarters were cut off by walls of smoke, so that those who lingered for booty or lost their way, or lay in drunken stupor in the cellars, alike perished.

  Far into the night the city burnt, and smouldered for three days after, a waste of blackened timber round the lofty gothic cathedral. How it happened no one then knew or has ever learnt. One thing, however, was clear to Tilly and Pappenheim, as they looked at the sulphurous ruin and watched the dreary train of wagons that for fourteen days carried the charred bodies to the river—Magdeburg could no longer feed and shelter either friend or foe.

  Because of that, some have thought, not without justification, that Dietrich von Falkenberg planned the fire, leaving its execution in the hands of some few trusted citizens and soldiers, the fanatics of his party, thus to destroy Tilly’s prey and possibly Tilly’s army in the moment of victory. It is not impossible; at the time it was widely rumoured, and the fallen city was called by some the Protestant Lucretia because she had destroyed herself rather than outlive her shame.[57] Proof of the crime is lacking, for the blackened pyre left no evidence; in the sack of a great city accidental fires may easily break out, the high wind and the wooden houses doing all the rest. One thing only is certain, that neither Tilly nor Pappenheim would have deliberately destroyed the city on whose wealth they had planned to feed and pay their army.[58]

  The greater part of the food in the town was burnt, but when the soldiers came back to plunder among the ruins they found here and there cellars with wine casks which had escaped the flames, and for two days the troops reeled about blind drunk, uncontrolled and uncontrollable.

  On May 22nd Tilly began to set his world in order. The refugees were brought out of the cathedral, given food, and lodged in the cloisters of the monastery, where they lay for three weeks, huddled together under blankets, few of them having any other covering. In the monks’ vineyard a little camp was organized for the lost children, but of eighty gathered there fifteen only survived.[59] Famine hung over civilians and soldiers alike, while scavenging dogs fought over the dead and scratched up the buried. To prevent an outbreak of plague, Tilly had the bodies thrown into the Elbe. For miles along the banks below the city the current washed the swollen corpses among the reeds, where birds of prey gathered screeching above them.[60]

  Of the thirty thousand inhabitants of Magdeburg about five thousand were left, and these for the most part women. The soldiers had secured them first, carrying them off to the camp before returning to plunder the city. When the sack was over, Tilly attempted to regulate the situation. He sent priests among the soldiers to persuade them where possible to marry their victims, failing that to give them up for a reasonable sum. The surviving men of Magdeburg were allowed to buy back their women and ransom themselves, but those who could not afford the luxury had to march with the troops as the servants of their captors.[61]

  If he could do little for his army, Tilly could at least do something for his Church, and five days after the fall of the city he arranged the solemn rededication of the cathedral. The men were called into their colours, the leading officers with some picked soldiers marched into the cathedral with their banners flying, heard Mass and listened to a Te Deum. The cannon were brought into position on one of the larger fragments of the city wall, whence a salute was fired to announce the return of the cathedral to its true faith. Afterwards the general proclaimed that the black wreck at his feet was no longer Magdeburg but Marienburg, a city dedicated to his Patroness.[62]

  The wooden statue of the maiden that had crowned the gate for so long had been found after the fire, charred and broken, in a ditch.[63] She had been wooed and won at last, and for years to come men remembered the ‘marriage of Magdeburg’.

  The news came upon Europe with a shock of horror. At Vienna the thanksgivings were hushed, and in Protestant countries the disaster was received with an outburst of disgust and indignation. The appalling accident which robbed the conquest of its military significance was trumpeted to the world as the deliberate act of its conquerors, and Tilly’s name was to pass into history for ever coupled with Magdeburg. Years later, imperialist soldiers crying for quarter would be met with the answer ‘Magdeburg quarter’ as they were shot down.

  ‘Our danger has no end, for the Protestant Estates will without doubt be only strengthened in their hatred by this’,[64] Tilly wrote to Maximilian. He was right. Throughout Europe Magdeburg was the signal for Protestant action; on May 31st the United Provinces entered into an agreement with the King of Sweden, by which they undertook to add their subsidies to those of the French,[65] and directly after made ready to invade Flanders.

  More immediately disastrous was the treaty signed in mid-June between George William of Brandenburg and Gustavus Adolphus. The Elector of Brandenburg had agreed to yield Spandau in April but attempted subsequently to evade the obligation. Gustavus acted quickly. On June 15th he declared that George William’s further refusal to carry out his obligations would be treated as a declaration of war, and six days later he appeared outside Berlin and trained his cannon on the Electoral palace. The timorous prince broke down utterly, sent out his wife and mother-in-law to soften the invader, following himself some hours later with the sycophantic suggestion that they should settle the little misunderstanding over a friendly drink. Gustavus, now master of the situation, was nothing loth; gaily he pledged the Elector in four bumpers, and on the next day, June 22nd 1631, enforced a treaty which placed the resources of Brandenburg and the fortresses of Spandau and Küstrin at his disposal for the duration of the war.[66] For the rest of the day and most of the ensuing night George William solaced his wounded pride by riotous eating and drinking with the Swedish King.[67]

  Meanwhile Tilly’s position was becoming untenable. Added to his military difficulties, he was in a political quandary. Although he was commander-in-chief of all the imperialist forces, he had not on that account ceased to be the general of the Catholic League and thereby under the authority of Maximilian. All the spring, this prince had pursued his old policy of forming a Catholic constitutionalist party regardless alike of the Emperor and the King of Sweden. He calculated that he needed only the alliance within Germany of a sufficient number of princes, John George if possible, and the moral support of Richelieu. In accordance with this theory he had, on May 8th 1631, signed a secret treaty with the French government for eight years, by which they recognized his Electorate and bound themselves to assist him in case of attack. Maximilian in return undertook to give no assistance to their enemies.[68]

  The confusion caused by this secret treaty can scarcely be conceived. Richelieu recognized Maximilian’s claim to a title which h
is other ally, Gustavus Adolphus, intended to restore to its rightful holder. Moreover, he bound the French government to defend Maximilian in case of attack. Did Richelieu not realize that, even if Gustavus were fighting the Emperor, the Emperor’s army was paid largely by Maximilian’s resources and commanded by his general? Was Richelieu so simple as to imagine that Gustavus either could or would respect the purely technical neutrality of Bavaria, whatever his promises? The diplomacy of Maximilian and the Cardinal rested still on the fatuous assumption that the King of Sweden was their malleable instrument, that he could be used to frighten the Emperor, kept neatly within bounds in Germany, paid off and sent back to Sweden.

  The man who suffered most by this uncomprehending diplomacy was the faithful Tilly. As commander-in-chief of the imperialist forces it was his plain duty to hold back the King of Sweden. But as the general of Maximilian of Bavaria it was the last thing he could do, for it had been made clear to him, as soon as the treaty was signed, that he was to avoid all open contact with Gustavus, his master’s friend’s friend.[69] Failing this, Tilly might advance boldly into Saxony, using the terror which his name, as the reputed butcher of Magdeburg, now inspired to intimidate John George. But Maximilian was determined on no account to provoke the hostility of John George; he gauged the situation well enough to know that an attack from Tilly would drive the Elector into the arms of Sweden and destroy his own hopes of a new princely party.

  Once again the possibility of alliance between the two constitutionalists flickered up and was snuffed out. The armies of Tilly and Arnim acting together might have saved Germany, but a mild interchange of letters between John George and the Catholic Electors bore no fruit.[70] There is an immediacy in the conduct of war that cannot wait for delays of ministers; the decisive fact in the summer of 1631 was that Tilly’s men were hungry.