The savage European conflict known to history as the Thirty Years’ War was in its 13th year. For seven months the Protestant city of Magdeburg, in northern Germany, had been under siege by Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Empire. Then, on the morning of May 20, 1631, the Imperial besiegers launched their final, and this time successful, assault. It would trigger the worst massacre of the war.

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From the east they rushed the bastion guarding the bridgeworks over the Elbe River. Through the outlying suburbs, razed and gutted with trenchworks, they pressed on to the foot of the city’s north wall, where one of the towers guarding the gate had crumbled under relentless Imperial cannon fire. Caught in the middle of morning prayers, the handful of Protestant sentries posted there were quickly dispatched. The remaining defenders, outnumbered more than 10-to-1, surrendered or died — usually both — as 25,000 Holy Roman Empire troops stormed into the city.

Ever since the Imperial cavalry general Gottfried Heinrich Graf zu Pappenheim had been sent to besiege the Lutheran-dominated city in November 1630, the hard-bitten mercenaries who made up the bulk of his army had lain in the mud and filth of the trenches outside Magdeburg, dreaming of the loot within. Now they filled the streets. Drunken pikemen and musketeers dragged ill-gotten plunder and captive women, and cuirassiers plunged their chargers through shop windows and over fleeing burghers, while officers vainly tried to marshal their uncontrollable men. Drumbeats, gunshots, pleading and screams resounded through the streets, accompanied, inevitably, by the crackle of flames.

At noon some 20 fires blazed up almost simultaneously. Within hours they were consuming the city. It was all the Imperial commanders could do to herd soldiers and citizenry alike beyond the walls; as it was, large numbers were cut off and perished as the city was incinerated blocks at a time. Of Magdeburg’s 30,000 citizens, only 5,000 survived — mostly women spirited off to the Imperial camp before the onset of destruction. In their anguish, they asked each other only one question: Why had their deliverer not come? Where was the king of Sweden, the ‘Lion of the North’? Where was Gustavus Adolphus?

Some 120 miles to the east, at Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, the Swedish king sat mired in fruitless entreaty. His paltry force of peasants had driven an Imperial army into the city and successfully taken it days before. He was poised to plunge cross-country to the aid of Magdeburg. All that prevented him from doing so, and saving Germany, was the Germans themselves.

Thirteen years into the Thirty Years’ War, only losers remained on the field of northern Germany. The Holy Roman Empire, if nominally united by force, was, in fact, irrevocably sundered, its German princes and potentates hopelessly divided into hostile camps. The rebellious Lutherans and Calvinists of the Protestant Union had lost nearly everything; their counterparts in the Catholic League had lost their independence to Hapsburg Emperor Ferdinand II. Victorious Imperial General Albrecht von Wallenstein had claimed 66 estates and a duchy as his personal spoils of war and had become the most powerful man in Germany — too powerful for the comfort of the emperor, who had cashiered him. Wallenstein’s subordinate, Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, now placed in overall command of the army of the Catholic League, found himself reluctantly saddled with Wallenstein’s nefarious mercenaries as well. Ferdinand himself, his grip on the empire finally secure, had suddenly grown too strong for the balance of European power. What had begun as a minor religious struggle had become a European war of international proportions, in which Germany would ultimately lose a third of her population, and in some areas more than half.

From Sweden, King Gustavus II Adolphus had viewed with apprehension the Catholic expansion in Germany, especially along the coast of the Baltic, which he aspired to make a Swedish lake. Born on December 9, 1594, Gustavus Adolphus had taken full part in Swedish affairs and had helped lead the armies of his father, Karl IX. He had studied the doctrines of Maurice of Nassau, the Dutch general who had fought the Spanish to a standstill in the long struggle for his country’s independence. In that age, infantry still relied on the pike as much as on gunpowder. Cavalry, on the other hand, had grown so enamored of the gun that, except for its heavy armor, it little resembled the hard-charging knights of old. In an age dominated by siege warfare, pike formations and mercenary armies, Maurice favored native-born conscripts fighting a war of movement and firepower.

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